Is this project dead?

[jfrconley]

The hardware side seems to be posting updates reguarly on twitter, but this repo hasn't been updated for months. To be brutally honest, this project isn't even remotely close to ready. I experience frequent crashes and issues, even what you expect to be simple day to day operations don't work smoothly. Performance leaves much to be desired, mouse side buttons don't work, many programs straight up don't open correctly, things being open on the desktop prevent them from being opened. There is no persistence between sessions, no real window management, and not even a basic ui. Unless this project isn't really open source and there's some secret repo with a functional OS hidden away, I can't imagine this will be ready for the planned launch.

It really sucks because I want this to work so bad. I can see the outline of a great system, and maybe even a glimmer of genius. However, this almost smells like abandonware at this point. I've gotten applications stuck so many times, I literally cannot fathom using this for work, let alone a daily driver. Webstorm won't even open.

Apologies for the rant, I'm just wondering if there are still plans to support this repo at all

[KaneTW]

There are definitely plans to support it.

Basically the situation right now is that we need to deal with the things that have the longest lead times (getting hardware finalized/ordered), which will free up dev time to work on the software again.

Our original plan was to hire additional devs and have them work on the software in the meantime, but that turned out harder than expected in the current situation. And with hardware lead times being what they are, there's honestly still time to polish this.

About 3-6 months of dev time on this should be enough to sort out remaining bugs, but if you submit an issue I'll see if I can take a look when I need a break from hardware work.

[georgewsinger]

To elaborate more on what @KaneTW said: Basically we have decided to go 100% on hardware until things are finalized and we are waiting on mass production components to arrive (which gives us the optimum time to focus back on compositor development). Some additional things:

• While it's true our compositor development has reduced significantly since we started working on hardware, our dev branch is updated more frequently. We tend to keep master locked in the attempt to keep things more stable. It's possible that some of these problems are fixed by switching to dev.

• Problems people experience with our software are often the result of different hardware configurations. Creating our own hardware (e.g. the Simula One) allows us to better focus on one hardware configuration and ensure a quality experience.

no real window management, and not even a basic ui.

Can you expand on what sorts of UI you would find useful? We have plans to add proper window tiling next year (after headsets ship).

mouse side buttons don't work, many programs straight up don't open correctly... I've gotten applications stuck so many times

Can you clarify these items? By mouse side buttons do you mean mouse buttons that aren't left-click, right-click, or middle-click?

things being open on the desktop prevent them from being opened.

This is a known problem unfortunately (e.g. with firefox & chrome) with no easy solutions. It will at least not be an issue on our dedicated hardware (since the VR device becomes the primary compute unit for all apps to open).

There is no persistence between sessions

We have beta tested using xpra in the past to handle session persistence, but it caused drastic performance drops & weird behavior elsewhere in the program. We stopped going down this path after deciding the best path forward was a dedicated hardware device.

Apologies for the rant, I'm just wondering if there are still plans to support this repo at all

It's all good. The TLDR answer is "yes, but we have to focus on hardware first, since that's the ultimate bottleneck of our product".

Webstorm won't even open.

I just started a bug report for this: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula/issues/181

[jfrconley]

Thank you for the response! I'm glad to hear that you guys are still working on this. To clarify a few of the points I made:

• the mouse buttons on the side of my mouse do not repeat their normal bindings (I have them bound to go back/forth on webpages).

• by basic ui I mean things like power management (login/logout/shutdown) and preferences.

Again, I really appreciate you guys taking my rant seriously. Was having quite a day yesterday, and got frustrated with some issues 😅. Really good to hear that development will continue! I work almost exclusively in vr using a quest with immersed and am looking forward to a truly native 3D OS. Have my index setup in my office just to test this, will likely be an avid user once it's ready.