Nightshade Ceresintroduction: me in my new dress (and beneath one of the weird thingies i do in blender for #opensim) on my beautiful island in #groovyverse.
Jupiter Rowland@Rugrat :reptar_bar: Welcome on board (if you've actually made an avatar, that is)! OpenSim "veteran" of almost five years here (rezday: April 30th, 2020).
OpenSim is similar to Second Life and largely based on the same technology, and it basically uses third-party Second Life viewers because it doesn't have any of its own.
Second Life's learning curve is already intimidating because it's extremely versatile and powerful, and it's very different from what one may be used to from other virtual worlds or MMORPGs. OpenSim's learning curve adds even more on top with even less documentation and no tutorials or mentors whatsoever because the general assumption is that everyone who joins OpenSim has been in Second Life before anyway.
Also, like Second Life, OpenSim is not kind to underpowered hardware. And since the introduction of physically-based rendering with OpenSim 0.9.3.0 and especially Firestorm 7, it isn't worth bothering if you've got on-board graphics or a machine that's over 10 years old. That is, unless you want to stick with Firestorm 6.6.17 (which has at least one known bug that's fixed in Firestorm 7) for all eternity, and even that won't guarantee you smooth FPS.
But look at in-world pictures from Second Life or OpenSim, then look at in-world pictures from virtual worlds made for stand-alone VR headsets such as Horizons, and judge yourself what's looking better. And, for example, my main OpenSim machine is on 2018's mid-range level with a six-core, twelve-thread Ryzen, 16GB of RAM and a Radeon RX 590 with 8GB of VRAM. It's actually faster with Firestorm 7 than with Firestorm 6 because Firestorm 7's multi-threading support removed a nasty bottleneck.
OpenSim does have its advantages. It's fairly easy to build in-world once you've gotten the hang of it. No need to build entire scenes in external editors, export them, convert them etc.
Land is dirt-cheap in comparison with most other virtual worlds. It is not tied to NFTs because OpenSim entirely works without blockchains, without cryptocurrencies and without NFTs. For example, in Second Life, a standard region of 256x256m costs you about $250 a month or more. Many OpenSim grids offer you the same size of land for $10 a month or cheaper. Another example would be @Lone Wolf's Wolf Territories Grid, the grid with the most monthly active users and one of the two largest grids in terms of landmass. Its default land offering is one sim the size of 16 Second Life standard regions, 1024x1024m, for under $40, depending on the configuration. Some places even offer smaller parcels for free to residents.
You can also create your own land: Some grids let you attach self-hosted sims. OSgrid, the oldest grid and the other one of the two biggest, doesn't even offer land rentals and only lets its residents attach sims. And you can even run your own grid.
It's hard to wander around Second Life and see everything, also because it's constantly changing. But the Hypergrid has more than four times Second Life's landmass, and both OSgrid and Wolf Territories are larger than Second Life, so you've got even more to explore. (The obvious downside has to be Empty World Syndrome: You're less likely to encounter other avatars unless you go to an in-world event.)
Also, almost all content in OpenSim is free. That is, admittedly, the huge majority of that free content was and is still being pirated from Second Life, many users defend this content piracy, and it's often hard to tell whether something is legal or not. But there are still idealists who try to get as far as they can with only legal content, and some of them still create their own content.
Unfortunately, OpenSim doesn't have an active community in the Fediverse. It's mostly Lone Wolf who occasionally advertises for his grid, unfortunately with no hashtags, Mal Burns announcing videos under @Metaworld Opensim Social, again with no hashtags, and a small bunch of French users. There's also Groovyverse grid owner @Hyacinth ?️⚧️ ☮️ who also represents her grid on PeerTube under @GroovyVerse, but I haven't heard of her in the Fediverse in a while.
Lastly, fair warning: I strongly advise against having an underage-looking avatar in OpenSim. If you have one, you will automatically and unavoidably be considered a paedophile, and you will be barred from a whole lot of places.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #OSgrid #WolfTerritories #WolfTerritoriesGrid #Groovyverse
Hyacinth 🏳️⚧️ ☮️
Juno Rowland