hmm... this came up at Zero's office hours a while back. i thought we
said that if we were going to support multiple world geometries and/or
coordinate systems, we should simply use a tensor field to define the
shape of space and be done with it.
but... i totally agree with Q, it will be a very long time before
we'll be able to support arbitrary spacial geometries. the
llGetWorldConstant() would allow scripters to write scripts that could
behave differently on platforms that do support such things. (i.e. -
someone could modify OpenSim to demonstrate the functionality they
would want to see on the SL grid.)
-cheers
-m / ∞
On Nov 1, 2008, at 7:50 AM, Kent Quirk (Q Linden) wrote:
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.
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