[opensource-dev] What is the license status of UI sounds ?
Henri Beauchamp
sldev at free.fr
Fri Nov 5 13:50:53 PDT 2010
Greetings,
As many of you probably know or noticed, the viewer UI sounds are currently
sound assets that the viewer must retrieve from the asset server and then
decode into a temporary *.dsf file before being able to use them.
This poses a number of issues:
- There is a significant delay between the time the viewer is started and the
time when the asset gets preloaded in the VFS cache: this time is the minimum
delay before an UI sound can be used after the viewer is connected when it
was not kept in the saved VFS after the last session (which often happens when
the VFS gets shrunk down).
- Even once in the VFS, there is a delay between the time an UI event is
triggered for the first time in the session, and the time when the
corresponding UI sound is played: this delay corresponds to the decode time
(the time needed to extract and decode the data from the VFS, and to write it
down as a *.dsf file in the disk cache).
- Should the asset server be too busy, the sound may fail to get retreived and
the corresponding UI event will not have a sound for the full viewer session.
- When running two viewer sessions and you close one viewer, the decoded *.dsf
files get erased, and the UI sounds stop playing in the remaining session
(this bug is however fixed in some TPVs, among which the Cool VL Viewer).
- The UI sounds cannot be played before the viewer is connected to the grid.
- While the UI is constant from one grid to another (either in SL or OpenSim),
the UI sounds are not (OpenSim sounds are especially lame, IMO), and since
they however share the same UUID, when switching back to another grid, you
may get a mix of the two grids UI sounds (depending on what sounds were
kept in the saved VFS cache).
- The UI sounds get stored many times: once in the live VFS (in RAM), once in
the saved VFS (most of the times) on the hard disk, once as a decoded sound
file (*.dsf), still on the hard disk, once as a buffered decoded data (in
RAM, after the sound has been played once)... Lame (two storage spaces: on
disk and in RAM should be more than enough for such sounds) !
These issues could easily be solved (I got a patch ready), provided the UI
sounds could be distributed as part of the default skin (for example in
/skins/default/sounds)...
To do this however, we'd need to know what is the license status of the UI
sounds: does LL allow TPV developpers to distribute them (under the Artistic
License, for example, like for the UI artwork), and if yes under which
License ?
Thanks in advance.
Henri.
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