Vague post is vague… sorry.

I accomplished something today. Something that’s been vexing me for a couple of weeks now. The problem: getting two completely different systems, two “industry standards” that work completely backwards from one another, to work in harmony. At first, it seemed an unobtainable goal. Content creators in Second Life have always chosen one standard, or the other. The systems worked so differently.. how could it be done?

Well I managed it, and not without some effort. In fact, I started by rebuilding someone else’s “one-standard” implementation.. but that soon proved too complex. And as I went on, I realized that the way they had done things, was NOT the way I had to, or wanted to do those same things, because of factors in what I was doing that they didn’t have access to. So yesterday I started over from scratch, building the framework that could make both standards work together.

In the end, it’s done, and the older standard, is working so swiftly it actually outpaces the newer, allegedly “better” standard. Both standards are working beautifully however, and they’re ticking over as fast as their chat messages can be sent and received. My solution still has a few limitations, but all in all, it’s as good a solution as I’ve ever seen for this problem.. and supporting both standards means more people can enjoy my products with more of the toys they already have.

And it all happens inside one little script.

I’ve definitely earned my rest tonight. Tomorrow I finally get to return to moving forward with the project. Totally looking forward to that.

The precise nature of what I did, and why, and what this big project is that I’m working on, will have to wait for another day. Until the project is finished, I can’t say what it’s all about. Just suffice it to say that I overcame a major stumbling block within the last 2 days.. and it’s left me feeling very good about moving forward.

Monday July 12, 2010 - 9:34pm | Filed under: Blog