[Opensim-dev] Protocol documentation, anyone?

[Cristina Videira Lopes]

It's clear that we don't know a lot of things of the client-server 
protocol with the LL viewer. The fact that things like TPs and crossings 
kind of work seems to be entirely due to the relentless work of 
trial-and-error of some early contributors to OpenSim. Kudos to them! 
The fact that no one was even aware of EnableAgentCommunication is an 
indicator that this has been really, truly a case of honest 
reverse-engineering... The current state of things is extremely fragile, 
though. If we try to fix some oddity in one corner of the protocol, 
chances are we are going to screw up seven different things in the rest 
of the protocol, because we don't know what the client wants.

So -- we need help. Calling for people who don't see themselves 
contributing code to OpenSim core, but that want to help its development 
by helping make the guessing game less painful!

The challenge is to read the LL viewer source code and try to get an 
understanding of what the client expects from the servers with respect 
to region crossings and teleports. Here are some examples of things I 
would like to know:

- How are seed capabilities being used in the client?
- Do all child agents have their own seed cap, or do they share that 
seed with the root agent?
- Does the client care about who sends it seed capabilities?
- What is the expectation on the seed cap that is sent on 
EstablishAgentCommunication, CrossRegion, FinishTeleport?
- Do child agents have Event Queues? If so, when are they opened/closed?
- Under what circumstances does the client close or refuse to use an 
Event Queue?
...

If anyone is interested in doing this important piece of work, I have 
very concrete viewer log messages that can serve as starting points for 
mining the client code. Just let me know!

Thanks,
Crista