Second Life Server

[phaedra Exonar]

Found this on the phoenixviewer web page, has some info on the separation of pathfinding and new physics changes, good to know if you want to turn off pathfinding, all so they have the instructions to turn off pathfinding if you wish to do so.

http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/pf_questions

http://www.phoenixviewer.com/

If regions have to be manually optimized, why isn't LL putting this info in the face of every land owner, currently only people who read the server forum or have an interest in pathfinding are like to even know about this.

[Innula Zenovka Recognized Helper]

Speaking as a landowner, I've been aware of this for ages.    That's because tier on sims represents quite a significant outlay and rentals on them represent quite a significant income, so I make a point of keeping up -- via the server forum,  the wiki, knowledge base, blogs like Nalates' and Inara Pey's and discussions in SLU -- with what's going on.

In point of fact, while I've turned off pathfinding as a precautionary measure, until I can make time to optimise stuff, everything I'm being told by people who know far more about it than do I suggests that I'm being over-cautious, in that having it turned on or off isn't going to make any difference unless people start introducing pathfinding objects onto the sim and, even then, in practice I shouldn't notice any ill-effects from not having optimised the sim other than that the pathfinding objects weren't performing as well as they might.

[Ayesha Askham]

I am a little concerned that Tara Undercroft feels that this is not appropriate for the Server Blog, what ever does Pathfinding concern if it does not concern Servers??

I cannot help mumbling to myself about sweeping and carpets.

[Innula Zenovka Recognized Helper]

But I thought that phaedra was complaining that "currently only people who read the server forum or have an interest in pathfinding are like to even know about this."   So isn't moving it to the General Discussion Forum, in order that people who don't normally read the server forum may become aware of it, too, a sensible thing to do?   Or am I misunderstanding something?

[Vladi Hazelnut]

turning off path finding in your region will not effect anything. It won't help with performance issues related to path finding and it won't fix any of the glitches the new code has introduced. The only thing it does is disable the ability to use pathfinding characters on your region.

And from what I can gather the pathfinding code should not effect your sim performance anyway, unless you are using it. The only reason to optimize your sim for path finding would be if you were actually running path finding characters on your sim. Then you would want to optimize how they interact with the land and prims they are moving around.

Pathfinding completey fubared our race race cars and drag strip. So I have been playing to see what effects it really has on the sim and stuff on it. Turning off path finding did nothing, nada, no difference. Sim performance was the same and everything that was broke is still broke. Optimizing it via the bulk setting also did nothing. Ok it did do something, it broke every vehicle that was currently out because I set it to static object instead of movable. But either way it didn't change sim performance, even by a .01 MS. And manually going trhough and trying optimize it didn't do anything either.

Then again we are not running any path finding characters on our sim.

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

It is my understanding that turning off Pathfinding will not make a blind bit of difference to the problems many are experiencing. Pathfinding required an upgrade to the Havok 7 physics engine, and that upgrade breaks a lot of existing content. Some of us may be lucky. Some of us will not be.

&Unfortunately, from what I've seen of the trial on the Magnum RC, Pathfinding has only been tested for fish.

[phaedra Exonar]

I originally posted the link because I thought they might answer some of the questions people were asking in the server forum, I added that comment at the end, because once again many of the answers that people need are there, but not easy to find. Now that the post has been moved it shows in both places which works out better.

I've been testing path finding scripts for months now, but I only own a small parcel of land on the main land, so wasn't able to opting in to enable path finding on my land early.  Some one with a full sim has a lot more options for dealing with path finding.  For some one on a sim with out a single region owner theres no option to turn it off so optimizing is our best option. 

The sim I'm in has 2 other land owners, one of them is LL.  Each owner will need to optimize their part of region.  Small land owners are the ones to must likely not be aware of all the changes, it seams to me that the the path finding info should have been made more visible for every one.  Especially since the default setting for objects is the least efficient from my understanding. 

[Innula Zenovka Recognized Helper]

Heavens above.. now we're back on the Server forum!

This is getting silly.

I don't know that the default setting for scripted objects -- moveable obstacle -- is the least efficient.  It's certainly the safest, since if you set something that actually needs to move -- a door, for example -- to static obstacle, then it can't be moved by script (and it throws an error if the script tries to).

[Ayesha Askham]

Innula

It may be my comment that brought the thread back to the server forum.  I did think that since Pathfinding is a server issue folks would look for a server blog...it seemed logical to me.  But there's a real mess out there in SL and a lot of folk are yelling about bandwidth.

I have noticed that on sims where there is little or no "spare time" that the sim tries to send the data over a hugely inflated bandwidth (up to 4Mbps) which is way beyond SL's own servers' capacity.  Now this needs some attention because folk are upping their own bandwidth to try to help and it does no such thing.

The problem does not occur if the sim has a few ms of spare time.  I think LL knew about this and simply warned sim owners that this might be a problem.  Whether they expected to see this bandwidth issue I do not know.

Coupled with the issue over traffic calculation (SVC-8099) I think there is a real thunderhead of resentment building.  The sky may not be falling but it sure looks like rain!

[Innula Zenovka Recognized Helper]

What's the bandwidth issue?  This one's new on me.  

My understanding of pathfinding and updates -- gained mostly from Nalates, who's been following it very closely -- is that the way pathfinding's set up, if updates to the NavMesh are going to have a bad effect on region performance, they wait until the region's less busy,  so pathfinding objects may start behaving strangely but other things shouldn't.   

As an addition to the resources phaedra posted, I'd add this Pathfinding Overview by Inara Pey, Nalates' discussion of Second Life Pathfinding Performance (linked to above) and Lorca Linden's detailed comment on Nalates' article (in which I'm delighted to see he says they're going to update the information in the wiki, which has left me utterly confused as it stands).   

I agree about traffic calculation, which is a nightmare, but that can't be to do with pathfinding, surely?