[sldev] Re: [META] Exciting reuter's post about OpenSim

[John Hurliman]

Argent Stonecutter wrote:
>
>> Not true at all, there are many different ways you could implement a
>> distributed grid architecture that involved storing inventory on the
>> client.
>
> Well, "... storing inventory in a distributed manner...". It has to be 
> stored *somewhere*, and it needs to be stored somewhere that doesn't 
> depend on some random laptop (that you haven't yet realized is sitting 
> at the bottom of your swimming pool, because your wifi is down as 
> well) being online.

You don't need a special concept of an "inventory" to have a grid. For 
appearance, clients are already telling new simulators all 218 of their 
appearance parameters when they enter and giving them the location of 
your baked outfit textures. Having simulators temporarily host your 
baked textures (and implementing some mirorring in case on simulator 
drops offline, and requesting the client to rebake in a worst case 
scenario) would solve the appearance problem. As far as inventory goes, 
just make it files on your hard drive. When I sit down in an Internet 
cafe and fire up a browser I don't have an inventory on hand*, but I'm 
still able to use the web.

"... storing inventory in a distributed manner..." sounds like a nice 
idea, but it is not essential to building a metaverse. It could be 
offered as a third party service instead of built in to the grid code.

* Actually a lot of sites like Google homepage keep persistent settings 
for me, which is the equivalent of keeping some inventory on a single 
simulator.

John Hurliman