[sldev] New viewer released with logging of the owners of speaking objects and their location

Dale Glass dale at daleglass.net
Fri Aug 31 05:02:16 PDT 2007


On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 04:31:02AM -0700, John Hurliman wrote:
> Slow isn't so much an issue, but having the viewer rely on a third party 
> website for functionality and having to continually run your bots to 
> update the database are sticky points.
Well, getting something to work was the first priority. Once there's a
proof of concept I can spend the time thinking of a better way of doing
it.

It doesn't rely on my site btw. The viewer just ships with a ~1MB list.


> Funny you mention that, as only a few versions ago (and everything 
> version before) that is exactly what the clients did. If no cache was 
> present on the hard drive they would query for the entire map (both 
> mainland and islands) and store it locally.
The whole map, on every login? I thought the map could be requested in
blocks, and a request for all of it shouldn't happen unless you zoom out
all the way.

My plan is to eventually to always do the lookup, just not show it
unless requested. That way you don't need to always keep it enabled to
avoid the possibility of missing a short lasting event.

> The popular trick floating around #libsl-dev is to use the SL Map API. 
> There is a javascript file that contains X/Y coords -> region name 
> mappings for the entire grid. Convert those to region handles and you 
> have a (mostly) up to date complete database with a single web query to 
> an official SL server with no bot farm needed. Querying for the entire 
> map is a more "in-world" style solution, but I assume they removed the 
> code that queried the entire map for a reason.
Well, libsecondlife can still request the whole map, so the viewer
should be able to as well.

Plan basically is: 

Before releasing a new version, run a little libsecondlife viewer which
logs in, gets the whole map, writes the list to disk and disconnects.
Package that in the distributed viewer.

Viewer will keep the map up to date by updating it from the avatar's
movements around the grid and map usage.

If it happens to find a sim it doesn't know about, then it will do the
full map request. This should be a rare ocurrence.

One problem with this is that the map doesn't show hidden sims, so
that'd trigger a full map request but still not work. This can be
slightly compensated for as the viewer will cache data about sims you
teleport into, so if somebody can teleport there and get the key, they
could then submit it to my DB.


People expressed interest in the feature, so maybe LL could add a
message to lookup the info. Integration into the official viewer would
be a lot more straightforward then.
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