What was your strategy for dealing with the situation where,
frex, a visitor enters the room and their system/browser crashes
leaving their (orphaned) avatar "stuck" at a remote server?
I'd suggest two methods for getting over this (not mutually
exclusive):
1. Time-and-motion: if the avatar hasn't moved for a
while, its image starts to degrade - either fading or
incrementally losing detail to other observers, ending
up as a wireframe and eventually going;
2. Reverse polling (world server->client) "pings" the
client for continued existence (and presence in the area).
If there's no reply within a timeout period, the client's
avatar degrades much faster (and is allowed to vanish
completely). If the client's s/w disavows an avatar at
that location, the client's avatar is assumed to have
left, incommunicado.
-- jonsg@hyphen.com Hyphen home page: http://www.hyphen.com/ jon@sundome.demon.co.uk And mine: http://www.hyphen.com/html/jonsg/ PGP key available on request Opinions here are mine, not Hyphen's