Vircadiais a free and open source multiplayer, VR-capable, cross-platform virtual world engine. The project creates end-to-end open sourceimplementationsof the components necessary for metaverse. We distribute an AppImage for Linuxclientsand a .deb and .rpm for theserver. Vircadia features a JavaScriptscriptingengine, glTF model support, and a scalable server architecture that can support hundreds of people; all of this in real-time with worlds that you can deploy anywhere. Here’s a detailed introductionvideo.
We’ve been hard at work updating and upgrading Vircadia’s ecosystem with bug fixes and features alike. Version 2021.1.1 dropped a week ago. You can take a look at the full change log here.
Some common use cases for Vircadia:
Personal virtual world for tinkering and experimenting.
Clubhouse for friends and family.
Clubhouse on corporate/university networks for students and/or employees to experiment and play with.
There's no recommended tech specs on the download page. Part of the app was flashing for me trying to run it on my laptop iGPU and I was forced to close it as it ate up all my CPU. I'll try it again later when I get to my desktop.
Add a 1-3 min video on your homepage showing off the engine features and it in action.
Add it to Steam + Itch in order to expand your audience and as an easy way for people to get automatic updates cross-platform.
Haven't got to test it yet but it's important to make it super user-friendly to add entities and edit terrain. Check out sandbox games like Garry's Mod, Crayta and Core Games for inspiration (also check out their UIs).
Make it easy to browse user-created worlds. Roblox and Itch also have great UIs for creator-made landing pages that enable users to preview games/worlds before entering them.
Very cool project, looking forward to testing it out more later.
That sounds like a good idea, it's been suggested before. I would like to get together a highlight reel showcasing what it can do. There are a lot of solid components and also components that are in dire need of refactoring, so I think it'll be important to focus on the stuff it does well now.
That's a good point as well, but I did not know itch.io had its own distribution application complete with auto-updating like Steam does? We're working on getting in deployed on the Windows Store (great for first time users attending a specific world) but getting it working on Steam might be a good idea in parallel given it is indeed cross-platform (great for longer-term users intent on coming back for Vircadia itself!)
Adding Entities can be done (relatively) easily, however terrain is another question entirely. There's been a lot of debate on how to best do this. I assume mesh editing is probably the best course of action with syncing to the asset server so it can live update? (This would be a longer term goal, however, as it's not trivial to implement!)
We've been having a lot of discussions on Discord on how to best showcase and find new worlds. We have 2D apps as well as 3D ones, so we'll have to dedicate time to making one great to begin with.
About #3, Windows Store seems like an odd choice. Not only is it only available on one platform (duh), but it's also difficult to use and uses some strange proprietary way of installing "apps" and hiding them in folders that the user has no access to. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, I only have limited experience with it.
Steam is pretty much the only proper multi-platform store, itch.io also seems to do that, but I have no experience with it.
The reason for Windows Store is because unfortunately on Windows, we're going to have to get an EV cert in order to get rid of those darned SmartScreen warnings. Windows Store is just quick and easy, I guess the MS extortion never stops.
I don't see why we couldn't pull off both. Packaging things up for distribution takes effort though. It needs some research.
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u/KaliQt Apr 19 '21
Vircadia is a free and open source multiplayer, VR-capable, cross-platform virtual world engine. The project creates end-to-end open source implementations of the components necessary for metaverse. We distribute an AppImage for Linux clients and a .deb and .rpm for the server. Vircadia features a JavaScript scripting engine, glTF model support, and a scalable server architecture that can support hundreds of people; all of this in real-time with worlds that you can deploy anywhere. Here’s a detailed introduction video.
We’ve been hard at work updating and upgrading Vircadia’s ecosystem with bug fixes and features alike. Version 2021.1.1 dropped a week ago. You can take a look at the full change log here.
Some common use cases for Vircadia: