Guides/Platform Development/Components
Sirikata Components
This section gives an in-depth description of the services of the Sirikata system. Each service is broken down into a number of components, each of which are also described in detail. This section should be used as a guide for understanding what component provides each aspect of the high-level services and how these components interact. This is not a code reference, although it will provide some pointers so you can jump from the description of a component to its code.
Sirikata provides the basic services and functionality needed by virtual world applications. Applications tie these services together and build on top of them to provide a unique experience to end users.
Sirikata breaks an entire virtual world system -- including the components executed by end users -- into three high level services: the object hosts, the space, and the content distribution network. These services loosely correspond to computation, communication, and storage, respectively.
To deploy a virtual world application, the application developer will provide a single space service (possibly distributed across many servers) which is, in some sense, the "world." Depending on the application, the provider might also run object hosts, which connect to the space and run objects provided by the world (the scenery and bots in a game, for example), and a CDN to handle storage of large, static data, such as geometry, textures, and prerecorded audio. As described later, clients connect to the world by running an object host locally which, at a minimum, simulates their avatar or camera object.
This high level description leaves out a lot of detail, but gives an idea of what is involved in building and deploying a virtual world using Sirikata. Note that this configuration isn't the only one possible -- for instance, a CDN might not be provided and all resources might either be directly deivered, as in a procedurally defined world, or the provider might not provide a CDN, relying on users to find hosting, for example via web hosting. In this manual we hope to describe the most common deployment, making note of alternatives where appropriate.
With this high level context, the following describes each of these components in a bit more detail, but focuses on each of their external interfaces. For details on the internal architectures of these components, including ways in which they can be customized and extended, see their corresponding architecture pages: