Are You Willing To Lose Some Content For A Better Second Life?

[Perrie Juran]

I was called a nazi the other night.  To be specific, I was called a Script-nazi.  Which in part has lead me to start this discussion and ask the question in the subject line. 

I am not sure what the number one complaint in SL is but I do know that lag is very high on the list.  And one of the big culprits as I understand it from the SL blogs (both the official and the unofficial ones) is Scripts.  Now I am not technically proficient enough to know this for a fact myself, but based upon what I have read, it sounds pretty plausible to me.

Two of the issues I have seen discussed are older scripts and poorly written newer scripts.  I have also heard re-size scripts brought to task as being nasty culprits. 

Now personally I did a little inventory of the items I most commonly wear.  There was no need for a 'glow' script in my boots.  My wrist cuffs, while I always wear them, I rarely use them.  So I made a copy, removed the scripts and wear those when I am out and about.  My hair has no scripts.  Nor my hat that I am never with out.  (OK, I do take it off in bed).

But all this got me puzzling, I shouldn't have to be doing all this work.  Except for the fact that I want to enjoy a lag free SL.  I also got to thinking it is probably a very small minority in SL who have any knowledge about the causes of lag.  And should it really be necessary to know?

But before this gets too long to read and I go off on every tangent in my brain atm, I have been in SL for close to 4 years now.  Sometime in late 2007, maybe early 2008, I remember there being a major change or upgrade to the Havok engine SL uses.  And I remember that upgrade did break some content in SL.

One of my favorite places at that time was a SIM called Zero Point and it had what is till in my mind the best roller coaster I have ever rode in SL.  And the change in the Havok engine broke it.  The creator even posted a sign by it explaining it may not work.  And for whatever reason they chose not to rebuild it.  I was sad to see it go but it happenned.

So my question to you is would you be willing to sacrifice some content, would some items being rendered unusable be acceptable to you, if it should mean a major reduction in lag and improvement in overall usability?  There are a few who are predicting that the Lab is going to step in and force this issue anyways.  Are you prepared to deal with it?

 

[Perrie Juran]

p.s.  For those of you wondering about me being called a S.N., I was at a live concert the other night to hear one of my favorite performers.  The club owner gives a prize to the person with the lowest script count.  I have won it a couple of times.

A girl started bitching in public chat, "WTF do I have to do to win it, take off all my clothes?"  I did a quick check of her Avatar script count and well, I probably shouldn't have said anything about her shoes, but I did.  At which point she called me a S.N.  I should have known better.  Saying something about a woman's shoes may be worse than telling her an item of clothes makes her ass look fat.

[Knowl Paine]

Clean up the junk, trash, litter, rubbish, refuse, garbage, scraps, debris, waste,  first. Then consider deleting items.  

 

[Peewee Musytari]

Resize scripts in themselves are not the problem, it is the badly used ones that are. For example a many prim object with a resize script in every prim that is no mod and has no menu option to delete the scripts is just bad, some hair has in excess of 200 scripts in it and no way for the owner to do anything about it.

Many creators are taking a much more responsible attitude to them now and apart from only using 2 scripts instead of 200 they are also including a button on the menu which will delete the scripts....Applause to all those creators.

I don`t think it is necessary to lose any of the benefits of scripts, people just need to be better educated about them and creators need to ensure that they are selling products that are well scripted and not just add to the problem for the sake of a quick buck.

It is likely that at some point LL with switch off the ability for any non-mono scripts to run, but current scripting is all Mono so that is not going to address the issue of bad scripting, only education & a sense of responsibilty can do that.

[Ceera Murakami]

One of the big problems with script limits, Avatar Rendering Cost (ARC) calculations, and similar efforts to "eliminate lag" based on a simplistic score or formula, is that there is no simple, hard and fast answer to what is acceptable and/or necessary.

If you are a Human avatar, then sure, you can strip out most of the lag-inducing scripts in your wardrobe - things you don't really even need like resizers and scripts to change the color of the barrette in your hair to one of a zillion colors - and can feel really good that you got a near-zero score on some arbitrary scoring system. You may well have even helped yourself and those within draw distance of you to improve the percieved lag, to some degree. The system is built to represent Humans, so it's fairly easy to do without certain scripted developments that don't really add that much to your experience. I have one Human avatar form with an ARC score of 1, and a script count of zero. And she's still reasonably good looking. But to be up to current appearance standards, I would have to at least add prim hair, which would increase my ARC score.

