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

Argent Stonecutter secret.argent at gmail.com
Tue Sep 18 11:05:30 PDT 2007


On 18-Sep-2007, at 12:22, Ryan Williams (Which) wrote:
> Argent Stonecutter wrote:
>> From: "Tao Takashi" <tao.takashi at googlemail.com>
>>> I am not sure it will. I think the mesh and all the things an  
>>> avatar is made up of will be transferred to the region for  
>>> simulating it.

>> The region doesn't simulate an avatar. All it does is deliver the  
>> textures and appearance parameters to the client. The avatar mesh  
>> is in the client.

> It also calculates the collisions between avatars and the rest of  
> the world, and runs the scripts in attachments, and makes the  
> decision of when to deliver the representation to other agents,  
> which is a non-trivial calculation.  Maybe you meant something  
> else, but the simulator definitely does more than just act as a bit  
> pipe for avatars.

What I mean is that as far as the sim is concerned, the avatar is a  
box. Apart from the overall size, the avatar shape takes no part in  
the physical simulation of the avatar, and the sim doesn't take the  
mesh and other visual characteristics of the actual avatar into  
account when dealing with it. Even scripted attachments don't involve  
the sim having to know anything about the mesh or avatar settings...  
all attachments are considered to be in the same place as far as the  
sim goes. I don't know if that place is the exact center of the  
bounding box, but it's not far off it, and the actual prims in the  
attachments are all phantom and don't interact in collisions either.

I don't mean that the sim is a pipe, I mean that the sim is not where  
the actual simulation of the visible attributes of the avatar takes  
place. An avatar is not QUITE the same as a box prim in the same  
location (avatars can't fall over, for example, or rotate), but it's  
certainly not true that the mesh is ever transferred to the  
simulator, and most of the other characteristics of the avatar itself  
(other than attachments) don't need to be known by the sim as  
anything but a UUID (and I suppose an architecture where the client  
accessed assets like clothes, skins, and hair (as well as their  
associated textures) through another path would be quite possible).



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