[Opensim-dev] clients, agents, avatars, ODE

[Sean Dague]

On Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 03:17:38PM -0700, dan miller wrote:
> from my narrow POV as physics guy, what should happen is this:
> 
> when a client *really* enters a region, thru logon or across a border,
> AddAvatar() should be called, so the avatar can interact with the
> environment (walk on terrain, bump into prims/other avs...)
> 
> when the client leaves the region, RemoveAvatar() is called to remove it
> from the physics for that region.
> 
> How the code got into the state it's in, I have no idea.  Some of this was
> inherited from pre-sugilite days, when things were mighty different.
> 
> I'm willing to get into the logistics of the rest of the codebase to some
> degree, but frankly I think my energies are better spent staying focused on
> physics issues.  While not ideal, the physics engine plugin API is a
> reasonable first pass, and is a good point of interaction between physics
> and the rest of the project.
> 
> What I think might be helpful would be for me to add debug messages along
> the lines of:
> 
> [PHYSICS] AddAvatar called; avatar count for this scene is now X
> [PHYSICS] RemoveAvatar called; avatar count for this scene is now X
> 
> or something along those lines.  Then you geniuses can mull over the code
> and mangle it into something that makes sense from the physics angle.
> 
> Does this sound reasonable?

This sounds reasonable to me, except the part where we are geniuses. ;)
Those debug statements should help understand the interactions a lot
more.  It might also be good to write up some of the sequence to expect
on the region crossing, as that clearly is one of the touchy parts in
the current code.

       -Sean

-- 
__________________________________________________________________

Sean Dague                                       Mid-Hudson Valley
sean at dague dot net                            Linux Users Group
http://dague.net                                 http://mhvlug.org

There is no silver bullet.  Plus, werewolves make better neighbors
than zombies, and they tend to keep the vampire population down.
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