[Opensim-dev] Thoughts on SceneObjects

[Sean Dague]

Disclaimer: I'm not looking to implement any of this, at least not any
time soon.  This is just food for thought, and I'm curious what others
think about these approaches.

I've been recently thinking a lot about SceneObjects, and how they might
be made both more sensible, and more flexible, as today the SOG/SOP
stuff is very monolythic.

It started to occur to me that SceneObjects are really a set of
capabilities.  Some of the capabilities seem to be the following:

* have physics applied
* be scripted
* be persisted
* be seen by all clients
* have inventory
* have children
* be modified by the client

This isn't really an entire list, but it's based on times a SOG/SOP
interacts with classes beyond itself.

Today we handle this with having all this functionality in a single
class, and then use bits or booleans or the permission manager to block
the system from doing certain things.

While this works well enough in the SL use case, the moment you start
looking at creating objects through a path other than the Client
interfaces, you quickly start running into creating a lot of work
arounds to trick OpenSim into not letting these subsystems get their
hands on the objects (for either simplicity or performance reasons).

Discussion is welcome, as I'm start to experiment on the synthetic
object side and it definitely exposes a new way of thinking about objects.

	-Sean

-- 
__________________________________________________________________

Sean Dague                                       Mid-Hudson Valley
sdague at gmail.com                                 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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