But some other avatar types require scripts and higher "Avatar Rendering Cost" scores merely to exist in Second Life. To be a typical Furry avatar, with even close to realistic looking fur, you have to put up with an ARC score that would make some Human avatars wince. Do we shave off our fur or look like smooth-skinned cartoon caricatures, or just Humans wearing smooth animal masks? We need scripts, too, for mouths that move and eyes that blink and show expressive emotions in animal-shaped prim heads, and tails that wag, and wings that flap, HUDs that allow a dragon to breathe fire, or scripts to allow horse avatar to wear a saddle that allows another avatar to ride them... I certainly do try to eliminate unnecessary lag inducers like scripted resizers in clothes and hair, but I am not going to go back to being only Human for the sake of an arbitrary low numeric score.

Looked at another way, every prim and texture used in Second Life adds to lag. Would you give up detailed, realistic forests, buildings and roads, and strip down to cartoon-like flat-colored boxes and open plains for the scene around you, just for the sake of a very low-lag experience? Or for that matter, give up the 3D experience entirely! After all, a text-based chat room doesn't experience script lag or texture lag at all! Yes, I am being somewhat facetious here, but I hope you can see my point. Basing decisions on what should or should not be allowed on some sort of score or formula just doesn't work. Script counts and ARC scores can certainly indicate where improvements can be made, but they should only be a guide, not a restrictive law.

Much of what is beautiful and creative in Second Life requires scripts, textures, sculpted prims, and other things that can all be pointed to as 'causing lag'. You have to strike a balance between what is needed to create the virtual world and make it pleasant to experience, and what is excessive and unnecessary. No simple formula can make those judgement calls.

Also, much of what exists in Second Life can not be easily replaced or upgraded. If you own a scripted gadget called a "Starax Wand", you have an artifact that can never be re-purchased and you can never get a more script-efficient version from the maker, because the creator if that item left SL years ago, and is unlikely to ever return. 

Making script use counts and ARC scores available can give the makers of new content a way to measure the efficiency of their new or upgraded creations. If they make a resizable hair that uses only one script instead of 200, they can market the low-lag benefits of their product, and if it is of high quality in other ways as well, it may well take over the niche held now by less-efficient products.

Let the market work on its own, and newer developments may well make some older, lag-causing items obsolete, and willingly discarded in favor of newer products. But don't try to force the issue, because some things will never be re-created by anyone, and are still valued in this virtual world.

[Void Singer]

heh, there is one regular attendee at several of the tech office hours that has wears an object that displays the script count for every avatar in the area.... and the funny thin is, even the worst offenders at those meeting are still mine below the averages I see out and about in SL....

being a scripter of aat least a little merit I've never touched athose products with the worst abuses.... recolor and resize scripts that have a slave script in ever prim.... in fact Ive written and made available free versions of both those that use only a single script (and had the original 2 script version back before the new functions made it easy to write single script versions).

But lag isn't all about scripts... in fact it's not even mostly about them. and even when it is, it's not really the scripts, but bugs that are the biggest problem.... The mono rez/region_entry bug, there's another one that I can't remember the name of, but lets a single script gobble all the available time. and then even when it is the god awful massive amount of script in something, it turns out that users can't always do anything about it.

other things like physics shields, 5k+ sculpted avatars, huger texture overuse, and similar also have a huge impact on perceived lag....

you best bet is to direct people that obviously do have a script burden to resources wher they can find out themselves not only how script heavy they are, but also how to mange it and reduce it..... and avoid jealousy clueless people that resort to name calling because they didn't get something for their lack of effort.

[Seicher Rae]

You

Brought up

Her

Shoes?

/me looks shocked

tsk tsk

"Moron" not "Nazi" (moronic Nazi?):smileytongue:

I have some lovely, expensive, fabulous shoes that are just amazing in the humongous number of scripts they run. 

To simply answer the question in the subject line: Yes.*

Now for the *

* on the assumption that the loss would be momentary, that the talented designers and scripters would find a way to provide the same things, even better things, within the new, lower lag, parameters.

Lag is a big problem most places I've been in the last 6 months or so and it is severely affecting my enjoyment of SL.

Really dude? You commented about the shoes?

Have I taught you nothing?

[PeterCanessa Oh]

Just a few points ot make sure they are clear:

Scripts have the lowest priority for processing, verything else gets its allocation first  . That means scripts can only lag each other, if you can't move around it's more likely to be downloading or physics that's slowing things down.  [Except for bugs in SL, not the scripts]

LL have said script-limits are coming, but they're based on memory-allocation to stop the servers being over-loaded.

Having a large number of scripts means nothing about how active they are.  A single script such as an AO with a fast timer will be taking-up WAY more processing time than any number of others that are just waiting for a touch, or such like.

[Loren Twine]

Yes, I could live with that. A major annoyance, but I'd get over it.

 

As for creators and scripts, I think it's nice to have texture change and resize scripts for certain items, like shoes. That is, if I am allowed to DELETE them when I have the shoes the way I want them. There is no excuse for selling copy items with scripts and not letting the customer remove the scripts.

[Pussycat Catnap]

 

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Ceera Murakami wrote:

But some other avatar types require scripts and higher "Avatar Rendering Cost" scores merely to exist in Second Life. To be a typical Furry avatar, with even close to realistic looking fur, you have to put up with an ARC score that would make some Human avatars wince. Do we shave off our fur or look like smooth-skinned cartoon caricatures, or just Humans wearing smooth animal masks? We need scripts, too, for mouths that move and eyes that blink and show expressive emotions in animal-shaped prim heads, and tails that wag, and wings that flap, HUDs that allow a dragon to breathe fire, or scripts to allow horse avatar to wear a saddle that allows another avatar to ride them... I certainly do try to eliminate unnecessary lag inducers like scripted resizers in clothes and hair, but I am not going to go back to being only Human for the sake of an arbitrary low numeric score.

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Might I suggest you change avatars?

My furry AV's tend to have lower script counts than my human ones. The newer furry AV makers have got it down pretty well and can be very low lag.

 

[Qie Niangao]

Pretty much everything has been said.  I'd just add one thing that's not about lag, per se.

It would be a win if Teleports were blocked with a message, something like "You need to remove some scripted attachments before teleporting."

There's a pretty steady stream of complaints about how much teleports fail, making the residents' experiences quite miserable.  It's one of the top things people want LL to "fix."  In maybe one percent of the cases, there's something actually wrong with the account that prevents teleports, and maybe five percent more have a problem with their network connection, but in the vast, vast majority of cases, it's because they're simply wearing too many scripts.  And no amount of technical "fixing" can make it possible to move between sims with an infinite number of scripts attached.

If script memory limits were in force, that would probably prevent people from attaching enough scripts to cause teleport problems, but without those limits, it's a very common complaint.  If people were informed that they had to remove stuff in order to make teleports work, they'd have a lot less frustration than suffering through failed teleport attempts, over and over.

[Darrius Gothly]

Purely Techie concept Qie .. as you are one of the better educated about these things ...

Wouldn't it make more sense to move script execution to servers that do only scripts .. and maintain a partition or task for each Avatar? As I understand it right now, when you teleport or move across Sim boundaries, your entire script collection gets copied and run on the new Sim's server.

But if script execution was separated onto its own server farm, and you got a partition on the script servers when you logged in, no matter where you roamed in Second Life, your script burder would never need to be moved or copied from server to server.

@Perrie OP - If folks would be willing to pay a small upgrade fee to creators to receive updated versions of products with notorious histories of script abuse, chances are that people wouldn't have to give up their stuff at all. Many creators used the best knowledge available at the time they made the item .. and it now turns out that what was "best" then is woefully inadequate now.

So folks get all upset and want free updated copies of stuff they bought a year or more ago, and Creators get defensive because going through the effort of rescripting old products takes time and costs them money and they can't afford to throw their time away for free.

Aim for a middle-ground compromise. Understand that creators are not trying to rip you off. In many cases they are just as frustrated and perhaps even angry at how script loads have turned out. With no pun intended, walk a mile in the other person's shoes and try to be agreeable. It can pay off in major advantages to both parties involved.

[Ann Otoole]

I have not managed to go back and check every single thing but for newer stuff I just include a boxed one script low impact resizer script with the product. The customer can drop it in if they want. It has a self delete option.

The newer type of "users" (LL seems to call them users instead of residents) are unlikely to have any capacity to learn all this stuff. So the correct solution is for all wearables to be positioned and sized by buttons on the viewer overriding the mod permissions. This would eliminate the need for resizer scripts and make no mod stuff usable again provided users can kill the scripts in no mod content to erase the abusive scripts.

Texture and color changers are a different story. The solution to most of that is to make unscripted fat packs. Most people only use one or two color/texture combo options anyway.

[Loren Twine]

I will often mess around with color and textures, and make a copy if I get something I'm particularly pleased with, so I don't have to do it again if I change it later. It's just a shame that I usually can't nuke all the scripts after I do that.

[Qie Niangao]

 

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Darrius Gothly wrote:

[...]Wouldn't it make more sense to move script execution to servers that do only scripts .. and maintain a partition or task for each Avatar? As I understand it right now, when you teleport or move across Sim boundaries, your entire script collection gets copied and run on the new Sim's server.

But if script execution was separated onto its own server farm, and you got a partition on the script servers when you logged in, no matter where you roamed in Second Life, your script burder would never need to be moved or copied from server to server.[...]

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I've seen that proposed before, and it would be interesting to see how it would turn out, but I don't think it's a panacea.  It seems it would get some savings at TP time (not having to actually copy scripts and state into the TP'd-to sim) at the expense of a very large amount of communications after TP is complete.  A tremendous amount of information flows "through the membrane" between the shared state of the region simulation and the script VM; all that would have to become network messaging, with implications for perceived lag. 

My hunch is that it would replace one big fat rubber band with a whole bunch of little ones, from which there could be no escape.

[Cerise1488303085]

 

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Qie Niangao wrote:

My hunch is that it would replace one big fat rubber band with a whole bunch of little ones, from which there could be no escape.

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Yes, imagine bullets that have to report their collisions to a remote server before they can react!

 

[Darrius Gothly]

*sigh* Yup, it's one of those problems that has consequences no matter which way you turn. There are optimizations that could be made of course .. such as keeping non-avatar scripted objects running in the Sim but offloading the scripts in attachments to separate "Avatar-exclusive" script servers. But even so, scripts that perform frequent actions in-world would still be stuck shuttling lots of data back and forth between the two servers.

Thinking about it though, it seems that the biggest "hogs" of script resources (resizers for example) have very little interaction with the Simulator, only needing to communicate once in a while .. so they would make good candidates to offload. Scripts that are constantly running and communicating with the Sim could be retained on the Sim Server itself.

Well written scripts generally go idle .. meaning they are not running routine actions but are suspended pending an incoming event. These would make great candidates for offloading too.

All in all, it's not a pretty picture. It can be done, but it's not something a couple geeks can whip out in a weekend either.

[Void Singer]

 

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Darrius Gothly wrote:

Purely Techie concept Qie .. as you are one of the better educated about these things ...

Wouldn't it make more sense to move script execution to servers that do only scripts .. and maintain a partition or task for each Avatar? As I understand it right now, when you teleport or move across Sim boundaries, your entire script collection gets copied and run on the new Sim's server.

But if script execution was separated onto its own server farm, and you got a partition on the script servers when you logged in, no matter where you roamed in Second Life, your script burder would never need to be moved or copied from server to server.

---

 

even if we weren't so far down the localized path as to mean that doing that would pretty much mean rebuilding SL architecture from the ground up, it would be a huge bandwidth issue.... the network would be flooded with communications and verifications about what information could be received form or sent to your current region, nevermind discovering what information regions should be passing from the local environment to the script farm, or how to handle unattached content. it'd pretty much kill any ability to communicate between colocations as the bandwidth requirements would be obscene.

