What is the difference between OpenSim GUI and OpenSim Creator?

[adamkewley]

AK: question ported from YouTube. Edited to suit GitHub discussions

What is the difference between OpenSim 4.4 (GUI version) and OpenSim Creator (0.5.12)?

[adamkewley]

OpenSim Creator's development is more geared towards creating new models, whereas OpenSim GUI is more geared towards analyzing and editing already-built models. Abstractly, this means that OpenSim Creator spends more of its "coding real-estate" on things like real-time rendering, automatically-updated feedback cycles, etc. whereas OpenSim GUI spends more of its "coding real-estate" providing a comprehensive suite of tools (e.g. Inverse Kinematics solver, CMC solver, scale tool).

Another difference is that they are developed by different (though, strongly collaborating) teams with different development cycles and requirements. At time of writing (v0.5.12), Creator is a one-man project (me) with a (roughly) monthly release cycle. This means that, in order to rapidly deliver a new feature, users will occasionally encounter bugs (even in existing functionality) in new releases because there's only so much one developer can do with that cycle time. By contrast, OpenSim is a multi-developer project with a (roughly) annual release cycle. This means that features take a little longer to come through but, when they do, they have been more extensively QAed.

In summary, both tools are complementary, but have an overlapping functionality. Because both produce the same file via the same underlying OpenSim API, you can pick and choose which to use, depending on your requirements (many use both). You should take the development cycle into consideration if you're planning on using either to (e.g.) design a workflow, lecture series, etc. OpenSim Creator works fine, but you have to be willing to accept (sometimes, quite aggressive) UX changes over a timespan of a year or two. If you need something that's UI-/UX-/feature-stable over a longer period of time (e.g. >5yr) then OpenSim is a proven solution (or, at least, write your documentation around a specific version of OpenSim Creator).

Longer-term, I imagine the most valuable features from either project will gradually migrate to both of them.