[vos-d] status and scheming

[Ken Taylor]

Peter Amstutz wrote:
>I'm pretty far from deciding at all how this would work, but it is
>certain that we need a time parameter for animation, so it is worth
>exploring fully the potential benefit of introducing a deep concept of
>(relative!) time into VOS.

Interesting.... though there is a fundamental difference between the time
parameter of an animation (which is relative to a "start" time, and most
likely will loop), and the time parameter of a versioning system timestamp
(which is absolute time, and hopefully doesn't loop!). However, I do see the
interesting analog between "frames" of an animation and "versions" of any
other object. I would just be careful not to over-generalize (sometimes OOP
has that effect on people :) ).... A 5-dimensional programming model may be
taking it too far :P

Some other interesting (but more mundane) thoughts: how this server-side
clock would interact with server-side physics simulations (with client
prediction supported), or how to implement powerful but intuitive time-aware
scripting.

Caveat: I haven't read Lalo's time-awareness braindump post yet. It's past
my bedtime :)

Double-caveat: I still haven't dug in and figured out how the current
implementation of VOS-as-a-3d-virtual-world-server really works yet. Maybe I
should go and do that before blabbing and speculating too much on this list
:P

-Ken