[Opensim-dev] Call to discussion: Physics plugin retrofactoring.

[Toni Alatalo]

Hi,

the thing i was experimenting with triggered this discussion with Teravus, 
so a quick comment from the perspective of that particular use case here:

On Tue, 6 Nov 2007, Michael Wright wrote:
> And the general agreement (if I remember correctly) was for a event 
> based system, so like your option 1. I'd have to dig back through the 
(..)
> Teravus Ovares <teravus at gmail.com> wrote:
> we also need a physics event subscripion manager..  so the number of 
> events raised is only what is required to make the system work..  and

so along this route in my case I would have liked either callbacks on all 
avatar-to-avatar collisions within the region, or in fact in a special 
case just collisions of a certain avatar with any other avatar (or even 
just a certain set of other avatars). so optimally such a subscription 
system would provide means for specifying the types of events and/or the 
objects of interest. dunno how feasible implementing that is w.r.t keeping 
the performance of the physics system.

> 2. (Scene Oriented -
>  2a. Include 1..  (IsCollding would be changed to - CollidingObject and 
> CollidingGround, and they would be changed to int number of collisions)

apparently this is not the route to take, but just mentioning for the sake 
of completeness: in my case the number of collisions with objects would 
have been close to useless, it could only have been used to limit the list 
of which avatars should be checked for collisions by e.g. position 
distance checking (which i use now as a workaround), to find the 
individual avatar collided with.

so the useful thing for that case would have been having a reference to 
the (list of) object(s) collided with, not just the total count of them.

> Lets work together on figuring out how to expand the system so that all 
> current and (foreseeable) future needs are met :D

i have some other wishful use cases too, will try to pin-point their 
requirements soonish too :)

oh and if things go well in place might have time to do some of the actual 
work too in near future, not certain about that yet.

> Teravus

~Toni