[Opensim-dev] More on asset portability

[Sean Dague]

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 06:11:36PM +0900, Johan Berntsson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Recently lulurun mailed about asset portability. Today I had a long 
> conversation with him, and I would like to restart the discussion from a 
> slightly different point of view.
> 
> What lulurun wants to do is to disconnect the asset and inventory 
> servers from a particular grid, so that it is possible to login on 
> another grid and still have access to your avatar, belongings etc. There 
> are already two fields (asseturl and inventoryurl) in the user server 
> that can be used for this purpose. The problem is that not all avatar 
> information is contained in the Inventory server. The user server 
> contains "wearables" data (list of UUID's). Now, the question is why 
> this information supplied by the user server. Wouldn't it be more 
> natural to have it in the Inventory Server?
> 
> If we clarified the roles of the user and inventory servers, and kept 
> all asset information in the inventory server, then it would be much 
> easier to use external inventory/asset servers. This means that we want 
> to move the AvatarAppearance API from the User server to the 
> InventoryServer. The logic would be changed so that the default 
> inventory and asset servers are used unless the asseturl and 
> inventoryurl are defined. That is, the grid would continue to use its 
> own asset and inventory servers unless you supply more information.
> 
> We plan to do work in this area soon, and welcome any feedback and 
> comment you have.

It does seem the moment we start talking about cross grid sharing of
services, we need to actually start putting authentication in these
communications.  While wild west has worked so far, having someone else
delete everything in my private inventory system probably isn't going to
fly.  People will assume because it is *their's* that there is some
protection on it.

A few questions and use cases.

Grid A has all UGAI services.

Grid B also has all UGAI services.

User B (normally lives on Grid B) creates an account on Grid A.  How do
they specify their AI servers?  They also need to now duplicate all the
rest of their user info there (name, profile, etc.)?

User B uploads a texture, which AI does it go in?  User B puts that
texture on a surface, what AI does it live in?

I definitely think we should start multiplexing AI services, as it would
be great to be able to easily plug in some stock content servers.
However, it seems like the complexity of user specific AI servers
explodes pretty quickly.  I've got 450 users on my test system.  Trying
to find an asset across 450 AI instances would really suck. :)

    -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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