Do bow and sword drawing and shot animations cause lag?

[agentronin]

In the gorean combat bow and sword weapons I am becoming familiar with there are options to play weapon drawing and sheathing animations. If these options are in effect will they cause an additional lag between the draw command issuance and the weapons availability to strike or shoot?

Does an enabled bow and arrow shooting animation cause lag between trigger and shot?

[Rhonda Huntress]

That would really depend on how the creator scripted the devices.  There is no way for us to know what is happening.  You could ask the creator or other people who use the same system in world.

[ChinRey]

As Rhonda said, it depends a bit on how well the script is written but in any case there is a delay from you click on the fire button until the message reaches the server. That delay can be anything from 0.1 to 0.5 seconds depending on how far away from the server you live and how good your connection is - long enough that any delay casued byt he script should be trivial by comparasion.

[Nalates Urriah]

On 5/8/2017 at 7:47 AM, agentronin Resident said:

In the gorean combat bow and sword weapons I am becoming familiar with there are options to play weapon drawing and sheathing animations. If these options are in effect will they cause an additional lag between the draw command issuance and the weapons availability to strike or shoot?

Does an enabled bow and arrow shooting animation cause lag between trigger and shot?

The animations are a minor problem. Once triggered the animation ID is sent to everyone. Their viewers request the animation from the asset servers and cache the animation files. The actual region server has little work to do. You can actually see how much work you are creating for the server by pressing Ctrl-Shift-Alt-U (Show Updates to Objects). 

After that, playing the animation places very little load on the region server. It sends a few bytes of information telling other players you are starting an animation. That is the end of the server's participation. After that it is up to the individual viewers. So, while there is some client side load it isn't an issue on a medium level computer. If you are trying to run on a Pentium CPU, it could be significant. But, the iCore CPU's should handle it easily.

More costly and lag producing is the script in the weapon. Knowing how many scripts are in it and how much memory they actually use is the criteria for deciding how laggy they are. See Those Scripts You Wear, Which Are Pesky? for information on how to see what is inside the weapon.

I suspect if you check with animations enabled and disabled, you'll find the same number of scripts. Things in SL do NOT delete scripts that will later be needed as there is no easy way to add them back. It is easier to leave them.

If you are concerned about the milliseconds from your key press/mouse click, animation start, and the firing of the weapon, that is harder to answer. Some script functions wait for a task to complete before moving on. Starting an animation via script is async, it doesn't wait. Your key press/click is sent to the server to start the script execution response. Your viewer does not wait for a server response and can send additional key presses and clicks.

You can use the Fast Timers to see what the viewer is actually doing (Ctrl-Shift-9 or Develop->Consoles->Fast Timers). It gets way techy.

The absolute most laggy factor of weapons is their rezing projectiles. Bows the rez and fire arrows cause lag. Not as bad as automatic weapons that rez bullets.

Drawing weapons does generally not rez anything. If you press Ctrl-Alt-T, you can see the weapon sheathed and drawn. When drawing the weapon the change is only in the items 'transparency'. 

For combat the only lag you need to worry about is your viewer's FPS and ping time to the simulator. If you lag the server, you lag everyone. The playing field remains level. There are, I'll call them cheats, that allow a player to slow/lag opponents without suffering the same delay. If you find a player that is incredibly fast... you are dead before you know what happened... repeatedly... and others have the same experience, report them to the game master. Ask that they be watched.

Edited May 10, 2017 by Nalates Urriah
Added info