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by dale_glass 647 days ago
Yeah, the line goes High Fidelity -> Vircadia -> Overte (where most devs are)

Vircadia started off well, but then the lead decided to go all in on crypto. Pretty much everyone just left and made a new project, while Vircadia as far as I can tell has almost no development going on. Or if there's anything it's not public.
1 comments
thetoon 646 days ago
Great news! Do you know if overte also intends to fork the (upcoming) web client?
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dale_glass 646 days ago
Currently, probably not. We've got plenty of other things to work on including several big projects some of which have a deadline needed to satisfy a grant (thanks NLnet Foundation!), and we looked into the web functionality and were unimpressed.

Vircadia's web functionality technically works, and I think it's an okay effort for the tiny team that remains, but it's really at the proof of concept stage. It's slow, misses a whole lot of functionality including very basic things, and has extremely obvious bugs like falling through the floor and the camera getting stuck easily.

So far our take is that it's too broken to just merge as-is, somebody would need to have at least some interest in fixing it up a bit. And for the time being there isn't, and on Vircadia's side the development of it slowed down dramatically.

It's not impossible in the future, but so far things just don't line up right. And it'd be a huge project. The web client is its own thing written from scratch, it'd be an enormous amount of work to make it half as functional as the desktop one.

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thetoon 646 days ago
Sounds fair, though I had hopes for such a client (at least something to just check out on the virtual world state without spinning up a whole desktop client).

Since you seem rather active with the project, do you know whether openxr is on the roadmap, or if you're stuck with openvr for the foreseeable future?

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dale_glass 646 days ago
> Sounds fair, though I had hopes for such a client (at least something to just check out on the virtual world state without spinning up a whole desktop client).

Even that would take some work. We've made a few improvements to the core code that Vircadia didn't and that would involve adapting the web client code to match.

I'm also worried about the effects it could have on the project. Will people start demanding that it be fixed now? What about when there's a security issue found in it? Will there be drama with Vircadia?

Merging the code means taking on a responsibility, and at the very least we'd have to properly review it and make sure it's good enough people are going to want to work on it.

So far I believe that this has to approached with some good planning and somebody willing to work on that code to account for any problems that might arise. So it'd help a lot if anybody was interested in maintaining the code.

> Since you seem rather active with the project, do you know whether openxr is on the roadmap, or if you're stuck with openvr for the foreseeable future?

Good news! It's been in the works for a while, and a PR for OpenXR was opened 5 days ago: https://github.com/overte-org/overte/pull/1129

If you're interested in testing that, you're welcome to give it a try. If you need any help getting started, we have Matrix, Discord and an in-world meeting in 5 hours from the time of this post.

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