[Opensim-dev] Local assets in Grid mode

Fri Sep 12 16:48:47 UTC 2008

(resent as it seems the original didn't get through the maillist the first time)

Hello everyone. Just for the note as I'm using this mailing list for
the first time, I'm Mircea / Taoki from #opensim and the other OS
channels on IRC. I decided to mail this to the opensim-dev list after a
chat I had with Nebadon two days ago about an issue with opensim (or
maybe a feature request would be more correct) regarding the problems
with running local assets in grid mode which we thought I should write
a summary up for here and probably list my suggestions about. I made a
few mantises and topics on the OSGrid forum about this in the past so I
hope this isn't something that's getting too old or anything. Also be
warned this is a long email so I apologise for having to write so much.

First
of all, many wonder why someone would want to use local assets in grid
mode. My own personal reasons are that I want to keep my sim whole and
be able to start it up in standalone or on other grids other then
OSGrid too. Grid assets make a sim dependent of that specific grid and
unusable anywhere else (unless running it with gray textures and
without sounds and scripts can be counted). Alongside that I kind of
don't feel like I'm owning my entire region while my assets are
somewhere else, which is why I want to keep my assets too and feel like
I'm owning the sim I run and not just half of it. Probably there are
others who feel the same way so I hope this doesn't sound too silly or
anything.

The problem with a region running local assets on a
grid however is that no one from another region can receive any of the
assets on that sim until they cross inside it, so if a client clears
its cache it sees that sim all gray and without sculpties and scripts
until the avatar crosses in. And obviously nothing you take in your
inventory from the local asset region is ever available anywhere else
(not even landmarks which makes them completely pointless in this
situation). Worse, I heard (and also experienced) that an avatar
crossing into a local assets sim looses inventory functionality until
next login. Because of this, running my sim on local assets seems to
have caused more trouble then not running it at all, but I'm still not
sure what to do (I already have a lot of assets so if I'm to switch I'd
need to transfer them all). I heard about the save-oar and load-oar
commands but I never used them before and heard they also render
inventory entries useless due to changing each asset's UUID on use.

I
thought to suggest a few solutions again and some ideas I had about
what could be done to allow a sim to run local assets on grids and have
everything loading up to the other sims too. My main ideas about this
were:

- Allow an owner to specify both local assets and grid
assets in opensim.ini... in other words use both asset storages at the
same time but not quite. In this situation, a sim would normally start
up using Grid assets but whenever someone sitting on that sim uploads
something or makes an asset, that asset goes -both- into grid assets
and that sim's local assets. The only issues with this are
double-uploads and upload times though that shouldn't be too much of a
problem, but the worst problem is double UUIDs as Neb noticed which
could cause a bunch of issues. I don't fully see how that could cause
UUID conflicts still as no one has any reason to copy the same sim with
the same assets and run it on the same grid in many instances, nor is a
UUID coincidence very likely. Either way, in this situation a region is
using grid assets, but their assetstorage.db also gets updated with
what they upload and use on that sim. So if the user ever wants to lets
say start the sim in standalone, they just select local assets and
start it up like nothing happened without requireing any other type of
transfer. If this method is implemented, it should also have an option
to allow importing / exporting assets between grid and local ones for
those who didn't get to sync them.

- The second method I had in
mind if the above isn't good is something a bit more complicated.
Basically, a region using local assets in grid would "project" its
assets on the entire grid at startup, and allow all simulators on the
grid to get the local assets of that sim, no matter what other sim they
are sitting on. For this however, every asset would also need to have a
simulator UUID with it so when an asset is requested the server knows
where to grab it from. The only issues with this idea is that too many
people from all over a grid requesting your local assets could badly
slow down your region (though its the owners choice to enable this if
they have good bandwitch) and that the assets won't be available while
that region is down.

- My third idea is similar to the one
above, just that instead of allowing the local assets region to stretch
its assets all over the grid, the simulator would temporarily upload
all its local assets into the grid assets at startup and use them from
there, and (probably) remove them at shutdown. In this situation we
would once again need an upload to go into both asset storages, and
we'd have a new issue where obviously, it would take very long and
stress the grid server a lot for a starting up sim to upload entire
megas of assets each time. And once again the assets would be
unavailable while the sim is down... unless we could make the sim
upload the local assets to grid ones -only- if they aren't already
there (eg: can't find an asset with the same uuid in grid assets). That
would only cause big startup times firts time the sim would start.

So
yeah that's mainly it. Not sure how good my ideas are but I really
believe something needs to be done for local assets users too so they
can run their sims normally in grid mode. An old mantis I have can be
found here http://opensimulator.org/mantis/view.php?id=1124 if anyone
can make use of it. I hope someone can find a solution for this... feel
free to reply me at this same email address as its mine (though ill be
subscribing to the mailing list) so I hope to see something going on
about this :)
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