I was expecting it to grow organically but it's actually gone quiet recently - despite continuingly healthly download and usage numbers.
If anyone has any suggestions that don't involve me spending all my time on community building or PR then I'd love to hear them.
Whenever I come across a fork on GH, my first assumption is that the fork is aiming to be merged back into the main repo in the future, and my second assumption is that the maintainers of the fork have less of an interest in the project than the original project’s maintainers. It’s a signal of lower quality IMO. You should keep mention of the original project in your docs, but I personally don’t think it’s necessary to keep the repo as a fork.
You can use the GitHub virtual assistant to request this: https://support.github.com/request/fork
I am pretty sure that issues, PRs, stars, and everything should be preserved, but don’t take my word for it.
I'll give it some thought.
Another good reason to defork is that, as we saw with the youtube-dl fiasco, there are some non-software-related reasons that MS may feel inclined to offline the entire fork tree. That'd be the bigger concern for me.
I was surprised you didn't have any videos of interacting with OpenBrush on your home page. Normally, I would have clicked away if I stumbled on that page, but since you posted on HN I searched it up on YouTube.
Do you and your volunteers use Open Brush regularly? If so, toss up some casual live streams on Twitch or other platforms. Post on Twitter and Discord, etc. before you go live, then upload the recording to YouTube for people to watch later.
Part of what makes Blender so damn accessible is the huge number of YouTube tutorials. Virtually every feature of Blender has at least one high quality tutorial video, walking people through every step.
Personally I was always assuming that any potential contributor was already fully aware of Tilt Brush. I find it hard to imagine that someone would be far enough removed from our scene that they would need to be informed about what Tilt Brush is about, but engaged enough to want to contribute. Am I wrong in this? Tilt Brush has pretty decent mindshare for anyone interested in VR content creation.
Another problem is that I just don't really want to spend my time making videos. Plenty of other people make videos about Open Brush / Tilt Brush. It just doesn't turn into "increased engagement from potential volunteers".
I really just want to code new features. Everything else is a distraction that I do out of neccesity.
I'm aware of tilt brush and would use it but I've still yet to have prioritized setting aside the money to even buy a VR headset, I don't much care for the companies doing it right now, and I'm not interested in just having a phone do it either. I keep hoping for the tech to improve and branch out beyond what it is right now.
OpenBrush was imo one of the best apps for it and I wanted to start playing around with the code, but had some friction even getting a build started and eventually lost interest. Installed several SideQuest builds, of course, but after I couldn't get a working distributable with built-in Icosa even all the way into September, I got annoyed and I haven't started the app or looked at the project since.
Just getting the Oculus dev env set up to the half-assed extent I did, it's risky, dubious, and feels bad. I never know which agreement I might accidentally click that'll allow Zuckerberg to Quest2 into my house backwards, or whatever.
I guess this is probably a lot less helpful than I thought it would be when I started typing. Sorry!
(It's a brave soul who tackles a codebase of this complexity as their first Unity project! But it was my first big Unity codebase and it was a great way to get myself out of the training pool)
I expect advanced 3D workflows of the future to look less like Blender and Unreal Engine and more like Tilt Brush.
Full degree of motion of both hands is so liberating. Plus it's fully immersive. When VR UIs improve around knolling and contextual tooling, this will become more obvious to people.
But anything spatial - most definitely. On the whole trying to arrange things fluidly in 3D space via a 2D monitor is like typing with gloves on.
Sadly, .NET/Mono apps not so good for Linux.
C# isn't the problem. Unity takes care of that.
I'm sure it will get fixed - if not by Valve then by Monado who are doing great stuff for open source XR support.
(some of the above might be inaccurate. I haven't had much involvement with the Linux side of things)
https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&star...
AR/VR is a headache. VR goggles are proprietary and locked-down, laggy, and make you dizzy. Your eyes try to adjust FoV when there is no adjustment needed.
This is an art program for (mainly) individual users and predates the metaverse hype by multiple years.
I dislike the metaverse hype as much as you but I love content creation tools. There's no need to use any mention of VR to rag on that.
I also mentioned our usage numbers are very good so your point doesn't even really make sense.
I don't want to get sidetracked into a general "defending VR" thing because that got still about 5 years ago.
I was hoping to get people thoughts on how to build a dev community around an already popular content creation app.
This is largely a function of both frame rate and IPD.
The latter is one of the reasons why I feel Meta has done an absolutely huge disservice to VR adoption by making the Oculus series fixed IPD. They claim to be able to software compensate, but my experience is that IPD on a headset being even just a millimeter or two physically off makes the difference between a comfortable VR experience and one that leaves me with a headache after the fact.
The fact that they reduced screen refresh rates on the Oculus S and the original Quest didn't help at all either.
I've had an Index since shortly after they became available and can use it hours at a time without any sort of discomfort provided my GPU is able to serve up enough frame rate for a particular title. Available GPU power is holding back VR currently more than anything, IMO.
Oculus Go and Rift S were the only fixed IPD headsets they produced, and I was able to use the Go comfortably with my abnormally wide IPD (69-70mm.) Quest 2 has 3 digital settings for IPD, and that also works fine for me at the widest setting.
(And both of the other consumer-release Oculus headsets (Rift CV1, Quest 1) had analog variable IPD.)
I honestly haven't paid super close attention to their hardware since the Rift S was such a disappointment and the Quest had the lowered screen refresh rates.
Quest 2 is designed to hit a very low price point, and it certainly shows. But despite that, it's a very competent high-resolution, high-framerate (90, with experimental 120Hz support) VR headset; the only major drawbacks are low FOV, poor color quality on the display, and lack of uncompressed PCVR.