[Opensim-dev] Proposal to subdivide the assets table

[Melanie]

Hi,

Stefan Andersson wrote:
>  
>> Well, to make a long story short: Regions don't own assets. Regions > use assets. Users own assets.
> I do know that you are primarily interested in the SL paradigm. 

I am interested in keeping the SL paradigm doable. Which is a 
difference. I am, in fact, planning to expand the SL scenario 
significantly.

>  
> But from where I'm coming, there's definitively scenarios where regions can own assets.
>  
> The question is whether those assets can then leave the region.
Granted. I think tying assets/objects to a region makes things very 
inflexible, but I see that there are use cases where nothing beyond 
that is needed. If the concept of a local object is introduced, then 
local asset storage without a centralized repository becomes 
possible for those objects.

>> So, a centralized asset storage is certainly needed, tied into the > concepts around asset portability, possibly several centralized > asset servers.
> I don't think portable assets should be our base case.
For the Metaverse, for inter-grid movement of avatars, portable 
assets are the base case. Creating a core that can't handle portable 
assets would therefore be counterproductive.

>> But assets are immutable and a region is a finite space. This makes > it an ideal situation for a persistent cache. 
>  
> Totally so.
Which is so even if local objects exist

>> Tier 1: referenced assets, indefinite retention> Tier 2: unreferenced assets, short term retention
> How would one decide what assets are 'referenced'?
Textures on a prim. Items in prim inventories. Looped sounds, UUID 
literals in scripts. Objects in world.

>  > However, because of the ability to reference an asset by it's UUID, > letting a region "own" an asset is still not possible.
> Actually, there is still a 'calling context' around that reference.
Again, if it is acceptable that an asset ID has only local validity, 
then yes. But global validity should be a goal, IMHO.

> There is definitively a lot of 404's and broken image links out there. And somehow, it's still useable.
Do we need to repeats the www's mistakes?

>> Issue 1 could be addressed by transferring the needed resources > along with the object, however, on a distributed grid like OSGrid, > this can be time-consuming, as home DSL may be involved.
> Maybe I misunderstand you, but in order to forward it to the agent, we need to transfer it to the region anyway.
If a region owns an asset, and the object crosses regions, then the 
assets would have to be sent along with the object, e.g. region to 
region. If the originating region is on home DSL, this will not be 
smooth.
Again, that means objects must be allowed to cross region boundaries 
in the first place.

>> Issue 3 could be addressed by creating a list of resources needed at > the time of the "take" and making that part of the inventory record. > This would significantly bloat the inventory table, as each prim's > inventory, face textures and all sounds/animations it might play are > listed in the database.> > Issue 3 cannot be reasonably addressed.
> I beg to differ. I think this very doable. I just think we need to boil the use case down.
The issue here is that the room required to store that metadata may 
well exceed the space it takes to just keep all assets. Orphaned 
assets make up only a fraction of the asset collection, but this 
type of expansive metadata would have to be attached to everything.
I believe it will fast hit the point of diminishing returns. Of 
course it's doable, but it won't be economically feasible.

>> Therefore, caching, which is something I have looked into and am > going to write some code for, is an absolutely viable solution for > many of the raised issues, but weeding the central server's contents > in such a way seems to be impracticable.
> Yay!
:)

Melanie