[sldev] Puppettering Branch

[Jake Simpson]

Some of you may have noticed there's a new build package on S3 named 
"Puppeteering". The link to it is here - 
http://svn.secondlife.com/svn/linden/branches/Puppeteering080323/. 
(asset urls is 
http://svn.secondlife.com/svn/linden/branches/Puppeteering080323/doc/asset_urls.txt)

I wanted to give you some background on what it is, why it's there and 
what it can do.

Puppeteering is a project that we had going last year that we dropped in 
order to focus on stability issues. Note, at the time this was a pretty 
contentious move, some internal people were fairly upset about it (one 
even quit over it) but it was deemed necessary for focus on stability to 
be the main issue. Also, using a mouse to actually generate animation is 
less instinctual than we had originally imagined and that was another 
nail in the coffin.

The basic idea of the project was to enable real time animation of the 
avatar, via mouse so that you can animate on the fly and other people 
can see you doing it. Therefore there is (obviously) some simulator side 
code that's not being released and which is not in our current simulator 
releases, nor is there much intent to really make it so. However, the 
client side code works fine without the simulator data passing code - 
it's just that no one else logged in can see you when you do the 
puppeteering animation.

Now we recently resurrected this code and have distributed it to various 
partners who have items in the works that might well end up using this 
code - basically we've given it to them, said "see if you can make 
something compelling with it, and if you can, we may reconsider 
finishing up the simulator code and pushing it through".

Anyway, to cut a long story short we (myself and Robla) thought about it 
and said "Well, if they can't, maybe the SLDev crew can do something 
with this" and with that we decided to publish the code to you guys.

The code itself is somewhat complete - there are definitely some things 
we would do differently and there are still definitely bugs in there, 
but right now it's pretty unlikely that we will return to this to 
complete it or refactor that which we would want to change with the code 
and intent as it stands.

So, this is unsupported code, lets be clear, but it's out there and if 
you guys can do cool things with it then we would definitely love to see 
it.  It's based off 1.19.1 by the way, and we do actually have a region 
on aditi that is running the simulator code (note, again, this code is 
relatively incomplete and the simulator could well crash) named 
Puppeteering (You may well need to log directly into it by they way).

Enjoy.

Jake Simpson