I’ve been suffering from analysis paralysis. What I envision for Basil and ultimately the Herbal3D system is a huge project with many components. These days, with the Internet and all the collaborations and projects happening, there are innumerable technologies to choose from. What languages to use? What IDE to use? What messaging library? And on and on and on and on and on. Argh! There are so many to choose from!!

Previous blog posts (Pesto to Python, Cassandra and Docker, Looking for a message bus, Thirft vs ProtoBuff) have all been about analysing various software libraries and packages. The end effect is that nothing has gotten done.

Nothing.

Well, some little experiments and some documentation but really no useful code or results.

The next step is to do something. The best thing to do is the prim baking code and the comparison of display frame rates between a browser based viewer and an Unreal Engine viewer. This experiment will create some of the required basic functionality and verify some of my conjectures about the basic Basil architecture. It will also be visual and will hopefully spark interest and thus build a community of developers.

So, rather than worry about transport and APIs, over the next few days I’ll work on conversion of the OpenSimulator prims and objects into “baked” mesh format and in various mesh file formats. Since an OAR file format contains all the asset descriptions as well as the region placement, and, since it is just a compressed TAR file, I will burst an OAR file and write routines to do the conversions and create new files. For display, I can just move that file structure under an HTTP server.