Bi-Weekly Scripting Meeting 18th August 2022 @ 1700 UTC

[AdamFrisby]

Hi all -

Good meeting this week, talked about a number of scripting topics, and a small demo.

Follow-up: Minimal scripting subset meeting
On the previous call it was agreed that Rob & Adam would work together on a simple Lua scripting subset to work on some interop demos using a WASM compiled Lua runtime. This was scheduled for August 30th at 9:30am PST - anyone who wants to join is free to do so.

Minimal Scripting v. "Maximal" Scripting - A long discussion touching on a number of points about whether script scope should be local, or global. I.E. should a script be able to 'view' the entire scenegraph, or only the model around it, with some kind of querying API.

Discussion touched on a number of points including:

• Memory use and implications of viewing the entire scenegraph
• Spatial partitioning: scaling the servers by spatial partitioning, and how this impacts the scenegraph visible to the scripts
• ECS-style performance impacts
• Built-in components for common functionalities vs scripted components; the performance impacts of each.
• The optimistically of scripts vs. built-in components (e.g. custom animator scripts; do you want to touch every bone, every frame?)
• Polling the scene: event based, cursor based, or just return everything.
• Events: what happens if there's 10,000+ returned objects in the area, how does the script handle that?

Rob spoke a bit about the event model used by Mozilla Hubs and how that turned into event spaghetti. Discussion of physics, and using the physics system as a way of querying the world - whether all platforms would support physics, and how multi-scene impacts.

Adam - demo'd the second part of the demo last week - showing import of the scenegraph into the client, as well as some reference code Sine Wave plans to release in the near future. This led into a side discussion about other areas of interop between SWE and Matrix's work in this space - and the potential for some overlap on web clients, regionservers/SFUs, and presence/IM infrastructure.

For the developer hour next week, Rob agreed to setup a Discord Role, and setup the bot for calendar reminders.