On “Top 10 OpenSim Issues and Performance Update”
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
Technorati claim code: UEDV838NH3WP
In a post on Rezzable, Jon Himmoff makes a critical review of his one year experience with Open Sim.
The work is complete and accurate. While he values very positively the improvements of late ( “OpenSim works, is getting better and will be the future of the 3D Web”), he  identifies 10 points that OpenSim needs to improve.
In this post I intend to summarize the 10 points and discuss briefly the post in Rezzable.
First the point on which I have nothing to comment, if not fully agree.
1. Physics is weak. The proposed solution is to replace the current engine with a more effective. There is nothing wrong.
2. Permissions. Open Sim has a long way to go. Agreed.
3. Documentation scarce. Ok
4. Admin Tools. We must have more information about the user, inventory and server memory. Perfect
5. Mesh support for mesh is needed. Ok
6. Scripting. Should be improved. But the good news is that you can program modules at the server level.
7. Movements between grids bad, but improving.
8. Concurrent users. Sim vs sim Second Life (50 approx) is superior to OpenSim (20-30). But in a single server we can hold 6 regions with less prims and get up to 400 users per server, compared with only 50 concurrent Second Life. We are working on many fronts to improve the ability of concurrent users, as does OSGrid.
Just two short comments. We work on developing virtual worlds for businesses and institutions Mostly education and training.
In our approach to OpenSim, the development of a currency like the Linden Dollar is not necessary. In fact the entire system of buying and selling that works in Second Life now creates more noise than benefits for our learning orientation.
Voice, on the other hand, is a priority for us. In fact it is one of the areas where we work harder. Having fought a long time against Asterix and FreeSwitch (open source), Teamspeak and Vivox (proprietary), our job now is to integrate Mumble (open source), which provides high quality sound, positional audio features and could arguably hacked into activating Lip Sync.
