[Opensim-dev] Thoughts on SceneObjects

[Teravus Ovares]

Just a thought,

Each object may be 'Touched', and while that touch might be related to
the script engine and therefore fit in with the scripted capability,
it may also not.  Therefore, it might be smart to separate it as it's
own capability.

Touch doesn't necessarily, but can, trigger a script event in non
SL<tm> use cases.   In some cases it could trigger a teleport, a web
browser opening up, a text dialog or a series of really complicated
actions that forever change the virtual world that the user is
participating in and move the story of the world forward.

Thinking in terms of interaction, additionally, each object
potentially could be sit on, moved, rotated, dragged in 3d space,
scaled, have media applied to a surface, capture input from the user,
report back collisions, and can be attached to an avatar.

In OpenSimulator, the object is the most basic paint that fills
virtual worlds.   It's really no wonder why we're having a hard time
defining exactly what it is and what it's public API should be.   It
should really be the most customizable and feature full object or
group of objects in OpenSimulator.  Customizability and solid
structure are not always mutually exclusive, and, it takes lots of
work and planning to make it appropriate for as many uses as possible.
  Just one suggestion that I have here is; don't just jump in and
define things.  Organization is key.  Have your ducks in a row.  Look
at it from several points of view.   Object interaction,
customizability of the API, and capability of the object are just
three. :D   This, most certainly, deserves several flow charts that
take up a few walls worth of space in a room.

Regards

Teravus

On 7/2/09, Sean Dague <sdague at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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