[Opensim-dev] Direction of Opensim and its relationship with viewers

[Mircea Kitsune]

@ Frank Nichols: Hypergrid is an example of the improvements Opensim has over the Linden servers, which IMO are very welcome and great. It doesn't interfere with clients and anyone can use it. Again, the only changes I'd fear are those that would introduce incompatibilities with the viewers used commonly by people. So far none of the things that happened in Opensim were such so it's good.

I'll use my example of prim draw types again: Let's consider that a special viewer adds a new shape called "spiral", allowing primitives to have the shape of a spring. If Opensim was to recognize and store the "spiral" type, people with this viewer would be able to use it in-world for building. However, people without this viewer would see either a box or nothing rendering, because they don't recognize the "spiral" prim shape. In this circumstance, OS can either support it at the cost of broken visuals for some viewers, or follow what I called "the SL limitations". Obviously it would be nice if a way to get around such things existed.

@ Dahlia Trimble: Using Opensim to make a MMO grid would be nice and perfectly fine. But IMO it should be done using server features that work with any program connecting. For example, NPC support is possible because the server can simulate bots as normal avatars without the clients even "knowing", so no per-viewer changes are needed nor does anyone have problems interacting with them based on their viewer. BTW: NPC support is something I'm waiting to see getting better and more frequently used, it would be awesome to interact with them on various sims and occasions.

As for a client protocol other than Linden's, I would worry it could add more than necessary. But if it's a flexible protocol and doesn't require Opensim to manually support multiple specific programs, I don't consider it a bad thing. Guess sometimes I'm too worried about everything being perfect and in place, so I give more attention to things like this and how they could affect the future.

From: j.frank.nichols at gmail.com
Date: Sat, 9 Nov 2013 20:56:45 -0500
To: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
Subject: Re: [Opensim-dev] Direction of Opensim and its relationship with	viewers

Well,
 I for one hope you are wrong, and that the core dev’s never place any 
limit on the direction that OS can go. SL is OLD technology, there are 
many new ideas coming out everyday. One of the advantages of having an 
open source implimentataion is that if the implimentation is designed 
correctly it can be extended into directions that SL would never be able
 to follow - for example Hypergrid.
Frank
Date: Sat, 9 Nov 2013 18:04:12 -0800
From: dahliatrimble at gmail.com
To: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
Subject: Re: [Opensim-dev] Direction of Opensim and its relationship with	viewers

So are you saying if someone wanted to use OpenSimulator as a server for
 a MMO-like game and they used a custom client with a custom protocol 
that was not compatable with SL viewers, it should not be allowed? Given that it's open source and MIT licensed, it's highly unlikely anything could be done to stop such from happening.

That wiki page is incomplete in that it does not mention IClientAPI, which is the interface in OpenSimulator *specifically designed for implementing new protocols* and is what the LL protocol uses to interface with the simulation. 



 		 	   		  
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