[Opensim-dev] Question on Avatar Appearance persistance

Fri Apr 11 17:09:56 UTC 2008

okay will try to make this my last email (before anyone replies) on this. But I think I'm understanding more of what you meant. 

And while I think there is no reason why we couldn't have AvatarAppearance hanging off UserProfile data. I'm still not convinced there is a need to try to connect all these things. Avatar Appearance is certainly a scene thing. In that every ScenePresence needs a reference to one. But we could move the actual Av atar Appearance class out to OpenSim.framework, or if going with the "Anemic Domain Model" appoach suggested by Stefan then we could have a base AvatarAppearance in the model project. Then in the avatar appearance module fetch the appearance object that was attached to the user profile. 

But I'm not sure I really see any benefit in this over the module doing a direct request to the user server for the appearance. I actually think its better to decouple things in this way. 

As I said in my last email, there could also be some bots/NPC's that don't have userprofiles. And also I think there is a chance that scene presences are created (and the appearance fetched) before the user profiles are. But can't be sure of that without looking deeper in the code.

But anyway as long as we went through the avatar appearance factory module concept to fetch the appearance that was attached to the user profile. Then I guess there is nothing stopping it. Just seems a coupling that isn't needed. 

I am very strongly of the opinion that we need to keep the factory module concept. So that a different module could be used. Different regions/applications might want a completely different approach to how the appearance of the avatars are handled. Like a game might want to randomly just give each user one of a set of preset avatars. 

But with this factory module. We can actually fetch the appearance from where ever we want, including the userprofile if it is decided. 

Michael Wright <michaelwri22 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: I'm still unsure what you meant about the appearance shouldn't be part of the land.

But avatar appearance is very much a scene related thing, its basically the definition of a 3d object...the avatar. Its not really the same thing as Agent/User profile/data. Thats more account data.

So while I don't really care how on the backend it is stored. I very much think it should be on the region side something like it is now. And kept separate from agent data. Also we need to remember that bots might have a avatar (with appearance) but no userprofile. The bots in simple module for instance.

I could well be completely miss-understanding what you meant. But I think there is a danger here of trying to make connections between two bits of data that should be handled on the region side in different ways. I think we should actually most likely be breaking things up even further. And break up that mess of OpenSim.Framework.Communications. So many different things have  been lumped together in there, just because they connect to the backend servers in some way. 

If we had a common easy way for any module to communicate with the backend servers then we could separate so much more.

Sean Dague <sean at dague.net> wrote: On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 10:51:39AM -0400, Sean Dague wrote:
> Currently AvatarAppearance is implemented as a Region Module.  It has a
> seperate connection with a mapper, pulls everything into a hash table,
> and accesses it from there.  While this works, it seems like having
> appearance as a function of land is somewhat odd (at least in my mind).
> 
> It seems to me that it would be more reasonable to have AvatarWearables
> hang off of UserProfileData, as it is very user specific.  My initial
> thought is to create a  AvatarWearableCollection class which has the 13
> wearables, and make that the serialized unit.  We can set by int, or
> should be able to set by name (shirt, pants, etc) as well.  This would
> hang off ProfileData like AgentData does.
> 
> Thoughts?

To clarify, what I really want to do is make Apperance like Profile, and
the AvatarAppearance Region Module work more like AvatarProfilesModule
in getting the user server to save the information back for it.

   -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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