[sldev] Machinima and recording movies/demos in SL

[Kiwi Alfa]

(resubmitted as I accidentally posted from a bad address the first time)

On 1/17/08, Argent Stonecutter <secret.argent at gmail.com> wrote:
> One advantage of doing it outside the client is that you would be
> able to upgrade the client without reapplying all the changes made in
> implementing the proxy.

Fair point - I hadn't thought about that. It would presumably require
the proxy to know the current state of the world at all times, though,
because you need to be able to get a dump when you start recording,
which would require reimplementing state objects, including needing to
know things like prim parameters.

The pointer to SLProxy elsewhere in this thread is a good idea -
thanks, Lawson. :D As far as I know, however, SLProxy is more of a
tool intended for use by other apps to modify the stream. As such,
while it would be invaluable to me (if not to use, then at least to
learn from), the only thing it would be able to do without additional
apps and with the minimum of coding would be to save packet files and
replay them as-is; it has no concept of the contents of the packets. (
http://www.libsecondlife.org/wiki/SLProxy )

If the recorder is implemented as a proxy, and depending on how
SLProxy works, I'd probably be using it as-is with the recorder as an
SLProxy application or plugin, or at least drawing substantially on
its code to start me off.

I can see positive and negative points for each method. Currently,
though, I think that the benefits of implementing it directly in the
client, combined with message liberation, means that it's probably
easier to start off doing it there first. As I said before, though,
I'm not an SLDev guru so if there's any points I'm missing I'd love to
hear about them.

(yeah, yeah, I know, the above implies I would be lazy about updating.
However, I think that in the early stages of development I would want
to get it stable with one version first before moving on, which is why
message liberation is so important. Obviously I'd wait until 1.19.x to
actually start doing anything, at least.)

 - Kiwi.