[Opensim-users] looking for full viewer-server API and communication details.

[Ethan Gardener]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2019, at 7:40 PM, Adam Frisby wrote:
> The first was the packet acknowledgement system, it relies on a lot of 
> arcane timing for it to work correctly, 

I think this explains well over half the bugs I've ever seen in Second Life, OpenSim, and InWorldz altogether!  I always knew there was some timing-related nonsense where there shouldn't be.  ... "Nonsense" is me being polite; there's so much broken behaviour which so obviously depends on crazy timing when there is no need for crazy timing that it makes me angry!

> That said, if you're really serious about redeveloping the protocol - 
> tweaking this one is not a good idea. There's a lot of good free options 
> - RakNet is now free and open source, for example, and is behind a *lot* 
> of games and MMOs. 

I'd *love* a viewer for OpenSim with a completely new protocol.  I've been sure it would be a good idea for... oh... 10-12 years, but my health has never been good enough to start.  My health has recently improved, but I'm only now at the point where I can start learning, so I've got nothing of value to offer yet.

> Netcode is hard. Flee in terror.

All code is hard, :) but yeah, networking programming is one of the (many) things which requires whole new ways of thinking.

I recently learned of Spin and its language, Promela.  "Spin is a tool for analyzing the logical consistency of concurrent systems, specifically of data communication protocols."  More info here:
http://spinroot.com/spin/Man/Manual.html
Home page:
http://spinroot.com/spin/whatispin.html
I'd use it if I was working on something as big as virtual world client-server protocol.