Milestone 3

[eggy]

Any thoughts on what should be in Milestone 3?
Here's a few ideas for future features:
- More prims
- Scripting engine in place.
- Object-specific scripts
- Seamless integration of scripting
- Seamless integration of texture edition
Here's how it could work:
- Click on an object, pick properties or contents or something.
- See the name of the texture or script in it.
- Click it to pop up your favorite text or image editor.

More adventurously:
- Streaming, realistic terrain?
- Better avatars?

Hugh, would it be motivating to you to start adding a more realistic terrain feature? The terrain is just a height-mapped mesh, and you seem to be keen on meshes and stuff. A terrain can be defined by as little as two images. A greyscale one for the heightmap and another for the ground texture. I would settle for just the height map as a start

[hughperkins]

Yes, this corresponds pretty closely to my own thoughts on Milestone 3.

The image editing is new, but I dont see why not. I am after all looking at introducing identical technology for scripting )) so why not images too? Good idea.

More prims is on my list. I will probably do this last, to give other people an opportunity to add some first.

Having meshes for avatars is on my list, tentatively, for milestone 3. I say "tentatively" because it's high risk: havent prototyped it yet, but should probably be on there.

For the terrain... ok, you're pushing for this so we should probably handle this. I'm a generics freak myself )) sooo... basically I'd like someone who wants to create a space sim to be able to do so just as easily as someone who wants to create a standing-in-a-field sim So, what I propose is that we create something like a terrain-prim, that you can put wherever you want and customize to your own requirements. What do you reckon?

Note that I might not be able to finish milestone 3 on my own before I break for a bit in two weeks. My personal milestone right now is to get scripting off the ground, though there's no reason why that cant include also in-place texture editing.

Hugh

[eggy]

Sure Az, no rush. I like the terrain as a prim idea. If we can have more than one terrain prim it would let people build caves with one terrain prim for the ceiling and one for the ground.

[hughperkins]

wrt terrains, since these posts, we've implemented terrains but, unless Jack changed the terrain system very much (I'm pretty sure he did improve it some), it kindof sucks for any real practical use.

I think Jack possibly added a feature whereby if you're underneath something marked as being a terrain, you automatically get pushed to be above it. If he didnt, then I think this is a good idea.

Terrains should never be rotated, its pointless, and just makes life complicated.

Terrains should always be the same (large) size. Having small terrains that can change size is not major added-value, and just messes up end-user experience.

There should be a way of defining the edge of the sim, so you cant fall off the edge. Falling off the edge always sucks.

It'd be nice if we could modify the terrain dynamically.

What do you think?

Hugh

[eggy]

This defeats the point of having terrains as a prim, which would allow people to build underground, being able to do caves etc.
Of course, you should probably ignore me since it seems that OSMP is now supposed to be an exact copy of SL and increasingly geared towards the average luser.

[Carnildo]

I think we need multiple types of terrain:
1) Something similar to SL's terrain: a surface that you can't go below, and you can't go off the edge of. Good for land-based sims.
2) A "terrain" prim type, that is simply a heightmapped sheet in 3D space. This can be rotated, scaled, and moved, and avatars (and other objects) can collide from both sides. Good as a general textured surface.
3) Maybe something similar to POV-Ray's heightfields. I'm not sure what this would be useful for.

[eggy]

Being able to rotate a terrain is very useful : In SL there is absolutely no way to edit the terrain mesh in order to make it conform to a specific slope.
In OSMP, you can just rotate the terrain mesh to 30 degrees or 45 or whatever slope you want to have.
I think the best way would be to have a "boundary" attribute that would mark a terrain prim as a boundary terrain, beyond which we can't go.

[hughperkins]

> I think the best way would be to have a "boundary" attribute that would mark a terrain prim as a boundary terrain, beyond which we can't go.

Thats a good idea.

Some other points:
- how do we cope with what happens to the avatar when the world hasnt rezed in yet (ie, including terrain)?

One possibility could be to block anything from going into negative z? Of course, this reduces flexibility as far as space.

Another possibility could be to have a flag to block negative z or not; and another to have gravity or not. Then, if youre in space you have no gravity, and the falling off the world issue doesnt apply. If youre creating a world with terrain, you activate the no-negative z option.

What do you think?

Hugh

[Carnildo]

Avatar positioning should be handled strictly server-side, so it doesn't matter. The server should already have a complete description of the world geometry.

For a world that hasn't yet been built (ie. no geometry yet), defaulting to gravity being off would probably be best.

[hughperkins]

By the way, just to be explicit, Milestone 1.0 comes after Milestone 3.

The reasoning is simple: initially we were just numbering the milestones sequentially: 1,2,3. However, these milestone numbers didnt correspond to actual file release version numbers, which is potentially confusing.

So, milestone 1 was maybe 0.3; milestone 2 was 0.4, milestone 3 was 0.5; something like that; in fact I dont even remember

Milestone 1.0 is using the actual file release version as its own version, which may be temporarily confusing in the short-term, but should hopefully be better in the medium to long-term.

I'm just writing this, because it looks like all the comments are going into the Milestone 3 thread rather than the Milestone 1.0 thread; which is strange since Milestone 1.0 is waaaayyy more important. My recent posting above was just an aside really. The one in this thread I mean.

Hugh

[eggy]

Network effects, hugh. Posts beget posts, people beget people