[Opensim-dev] Unreal viewer: summoning the coders

[Rob Lindman]

I am well aware of how these things work, or in this case, fail 
miserably. The interface is simply not intuitive. The implementation is 
sloppy, frustrating, and half-assed. 6 out of 10 times when I want to 
set up a new grid on a viewer there is some form of hassle involved, 
whether it's on localhost or in the cloud.

Having to restart the viewer to reload the configuration when something 
goes wrong here is a time loop from hell. I have a moderate to 
considerable level of experience with technology, and this is idiotic. 
No one that doesn't have a serious reason to will go to this level of 
effort in order to browse 3d content.

And yes, sometimes you might want to modify an entry. In the case of 
local loopback, with DHCP, I get a different IP address sometimes... So 
I have to open a firestorm file, among other things, to modify the 
entry. How about a reload button? Because once I put that URL in and try 
to apply a new grid, if it doesn't go through cleanly, I am restarting 
Firestorm. Sometimes I get the wonderful Not Responding. HOW GREAT THIS 
IS. Ever accidentally put a trailing / on there? This aspect, which is 
the FRONT DOOR to the entire 'metaverse', is an enormous fail.

Whoever came up with the gridinfo component simply didn't think. How 
about an ICON or a THUMBNAIL of the grid you want to connect to, so 
perhaps there would be a graphical way of looking at a directory of 
grids?

No, we're going to put in a crummy text file with no file extension, 
XMLRPC 'helpers' and no real detail about the grid, and "we're" going to 
pretend that it's all done, nice and tidy, and move on to ruining 
something else by ripping out the entire protocol? While you're at it, 
let's restructure all of the INI files AGAIN so that migrating to the 
new version is a complete hassle. A 10 year development cycle and this 
product hasn't even reached a 1.0 version yet. QUIT IT.

The solution is to make the dialog intuitive, add some form of debug 
component to track down issues, perhaps some knobs for timeouts -- and 
not to reinvent the wheel of the protocols. Reinvent things once the 
original things actually work.

If we are reinventing the wheel of protocols, it's time to set OpenSim 
on fire, acknowledge it for the failure it is, and switch over to using 
A-Frame, Three.JS, Node, and an entirely different stack. I have already 
written one of those. So have others...

There are good reasons for leveraging the existing infrastructure.

Perhaps the methodology of OpenSim is never to finish, but simply to 
fail, break everything, and start over again? If abandoning the current 
infrastructure is on the road map, then please, let me know, because I 
do not want to wait another decade for a basic working solution to what 
I'm pretty sure is an attainable goal -- a working 'metaverse' built on 
the existing infrastructure -- and I'll happily continue in my 
estimation that OpenSim development is insane and will never fulfill 
such a basic requirement. It would be a relief.

As for x-grid-info, I haven't seen anything with regard to this 
implementation. If it's a proposal and it ultimately fixes the issues I 
am bringing up here, bring it on. It could be a quasi-solution. However, 
at the present time all I can see is that it is a ridiculous, 
failure-prone hassle to add grids to the viewer, and a ridiculous, 
failure prone hassle to set them up on the server, and from the 
perspective of the end user, it's not going to be worth the frustration. 
Even when I'm paid to deal with this sort of thing it's not worth it.

Anyway, I know this won't amount to anything. But seriously, I was here 
on day one, a decade has gone by, and this is the FRONT DOOR, and it 
does not work properly. And you want to redo the plumbing. No.


On 2018-12-20 10:28, Cinder Roxley wrote:
> On December 20, 2018 at 8:32:52 AM, Rob Lindman (rob at roblindman.net) 
> wrote:
> 
> If people are working on these viewers, especially on matters of URI
> handling... it would be nice if there was one (1) ONE with a decent
> gridinfo configuration panel. (Preferences -> Opensim -> Made Of Fail)
> 
> When attempting to add a test grid... It is exceptionally annoying if
> there is some difficulty in adding a new grid. You cannot manually edit
> the individual line items for grids in order to adjust the different
> pages.
> 
> These are constant parameters provided by the grid. They aren’t 
> settings an
> enduser should need to adjust.
> 
> It frequently takes a while to fail if there is some difficulty
> reaching the /gridinfo file. I wind up with redundant 'lost continent 
> of
> hippo' entries. I was trying to figure out what was going on testing on
> 127.0.0.1 (which for some reason fails 'despite our best efforts'.)
> 
> This is how TCP is designed. You’ll get the same behavior from cURL. 
> The
> timeout is prolonged because there are people running grids on 
> extremely
> latent DSL connections and the timeout period needs to be that long to
> connect. I have encountered regions connected to OSGrid that take 
> nearly
> two minutes to establish a connection to.
> 
> The /gridinfo URI itself is also ridiculous. Check for /gridinfo.xml or
> something... I wanted 'mydomain.com' to be all a user had to put into
> this panel in order for it to work, instead of mydomain.com:9000 ... 
> And
> so, hey, I am running apache, might as well just put a file up there
> called /gridinfo, that way I can omit the port number while fulfilling
> the /gridinfo requirements... While it was 'fun' to mess around with
> mod-rewrite... this whole process shows that the OpenSim / TPV 
> community
> didn't put much thought into MAKING IT EASY for people to get on grids.
> 
> OpenSimulator hasn’t registered any port numbers in the Service Name 
> and
> Transport Protocol Port Number Registry. Since grid info is served via
> http, it is standard to assume port 80. True, most grids host gridinfo 
> on
> 8002 (already reserved for Teradata ORDBMS) or 9000 (reserved for
> CSListener and php-fpm’s default port) but there’s nothing stating they 
> are
> the standard port.
> 
> I ultimately had to open the Firestorm user grids xml file and add one
> in manually to access the opensim running on my local system. That's
> ridiculous. A typical end user is not going to want to go through that.
> I am an opensim / second life enthusiast and this hassle was enough for
> me to set the computer on fire. There is no easy way to debug what is
> happening here.
> 
> This is a DNS resolution issue with Firestorm. Nobody has ever bothered
> reporting it to Firestorm, so they don’t even know it exists.
> 
> If I had to go through all this trouble every time I wanted to connect
> to A WEBSITE then I am sorry to say I would simply become Amish and
> start milking goats.
> 
> You’ll get a lot of the same issues trying to set apache+php up on
> localhost and connecting via loopback if you have no experience or
> documentation to help you.
> 
> A replacement for LLUDP isn't needed.
> 
> Disagree. LLUDP has many limitations which are mistakenly blamed as 
> viewer
> limitations. Not to mention, UDP being the chief reason firewalled 
> clients
> can’t connect. The protocol needs changed or at least DEFINED in order 
> for
> client and server to communicate.
> 
> What's needed is for people to
> actually think about what they are doing. Try out the software under
> different conditions and wonder if a person new to this environment
> would REALLY want to contend with the seriously annoying issues that 
> are
> basically in the way of anyone adopting OpenSim.
> 
> As far as your example, that’s one of the reasons I created the
> x-grid-info:// scheme (and why ArminW created hop:// though it’s
> specification morphed) When x-grid-info:// is properly supported, one 
> need
> only to click a hyperlink in a web browser to add a grid to the viewer.
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---
Rob Lindman
Software Developer
https://roblindman.net/
316-361-6913