Open Simulator
Open Simulator wasn&#x27;t something I expected to see on HN.<p>Open Simulator checks off almost all of the boxes for the &quot;metaverse&quot;. Multi-user 3D world, check. User-created content, check. Open system, check. Interoperability between servers run by different parties, check. Anybody can run a server, check. Compatibility with external asset storage systems, check. Compatibility with external payment systems, check. Second Life itself isn&#x27;t as open.<p>So why isn&#x27;t it the metaverse?<p>Well, there&#x27;s a problem. It&#x27;s not &quot;fun&quot;.<p>If you start up an instance of Open Simulator, you get a blank piece of terrain. You can log in and visit it, and so can others, if you let them. Now you can build things. You can import assets and place them in world. You can sell or give parcels to others so you can have neighbors, who also can build.<p>This appeals to the fraction of the population which needs an outlet for their creativity. People who probably have a workshop or a drawing pad or a software development environment or a CAD program. It&#x27;s not a passive form of entertainment. This makes it niche.<p>That may be a generic problem with the &quot;metaverse&quot;. People don&#x27;t actually go to any of the NFT worlds much. Decentraland runs about 200-300 concurrent users. (They hit 350 today!) Sominium Space, maybe 25. Most of the rest are vaporware at this point.<p>Attempts to make metaverses fun mostly so far involve bringing in DJs, or adding gambling.
You need something fun for new non-creator users to do the first time they log in.<p>You can put games inside a metaverse. That&#x27;s what Roblox is. Roblox is Youtube for junior game developers. Upload something, compete for attention and revenue. Open Simulator and Second Life are a bit too sluggish for that. Mostly because of dated implementations. 
Open Simulator only has one real maintainer at this point. Linden Lab has a new VP of engineering who&#x27;s trying to increase performance, but he&#x27;s facing a long-standing corporate culture of &quot;can&#x27;t do&quot;.<p>(I&#x27;ve been working on an SL&#x2F;Open Simulator client that uses Rust&#x2F;Rend3&#x2F;WGPU&#x2F;Vulkan, and can get consistent 60FPS frame rates. But it&#x27;s nowhere near feature complete. The performance problem is solveable through parallelism and some algorithms that turn O(n) into O(n log n). The fun problem, I don&#x27;t have an answer for.)