Remember social games like Second Life? Vircadia, was created from a failed spiritual successor to it and it's free and open source too. Originally known as Project Athena, they've recently begun making some public announcements to bring more attention to it.
The idea is to have a big shared 3D social space that supports both normal and Virtual Reality PC hardware with support for Linux, macOS, Windows and Android. Unlike other social stuff, since it's open source it can't just be shut down and anyone can use it and it allows people to create their own avatar, their own worlds and much more.
As for the current status, they say it's "around an early beta". Functional, usable and stable enough with the core functionality there but it still needs a huge amount of polish and plenty of work ahead. They also seem keen to note how Linux is a properly supported platform, with some developers using it as their primary system.
What do you actually do? What's possible? A lot it seems. Socialise with friends, make games, watch movies, even use it for work meetings and more. It's not limited to any one specific thing and you can build / script it live in-game with others so you can shape it to your liking.
See more about it on the official site.
We'll be following this along a bit closer now to see what happens with it over time, could be great.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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8 comments
It remains me the idea of "Second life". Sure it's different, but interesting. And it's at a good time that many people has to be at home for the covid.
0 Likes
I tried it a little.
With all settings set to low, it’s very slow/sluggish, maps take a while to load, it seems i can’t rebind keyboard yet so on non-qewrty i can only suffer and move with arrow.
Curious to see what is possible to do, but my first steps are not overly positive.
With all settings set to low, it’s very slow/sluggish, maps take a while to load, it seems i can’t rebind keyboard yet so on non-qewrty i can only suffer and move with arrow.
Curious to see what is possible to do, but my first steps are not overly positive.
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redneckdrow Oct 12, 2020
I'm downloading this, just to see what it's like. I've always appreciated and wanted to try virtual worlds, but things like Second Life are off-putting because of the time and/or real money required to get anywhere.
The one social MMO that I've really enjoyed is Toontown Rewritten, and that's not everyone's cup o' tea. I mostly stick to that these days, I'm sick of both allegedly free and subscription based MMORPGs that are everywhere. The fees for some are downright bonkers attempts at usury.
The one social MMO that I've really enjoyed is Toontown Rewritten, and that's not everyone's cup o' tea. I mostly stick to that these days, I'm sick of both allegedly free and subscription based MMORPGs that are everywhere. The fees for some are downright bonkers attempts at usury.
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Greetings!
I wrote the posts on Reddit, so I can give a few clarifications here and answer questions if there's interest.
First of all, we aim more to be a platform than to be a social space. Vircadia compared to something like Second Life is highly distributed and there isn't a coherent world. We certainly have our social spaces and talk to each other, but building a social environment isn't the primary aim.
The best analog for what Vircadia is like is the web. There's a bunch of webservers out there, and some of them may form communities and have relationships with each other, but one doesn't enter into some sort of global "web community" by installing Apache.
In a similar way, Vircadia doesn't have any kind of required central services. We do support user accounts, but they're not required and you don't need to register anywhere, or to connect your server to any kind of grid to use it. Assets are hosted either on your own server, or on any HTTP server.
I wrote the posts on Reddit, so I can give a few clarifications here and answer questions if there's interest.
First of all, we aim more to be a platform than to be a social space. Vircadia compared to something like Second Life is highly distributed and there isn't a coherent world. We certainly have our social spaces and talk to each other, but building a social environment isn't the primary aim.
The best analog for what Vircadia is like is the web. There's a bunch of webservers out there, and some of them may form communities and have relationships with each other, but one doesn't enter into some sort of global "web community" by installing Apache.
In a similar way, Vircadia doesn't have any kind of required central services. We do support user accounts, but they're not required and you don't need to register anywhere, or to connect your server to any kind of grid to use it. Assets are hosted either on your own server, or on any HTTP server.
4 Likes, Who?
I tried it a little.
With all settings set to low, it’s very slow/sluggish, maps take a while to load, it seems i can’t rebind keyboard yet so on non-qewrty i can only suffer and move with arrow.
Curious to see what is possible to do, but my first steps are not overly positive.
You should try settings the graphics to High. Seriously.
This is a weird artefact from High Fidelity. Actually fixing that was pretty much the first on my list, but then bigger priorities appeared and this got a bit forgotten. The issue is that it wasn't entirely made like a normal gaming engine. "Low" should more accurately be seen as "Low impact on the system" rather than simply "low complexity".
High Fidelity envisioned this as something one might be running constantly during an entire workday, and if your work laptop sounds like a leaf blower all day that would obviously be undesirable. So "Low" actually contains a framerate limit, and framerate can vary depending on whether the window is in focus. So yeah, try High, or Custom for finer tuning.
Regarding loading, we host our files on good HTTP servers (mostly S3 and similar), but we place almost no limits on content. People are very free to overdo it with textures and geometry. I suggest trying "The Hub", which is a professionally made environment.
For keybindings, I'm taking note. We have a large population of long term High Fidelity users, and I guess with that comes acceptance of various limitations. But we definitely plan to improve in such respects, and that's why I started cautiously pushing it a bit -- got to see what reception it gets, and how new users react to it.
2 Likes, Who?
Greetings!
I wrote the posts on Reddit, so I can give a few clarifications here and answer questions if there's interest.
First of all, we aim more to be a platform than to be a social space. Vircadia compared to something like Second Life is highly distributed and there isn't a coherent world. We certainly have our social spaces and talk to each other, but building a social environment isn't the primary aim.
The best analog for what Vircadia is like is the web. There's a bunch of webservers out there, and some of them may form communities and have relationships with each other, but one doesn't enter into some sort of global "web community" by installing Apache.
In a similar way, Vircadia doesn't have any kind of required central services. We do support user accounts, but they're not required and you don't need to register anywhere, or to connect your server to any kind of grid to use it. Assets are hosted either on your own server, or on any HTTP server.
Any chance you guys can make it easier to import models?
I tried to import some fbx models and had to fiddle with unity and couldn't really get it to work in the end.
(I also tried to import some mmd models using this tool with little to no luck but it's a 3rd party tool so that's on me.)
Last edited by rubii on 13 October 2020 at 10:25 pm UTC
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Any chance you guys can make it easier to import models?
I tried to import some fbx models and had to fiddle with unity and couldn't really get it to work in the end.
(I also tried to import some mmd models using this tool with little to no luck but it's a 3rd party tool so that's on me.)
Unfortunately content creation isn't my forte, I'm a developer. But do come to our Discord or regular meetings, I'm sure our community members can help you with that. And if there's a specific problem of course we'll do our best to fix it.
2 Likes, Who?
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