[sldev] [ARCH] Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's

[Jason Giglio]

Mike Monkowski wrote:
> I've read the transcript and looked at the slides of teh Architecture 
> group, and I'd like to suggest an alternate partioning of the tasks.
> 
> I'm not sure what the Hosts are in the diagrams, but my interpretation 
> is that they are temporary instances, "virtual" virtual worlds.  The 
> information about an avatar is kept in the Stores, and when that avatar 
> logs on, an instance of the avatar is created on an Avatar Host.  The 
> information about a region is kept in the Stores, and when someone 
> visits it, an instance is created on a Region Host.
> 

That's not necessary or even implied.  It could be implemented that way, 
but it's likely irrelevant from the architectural standpoint, as long as 
  the agent domain isn't making bad assumptions about a region being on 
a particular host.

> It's not clear from the charts exactly what is in an Avatar Host, so let 
> me suggest that first it should contain an instance of the avatar mesh. 
>  We don't want to live with just two meshes forever, and we don't want 
> to have to store a universe of avatar meshes locally with the viewer. 
> Second, it should contain instances of all of the avatar's attachments, 
> including their positions relative to the avatar.  And third, it should 
> contain any objects temporarily rezzed by the avatar from his/her 
> inventory.

We didn't discuss anything called an avatar host.  I'll assume you mean 
a host inside of the agent domain.  Again, these are implementation 
details it seems, probably irrelevant to arch.

> 
> An avatar's inventory and all processing of the inventory would be 
> handled by the Avatar Stores.

For the most part, assuming you mean "agent domain".  The region would 
have to be handed inventory at some point (like when it was rezzed).

> A region host would contain instances of all objects owned by the 
> region, but the ownership would be handled by the Region Stores.

I'm not sure what you mean there.  Regions don't own objects.

> 
> The diagrams don't consider multiple viewers attached to a Region Host, 
> but let's consider how viewers get information about other avatars.  In 
> the current SL architecture, all the information about all of the 
> avatars is on the sim (region host) and all connections are through the 
> sim.  When an avatar moves across regions, his information is handed off 
> from sim to sim.  And because of this, we are limited to about a hundred 
> avatars per sim.

That's a non-sequitur. It's because of a lot of reasons, but the design 
you describe is really not one of them.


> So the new architecture has Avatar Hosts to keep track of the avatar 
> information, and viewers get information from the Avatar Hosts.  So if 
> my avatar is in the Region and your avatar is in the Region, we both get 
> information from the Region Host and we share information from our 
> respective Avatar Hosts.  And if we would like to be able to see across 
> regions, we need to contact all of those other Avatar Hosts.  That's a 
> lot of very dispersed connections.

The viewers are also talking directly to region domain hosts.  There's 
no reason the child agent paradigm we have now can't continue to work.


I'm going to ignore the rest of your message, because I think your 
underlying assumptions and understandings were pretty flawed.  Lets get 
those sorted out before we get too far ahead of things.

-Jason