BUT, there is a kernal of an idea in there.... there should be a viewer located local script functionality... which would only pass information to attached scripts... just a simple information stream that could pass information that the viewer wanted to. essentially taking the idea of viewer AO's and making them extensible so that they aren't static.... RLV and the phoenix bridge are step down this path, but they're not quite there yet

[Darrius Gothly]

*smiles* I don't always have to provide a whole forest. Sometimes, I just need to plant a seed.

[Void Singer]

then I hope you won't take it as "watering  the flowers" when I say that it has it's own issues... namely security concerns, which (IMO) LL is neither equipped, nor likely, to handle well... bringing it up to current standards, it would be a plugin ability similar to whats available in Firefox.

[Darrius Gothly]

LOL @ "watering the flowers"

Nope, no issues here. I have tons of ideas .. all the time. Once in a blue moon one of them survives longer than it takes for me to type it out.

Now, if I'd spent 10 years and untold gobs of money developing the idea, I would probably have a bit more "ego" attached to it .. but not much. If someone has a better idea, or spots a problem with the existing idea, that's the best opportunity I can find to make things better. (And if they not only spot a problem but also suggest some tweaks or enhancements to work past that problem .. ALL the better.)

[Qie Niangao]

Not just to be contrarian:  I'd rather move animations into the agent and out of the viewer almost entirely, except for playback.  The current round-about mechanism for informing other viewers about an avatar's changed animation makes synchronization a remote ideal, and poses hurdles for extending to a more "physical" avatar. 

(This is actually orthogonal to where the UI of an AO operates.  It's not as if moving the AO to the viewer takes the sim out of the picture; it just pushes the simple AO processing out of the script VM, and saves a network traversal only for the current convoluted data path for animations and animation-states.)

I guess I'm suggesting that in addition to making the viewer more extensible, the server-side agent representation could stand some beefing-up, too.

[Perrie Juran]

I know that there are a lot of technical issues involved when dealing with lag.

First of all there is what is already present in the SIM.  The build itself.  I have been at SIMs where I was the only avatar present and still encountered lag because of all the objects, scripts, poorly done textures, etc, that were already there.  There is one live music venue I know that is laggy even when empty because of all the particle scripts that are running there. 

The second thing is what each Avatar brings into the SIM with them.  I appreciate that some of the venue owners are trying to educate people about the issues. I know I thought WTF the first time a date told me she'd be showing up bald because she had to take off her hair in order to teleport!  Crazy stuff.

All of us (or at least I hope most of us) simply want to enjoy our SL with the least amount of muss and fuss possible.  Simply put, I want to log in, get dressed and go out and have fun here.  I've tried to take a bit of personal responsibility by looking at my own impact and taking some action to reduce it.

I would hate to see content broken but just like in RL, things wear out and sometimes need to be replaced.  We grudgingly accept this fact in RL.  So it may be that we will need to accept this fact in SL also. 

I feel bad for some of the content creators who are going to take the heat for this should LL start disabling some content.  Many of them have in good faith tried to provide a superior product.  There are a few of them though who don't give a damn about SL.  All they see is the money.  Their days are numbered.

[Void Singer]

 

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Darrius Gothly wrote:

[...] If someone has a better idea, or spots a problem with the existing idea, that's the best opportunity I can find to make things better. (And if they not only spot a problem but also suggest some tweaks or enhancements to work past that problem .. ALL the better.)

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if you were really a lesbian secretly masquerading as a drag king and this were a bar, I'm sure you'd have just earned at least one drunken proposal

 

@Qie:
not at all... I like "contrary", lets one know where the limits are. and TBH I agree, that would be nice, although I'm not sure that the servers are quite up to handling animation data on their side =/

in the more broad sense, a client side scripting system (including AO's) wouldn't be incompatible with that... you'd simply send the information to the inword handler and it'd trigger the animation there instead of from your client.

[Darrius Gothly]

 

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Void Singer wrote:

 

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Darrius Gothly wrote:

[...] If someone has a better idea, or spots a problem with the existing idea, that's the best opportunity I can find to make things better. (And if they not only spot a problem but also suggest some tweaks or enhancements to work past that problem .. ALL the better.)

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if you were really a lesbian secretly masquerading as a drag king and this were a bar, I'm sure you'd have just earned at least one drunken proposal

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Buy me a White Russian maybe? *wink wink*