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LÖVR – A simple Lua framework for rapidly building VR experiences

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Re: LÖVR – A simple Lua framework for rapidly building VR experiences

#31

Post by wkat4242 »

Auracle wrote: post #29
wkat4242 wrote: post #25

Wow. This sounds really interesting. I've been trying to learn unity but it's kinda tough especially if you want to make something really cross platform in VR. There's so much boilerplate in terms of libraries that also constantly seem to change so tutorials or books I follow don't seem to match. I wonder if this is powerful enough and easier to learn. Definitely will give it a look. I have some questions though. Is…

I’m shoulder deep in a Unity VR (just Quest 2/3 for now) application and it’s a freaking mess. Just your basic Player object is a tangled tree of ridiculous amounts of different GameObjects. God forbid you want to support hands and controllers.

Yes and if you have them in the wrong order in the tree, or a little setting (like an object reference) wrong on one of them it doesn't work right and it's really hard to find out why. Also what each one is actually for. The names are far from clear to me.

It's documented but I don't find it very clear. In the end I've started using the Oculus toolkit rather than the openxr one as it was the only one I managed to make work. Some things are implemented weirdly though. Like the fade to black when teleporting, it just draws a black rectangle in front of your face but that doesn't work if you're not looking straight ahead because you can look past the edges of the rectangle. So then I have to go and fix that.

I understand everything needs to be flexible, in an engine you can't make assumptions otherwise you can't do things that deviate from the norm. But this seems to be overly complicated to me.

Re: LÖVR – A simple Lua framework for rapidly building VR experiences

#32

Post by thetoon »

dale_glass wrote: post #30
thetoon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't Vircadia also derived from High Fidelity?

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.

Great news! Do you know if overte also intends to fork the (upcoming) web client?

Re: LÖVR – A simple Lua framework for rapidly building VR experiences

#33

Post by dale_glass »

thetoon wrote: post #32
dale_glass wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Great news! Do you know if overte also intends to fork the (upcoming) web client?

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.

Re: LÖVR – A simple Lua framework for rapidly building VR experiences

#34

Post by thetoon »

dale_glass wrote: post #33
thetoon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great news! Do you know if overte also intends to fork the (upcoming) web client?

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, mis…

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?

Re: LÖVR – A simple Lua framework for rapidly building VR experiences

#35

Post by thetoon »

wkat4242 wrote: post #27
shatsky wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a VR expert, but it seems to be about same thing for OpenXR+Vulkan as A-frame is for WebXR+WebGL. Minimalist 3D engine with simple API wrapping much more complex lower level APIs, "reducing number of things which can be done in exchange for making some things easy to do with it". Native, not web app. OpenXR is "Vulkan for VR" by the way, every major HMD vendors runtime supports it. Though only SteamVR supports Li…

Yeah Linux VR gaming isn't there yet. Especially if you have a quest and need to stream over WiFi. I'm still running a Windows PC for that.

For what it's worth, after years of (occasionally) trying to get ALVR working, I've had a surprisingly fast success with WiVRn.

Re: LÖVR – A simple Lua framework for rapidly building VR experiences

#36

Post by dale_glass »

thetoon wrote: post #34
dale_glass wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, mis…

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?

> 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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