I recall these discussions years ago on the SL forums back when nobody who could actually foment change read them, so this seems old news to me.
SL tries to be completely stateless. In an ideal world the client would never cache anything and the whole world would be streamed constantly from central command. Actually this sounds like the new "play any 3D video games from a streaming server" idea I hear being thrown around. It's very bandwidth intensive, and SL seems to be holding out for a future when everyone has 100 megabit to the home. If you want a world you can load up from a cache and then only get updates for changes, the stateless design principle is going to have to change to something more transactional. This might be too fundamental of a change for the current design to deal with. Per-prim transaction tracking is probably way too intensive. But break the sim up into 8x8 meter chunks (no height limit), and timestamp any prim changes within each chunk, and now you've got a fast, practical cache method that doesn't get overly granular. Client says: I have these cached chunks of the current sim, and I have these timestamps for each chunk. Sim says: Here is a list of chunks have changed since your last vist. All others are unchanged. Client loads the unchanged cached chunks from disk. Sim only sends prim data for the changed chunks. The lurking problem that is not going to go away and can not be solved is the intellectual property issues. A cache of the world can be ripped. But hey, a stream of the world using the existing methods can be ripped too. So might as well make caching fast and reliable regardless of the fact that it is rippable, because the current stateless stream method offers no better content protection anyway. Not improving caching for the sake of trying to prevent content ripping is basically an invalid premise. - Dale Mahalko / Scalar Tardis _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
