Objects, updates, and iterators

Today was the day of object updates. That is, writing the object updates.

The initial implementation is going to be very simple: an array of objects indexed by local id, and a queue of "local updates" with the members pointing towards which objects need to be updated. When the object gets updated, its reference moves to the end of this queue. Each agent periodically advances iterator on this queue as it sees fit, and sucks in the updates.

If there's a new connection - then its iterator is placed in the beginning of the queue, hence getting the updates for all the objects within the scene.

Indeed, polling an iterator for each agent seems like a lot of overhead - but I think it is not - what it would allow is the appropriate pacing of updates - slower clients would get the updates less frequently, and those would be more coarse. The faster clients will get the updates more as they come - hence will get smoother updates.

But there's one small detail - for this to work, the iterator implementation needs to be flawless. Which apparently is totally not the case :-)

Looks like I need to sit and write what happens in each specific scenario - otherwise it is a very good recipe to spaghetti code.