Re: [vwrap] Consensus? What exactly should be in the protocol

[Cristina Videira Lopes <[e-mail]>]

I think this is great, and we are on the same page.
But the drafts don't reflect this, and a lot of language in these emails 
also don't reflect this. They are full of intrusions into the 
renderer-server protocol and into the design of the virtual world itself.


David W Levine wrote:
>
> So. I guess I'm deeply confused. The Remit of WRAP, for a lot of 
> reasons is:
> "SecondLife Like" worlds. Which is to say worlds in which there is a 
> server
> from which one gets the state of the virtual simulation. Which is to 
> say that
> a client connects, and says "Please place an avatar here and tell me 
> what's happening
> around here" (which implies a whole bunch of other stuff, but put that 
> to one side for a moment)
>
> The vwrap specs have always marked the client as web endpoint which sends
> requests and gets back responses. There has been some interesting 
> discussion and
> debate about to efficiently keep a client informed about the 
> scenegraph they are
> interested int, but it rather does follow the web model.
>
> "Dear server, I want to know about X"
> "Dear client, here is what's at X"
>
> with the fun of "Oh, and here is what's at X now, and Now, and Now, 
> and Now" because the scenegraph
> is constantly changing. It doesn't tell the client what to do, and 
> we've talked at length about how to
> use content negotation, mime types and such to let the client and the 
> server do web style negotiation about
> what the client wants to see. (and this is very much marked as 
> extensible, exactly as Morgaine's been repeating)
>
> Further, the "Client/Sim" part is, in many ways, the least interesting 
> part of the spec. The ongoing discussion has
> always been that for the time being it just would re-use Linden's 
> basic pipes, not because they were lovely
> but because they worked, there is content, there is a clienbt, there 
> is OpenSim, and it's useful to move forward.
>
> The heavy lifting has always been in the form of "I have a shape X, 
> and a set of parts attached to me" which I want to bring
> with me to "virtual space X" That's only related to the client to the 
> extent that at some point, all the clients connected to
> a region need to share a set of things they can display (with content 
> negotiation mixed in) or the shared experience
> becomes "Woah, John's a dragon? He looks like a blue blob to me"
>
> I think there's a huge amount of "assuming" going on here, and it's 
> frustrating as all get out.
>
> - David
> ~Zha
>
>
> Inactive hide details for Cristina Videira Lopes ---09/22/2010 
> 03:00:13 PM---Cristina Videira Lopes wrote: > You can dictate 
> thCristina Videira Lopes ---09/22/2010 03:00:13 PM---Cristina Videira 
> Lopes wrote: > You can dictate that. But then this will be completely 
> irrelevant in
>
>
> From: 	
> Cristina Videira Lopes <[e-mail]>
>
> To: 	
> [e-mail]
>
> Cc: 	
> David W Levine/Watson/IBM@IBMUS, [e-mail], [e-mail]
>
> Date: 	
> 09/22/2010 03:00 PM
>
> Subject: 	
> Re: [vwrap] Consensus? What exactly should be in the protocol
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> Cristina Videira Lopes wrote:
> > You can dictate that. But then this will be completely irrelevant in a
> > couple of years when WebGL is actually usable or when Google finishes
> > their virtual machine for running safe native code on browsers.
> ...or when server-side streaming goes mainstream, and being in a virtual
> world is as simple as running a video player plus a few
> JavaScript/native back channels to the server.
>
> First point is: according to the Web principles, each web application
> controls 100% what and how the client gets via this really powerful
> concept of hypermedia. It is unlikely that the world is going to adopt a
> standard that forces implementers to take several steps back on this
> kind of autonomy. The diversity is what gives service providers an edge.
>
> The second point is: when we have all that variety of viewer
> implementations that are all equally accepted by the web browser, we are
> still to cope with portability of user agent simulation state between
> those worlds -- and that's the bottom line for interoperability of
> virtual worlds on the Web. I'm interested in this, because it's much
> more foundational than the variety of virtual world implementation 
> options.
>
>
>