High Fidelity Essentially Closes Up Shop, Lays Off More Staff

[RyanSchultz]

High Fidelity Suspends Its Remote Workteams Project, Announces More Staff Layoffs, Closes Its Open Source Codebase, and Withdraws Its Apps: High Fidelity Suspends Its Remote Workteams Project, Announces More Staff Layoffs, Closes Its Open Source Codebase, and Withdraws Its Apps

 

[Fionalein]

No good news but kinda was forseeable.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Translation: the investors are pulling out money like on a sinking ship, and are trying to squeeze some money out of whatever the code base might still has to offer. And the remaining investors demanded a business change.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Next in the news: LL gives up on Sansar.

 

[Fionalein]

Next in the news: LL gives up on Sansar.

One could hope for, maybe they can sell it to Suckerberg and Ondrejka who still look for a FB in Virtuality.

 

[Free]

Does this mean we can now start calling it No Fidelity?


/me runs!

 

[Seven]

I never tried it, too bad it didn't work out. I keep hoping something better than SL would come along eventually, but anything even remotely similar seems to fizzle out really early on.

 

[Chav Paderborn]

It had a concurrency of about 3 so this isn't unexpected.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

I never tried it, too bad it didn't work out. I keep hoping something better than SL would come along eventually, but anything even remotely similar seems to fizzle out really early on.

Sine Space has been going for like 4 years now, i think, maybe 5? Its unity engine, its really pretty, I just need to figure it out, which takes time I don't have right now. Not sure how it will continue, but I don't think its beng done to impress 'investors', so it might be a safer bet in the long run.

 

[Fionalein]

Sine Space has been going for like 4 years now, i think, maybe 5? Its unity engine, its really pretty, I just need to figure it out, which takes time I don't have right now. Not sure how it will continue, but I don't think its beng done to impress 'investors', so it might be a safer bet in the long run.

it also supports Windows, Mac and Linux .... and 3D

 

[Chin Rey]

Sine Space has been going for like 4 years now, i think, maybe 5? Its unity engine, its really pretty, I just need to figure it out, which takes time I don't have right now. Not sure how it will continue, but I don't think its beng done to impress 'investors', so it might be a safer bet in the long run.

Yes, they seem to be doing the right thing, keeping it low key and low budget from the start and build slowly and methodically.

But I say it again, don't rule out opensim. Yes, Avination and Inworldz collapsed but both had serious flaws built into them right from the start. There are other grids that have much stronger foundations.

Kitely is of course the most obvious example. They've followed a strategy similar to Sinespace's and they've been doing it for 11 years. They don't have nearly as many people as SL but they are actually bigger in land area and, perhaps jsut as important, they have more sims paid for by customers than SL does.

Then there are all those small non-commercial grids. Each of them doesn't matter much but combined they are significant.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

Yes, they seem to be doing the right thing, keeping it low key and low budget from the start and build slowly and methodically.

But I say it again, don't rule out opensim. Yes, Avination and Inworldz collapsed but both had serious flaws built into them right from the start. There are other grids that have much stronger foundations.

Kitely is of course the most obvious example. They've followed a strategy similar to Sinespace's and they've been doing it for 11 years. They don't have nearly as many people as SL but they are actually bigger in land area and, perhaps jsut as important, they have more sims paid for by customers than SL does.

Then there are all those small non-commercial grids. Each of them doesn't matter much but combined they are significant.

IIRC, The Sine Space team are some of the same folks from Open Sims; I'm not sure because I stopped doing much with open sims when inworldz turned into a disappointment [for me, anyway]

 

[Noodles]

You mentioned closing Open Source teams? How Open Source was it? Could some community team pick it up if they wanted to?

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I never tried it, too bad it didn't work out. I keep hoping something better than SL would come along eventually, but anything even remotely similar seems to fizzle out really early on.

It was really a nice place, felt a lot like early Second Life, and while concurrency was typically under 100 that seems typical of headset-based systems... there just aren't enough people using headsets.

The github repo is still announcing "We are hiring: http: //highfidelity.com/jobs"...

Noodles - There are currently 476 forks of highfidelity/hifi

 

[Chin Rey]

How Open Source was it?

Apache License 2.0 apparently.

Could some community team pick it up if they wanted to?

Probably if they manage to grab the code before it's all removed from Github.

Illan Tochter was talking about adding High Fidelity's voice chat software to Kitely. He was quite enthusiastic about it and said it's far superior to VirWox. I'm not sure if that meant adding High Fidelity code to opensim though. More likely he was talking about using it as a separate external service.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Probably if they manage to grab the code before it's all removed from Github.

Someone would have to remove all 476 forks of the code to do that.

 

[Chin Rey]

Someone would have to remove all 476 forks of the code to do that.

Not me!

 

[Noodles]

Anyone have a link to a fork? I don't know that I'll us it but I'd like to save the code "just in case".

 

[Selinica]

I never tried it, too bad it didn't work out. I keep hoping something better than SL would come along eventually, but anything even remotely similar seems to fizzle out really early on.

I did.
It was like VRChat but the tutorial only loaded once when I launched it and it wasn't the first time, it covered how to grab things form a distance before dropping me to my home region and nothing I tried managed to move me around apart from walking in the roomscale area did anything for movement.
Sometimes things would work and I could get to another area and sometimes those would have people that I could hear but almost never see.
Also their shopping thing was genuinely bad, to the extent that even looking up how to find and use purchased things was a thing that had to be done (assuming you could manage to buy something off their store).

And it's a shame as it had some neat ideas and some promise of at least doing some interesting stuff at the start. This is just my opinion, but they basically got surpassed by other alternatives in ease of use for users and creators and in reach and in the variety of people reached. They had some neat events inworld and other things going on but even that didn't seem enough to get more people into HiFi. I could use HiFi and deal with some very weird controls and talk to maybe two people at the only occupied world or I could go on VRChat where I can easily get an avatar and be unable to go to many instances of places as they are all full of plenty of people talking and interacting with each other and the latter allows me to even interact with people who are playing on a regular desktop client in a very natural way. I liked what HiFi might have done but it always ended up being for me and others I did manage to talk to a "well I figured I'd check it out and see what changed since I've had it installed and just remembered it's there".

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Anyone have a link to a fork? I don't know that I'll us it but I'd like to save the code "just in case".

Github - High Fidelity is all their open source code. You can `git clone` the whole thing.