High Fidelity recently moved to the Open Alpha stage and with that they also removed their request for people to not blog about some of the inner workings of High Fidelity. The reason for the request was completely understandable as High Fidelity was in the closed Alpha phase when the request was made and public blog posts could make some misleading representations about the platform.
I would still advise people proceed with caution when blogging about High Fidelity because it is still in Alpha and things can change quite dramatically during this phase.
However you can get an insight into the progress and development that has been made so far with High Fidelity thanks to Austin Tate, who has been quietly blogging about High Fidelity during the closed Alpha phase, but kept his blog posts private.
The posts start in May 2014 : High Fidelity Alpha Tests – First Screens, in which Austin took a look at building tools, mesh, chat, using scripts and much more.
There’s also an interesting post about NPC Bots as Assignments, which as you’d expect, covers how one would implement NPC’s within High Fidelity. I’ve had a play around with that myself and it worked quite well as an initial test.
Another interesting post covers Experiments with Oculus Rift DK2, in which Austin talks about how Oculus Rift worked with High Fidelity at the time.
An important point to note about Austin’s posts is that they are generally snapshots in time of the development process, things have changed since Austin documented his posts and therefore they will at times paint a picture of High Fidelity that is vastly different from how it is today. This is important because how High Fidelity looks and operates today, may not reflect how it will look in a few months.
Some of the features Austin covers are no longer in High Fidelity. I can’t emphasise enough that High Fidelity is in the Alpha phase, please bear this in mind when looking at High Fidelity because things can and do change, sometimes they change a great amount.
However as a record of the development process, the blog posts from Austin are extremely interesting, but treat these posts as they were intended to be seen, to quote Austin himself :
So, for those interested in how things have been developing during the alpha stage… I have been blogging about my experiences as the platform developed both within the Alphas Forums and through my own blog… though, at the request of High Fidelity, these were not made publicly accessible. This sensibly allowed High Fidelity to decide when and what to make public as the platform and its capabilities developed.
My blog posts, 18 of them from 14th May 2014 to 1st April 2015, are now publicly accessible
For a view of Austin’s posts, go here : https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/?s=hifi
Good point about the posts being snapshots at the time they were posted and not at all representative of the platform as it now is or how it might be in future. All the posts retain their ORIGINAL post date deliberately.