[Opensim-dev] Rebuilding SOG/SOP

[Justin Clark-Casey]

Frisby, Adam wrote:
> We had a fairly long discussion on IRC last night between myself, Justin 
> and Melanie in regards to how we might restructure 
> SceneObjectGroup/SceneObjectPart.
> 
>  
> 
> For the benefit of others, I have written up the proposal I made into a 
> fairly long post (with pictures), here:
> 
> http://www.adamfrisby.com/blog/2008/11/opensim-internals-rebuilding-sceneobjectgroup-co/
> 

I find the idea of being able to combine two different virtual world object types into the same scene most intriguing. 
I'm not sure how useful this would be in standalone or even closed grid applications, but in an open public grid to 
which anybody can connect a server it could allow for a lot of freedom.  You don't have to say that your server is a 
Second Life environment or a VastPark environment - both can inhabit the same world.  Maybe this is what people were 
thinking already but it's not something that I had fully considered before.

Might one still want to push as many attributes into IEntity as possible, even though potentially they may not be used 
by some virtual environments?  Without this, it looks like each implementation may need to potentially write converters 
for every other VW implementation that it wants to interoperate with (e.g. so that LL can understand some aspect of 
AWEntity and vice-versa).  This could lead to a combinatorial explosion as environment implementations are added to the 
system.  I think it's okay to have some properties in IEntity that might remain unused for some implementations.

I also don't know if you could get away without subclassing Scene in some way.  It does play a big co-ordinating role 
for a lot of functionality which I can't imagine will all be generic.

It seems like its early days for this and there are still a lot of unanswered questions.  But as a general architectural 
direction it sounds quite good to me.

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