[sldev] [META][AWG]log chat of AWG meeting Friday, Oct 5, 2007

[Argent Stonecutter]

On 07-Oct-2007, at 22:34, Lawson English wrote:
> In my case, specifically, I'm talkign about the keywords/functions  
> data for the floater I'm making. This obviously is never going to  
> be published as an asset, but it still should "live" in the client.  
> The issue I ran into that got me so incensed about this whole thing  
> is that the folder class in the client is chained to the asset  
> server. Anything "not an asset" can't be put into a folder. The  
> classes themselves are so chained I can't derive a non-asset folder  
> class from them without rewriting almost the entire class.

That's a fundamental design flaw in the UI library. You don't design  
a system around design flaws that absolutely need to be fixed. The  
Linden UI framework is pretty much worthless, except that it already  
works for OpenGL. Modifying a portable UI framework like Tk to  
include openGL calls in the same structure that already supports X11  
and Win32 and Quartz calls is a better approach.

> This is a trivial example, but what about more interesting ones?
>
> I have perhaps 100 sample scripts in my inventory.

That's the other case. We're agreed, I think, that things that live  
in the asset server should be able to be treated as assets whether  
they're currently in the asset server or not. The solution is to fix  
the client so it can deal with them that way, but that's got nothing  
to do with the system architecture.

> And, in the world wide grid, what about assets that can't be used  
> on one grid, but can be in another, that live in my inventory as  
> "assets" even though they're not assets on the currently accessed  
> grid?

You need assets to be treated by the asset servers as blobs with  
properties anyway, so that when you get a prim with an asset in it  
that the local grid doesn't know how to handle it just sits there and  
gets copied and moved as an opaque object. That's got nothing to do  
with making things like names into assets in the client to work  
around bad design.