[sldev] Sim Size Limits?

[Kent Quirk (Q Linden)]

There are things that are worth abstracting, and things that aren't.  
Writing a function that returns pi in case its value changes someday  
is the extreme example. This isn't quite in that category, but it's  
closer to that than to, say, the gravitational acceleration.

Here's my real objection -- you're asking for adding a special-purpose  
function to the LSL namespace that returns one value that's unlikely  
to change. Granted, on other platforms like OpenSim, it may well  
change (although as Doug said, it's also baked into our protocols, so  
it's not quite so easily changed as one might think). Designing for  
every future possibility has a name -- overdesign -- and it can be the  
death of projects as people try to keep up with all the things they  
thought they might need someday.

With that said, though, I think there could be a reasonable middle  
ground: something like llGetWorldConstant(int identifier) where you  
can look up values of certain world constants, like gravity, direction  
of gravity, size of sim, coordinate of the center of the sim, and so  
forth. We'd want to define a namespace for the constants -- similar to  
the way OpenGL has GL constants -- so that developers of compatible  
platforms could have their own specific constants, there could be  
standard values implemented by all, and a place for proposed future  
standards.

I would be prepared to support a well-developed proposal for such a  
function (provided it also included a proposal for how to manage the  
namespace of constants). I still don't think I'd support a specific  
function for this particular issue.

	Q

On Oct 31, 2008, at 8:15 AM, Argent Stonecutter wrote:

> Likely or not, a routine that simply returns the vector  
> "<256,256,4096>" right now seems to be a cheap way of making it  
> possible for you to change your mind in the future.
>