I was planning to write up a detailed post-mortem blogpost about High Fidelity, when my friend Theanine wrote an excellent article on the same topic, and posted it to his Medium account today. Theanine wrote a well-argued, thoughtful essay, which is far, far better than anything I could have written myself, informed by his many years of working on the platform as a content creator, with his background as a game developer and a game artist.
Theanine very kindly gave me his permission to repost his work here as a guest editorial, along with his pictures.
Please note that Theanine has asked me to remove his guest editorial from here, and refer people to his original write-up on Medium. Thanks!
Many good points, I don’t think there’s anything I disagree with. But I think there many other issues too, like the complete failure to have a business plan. Even with a bigger userbase, HiFi just wasn’t set up to make any money. On the other hand it’s thanks to that we have an interesting platform to build on. A company with a different mindset would never have made such a distributed system.
I’m part of the Athena effort, and we’re definitely paying attention to these things. I’ve just been playing with rendering quality settings today, and there’s been talk about the LOD. I personally own a Quest and would love to make Athena usable on it. I’m also primarily a desktop user myself — though I love VR, I prefer to develop under Linux. So you can be sure I will want to make my own life easier.
I agree with you that this seems like a good opportunity. Here development seems to be proceeding at a good pace, and I really hope we keep going forward.
I’m a Linux user myself! I wrote the blogpost above on a Kubuntu laptop. I’m relieved to hear Linux support won’t be going away. Keep up the great work! I’m grateful to all of you programmers who are keeping the code alive. Wish I could contribute code myself but my skillset is on the art side of things.
I’m sure there are things you can contribute, if you’d like to. We’re mostly a group of developers and very concentrated on that, but there’s plenty to do on the art side of things.
For instance we could use a welcome area of some sort, a project name and logo (“Athena Project” is unlikely to be permanent), and really any assets you’d like to contribute. I’m sure nobody would say no to more avatars for instance.
Please come by our Discord or join our meetings and we’ll see where things go from there 🙂