[Opensim-dev] Protocol documentation, anyone?

[Justin Clark-Casey]

Cristina Videira Lopes wrote:
> 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!

Strongly seconded.  There would be much love from us for anybody who isn't planning on directly contributing code to 
OpenSim but could do this kind of thing.

Bugging Lindens (nicely :-) for documentation might be good too, though I doubt this approach would go anywhere fast 
right now.  Or maybe there's even some out there already that we don't know about?

> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
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justincc
Justin Clark-Casey
http://justincc.wordpress.com