[sldev] Machinima and recording movies/demos in SL

[Kiwi Alfa]

On 1/17/08, Mike Monkowski <monkowsk at watson.ibm.com> wrote:
> One other thing to consider is that in order to get information from the
> server, you have to be logged on, and if you're logged on, you'll also
> get messages about what's happening currently: avatars moving around,
> objects responding to scripts being run, etc.  Somehow you have to
> distinguish between live events and recorded events.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it seems to me there'd be no
problem with that; remember that to play back the recorded files you
would be using a completely different server, which would be supplied;
you wouldn't connect to Linden Lab's servers at all.

> And then, there's packet loss. :-)

Well, that's always going to happen, even in he way machinima is
recorded today. Only events that are actually received would be
recorded, though, not the complete conversation, so there'd probably
be just a delay in the recording until the events started to be
received again.

> Nevertheless, I encourage you to try it.  I think it would be great for
> machinima.  Oh, while you're at it, can you add a feature to scrape the
> timeline? :-)

At first I was going to just concentrate on doing commands for play,
pause (which itself will be an interesting challenge - what do you do
with physical objects that are paused, for instance?), and seek to the
beginning (reset), which I suspect will be accomplished at first by a
forced 'teleport' in such a manner that the client forgets everything
so that the server can replay the initial setup.

I was planning to see if I could build in a fast-forward feature
later, which should, I think, be straightforward enough (although
there's the problem with physical objects again). Rewind will be more
difficult as it essentially involves sending commands that do the
opposite of what was recorded, and will require either stateful
knowledge of the world or the ability to look up information in prior
events on-the-fly - for example, if a prim is deleted in the recorded
scene, to rewind you'd need to create a prim instead, with whatever
prim parameters and textures were in force at the time it was deleted
(which aren't necessarily the same as they were when the prim was
created - and by 'created', I mean 'first appeared in the recorded
archive').

Once fast-forward and rewind were both implemented, scraping would be
easier as the necessary events could just be piled on top of each
other, although I suspect that for the sake of sanity, some events
that don't affect anything permanently, like sound events, would
probably be excluded from being sent while scraping. ;)

Thanks for the encouragement!

 - Kiwi.