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Rotating bot mystery solved

ChinRey

By ChinRey,
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ChinRey

ChinRey

Posted
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There have been so many thread on this forum about avatars that suddenly pop up at a sim, rotate around for a few seconds and then vanish.

I've finally found out what it's all about. It's a program called Terrain Sculptor and what it does is create a simplified terrain map of the sim. One more mystery solved and yes, I too wish the explanation was a bit more exciting than that. ;)

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Chaser Zaks

Chaser Zaks

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Unfortunately, it isn't as simple as one tool.

Terrain sculptor simply uses the same technique the bots use. While they don't need to rotate if they were not libopenmetaverse based(telling the server you have a screen resolution of 65535x65535 with 360 fov with 65535 draw distance does the same thing at rotating), they do so to tell the sim "I am looking in this direction, send me the info of what's there!" to download information such as terrain and near by objects.

As far as I am concerned, they are harmless. No need to ban them, it won't stop new ones, it clutters ban lists, and so far they only seem to spin. Nothing wrong with freezing them for long periods of time and posing with them though! :P

Some theories go that they are copybotting bots, I have to say this is highly unlikely. Downloading and storing that much data would be unreasonable, especially in a unorganized mess of uuids.

Others say they are "stalking" bots, or more specifically, locator bots. That being stuff like findyourfriend which was removed from SL for privacy invasion. I doubt this is also the case. Searching 20,000+ regions with 40 active bots is unreasonably slow and there would be no need to spin. Plus there is the fact keeping such a service under wraps would be hard, especially if you want to sell it.

A more reasonable answer to what these bots do are possibly:

Grid metric and statistics bots. Indexing stuff like average water height, mega prim usage, terrain elevation, etc.

"Get paid to visit" bots, such as traffic cones and coin hunts. Shouldn't be gaming traffic anyway.

Camping bots. I could be wrong, but I think LL did ban camping, but I do know such places still exist, these bots may be looking for those obscure locations.

Freebie copier bots. Could be archiving freebies, or snatching them up to resell on MP.

 

But to quote(slightly modified) a old commercial, "How many people does it take to find out what these bots do? The world may never know!"

Edited by Chaser Zaks
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Callum Meriman

Callum Meriman

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2 hours ago, Chaser Zaks said:

As far as I am concerned, they are harmless. No need to ban them, it won't stop new ones, I clutters ban lists, and so far they only seem to spin. Nothing wrong with freezing them for long periods of time and posing with them though! :P

Hmm, you just gave me an idea, with the Yule season fast approaching I can program one of my many bots to detect these, based on the well known turn, and keep them locked, frozen in place.

Hang a few christmas lights from the new captive bot, add a red hat with white fur trim, a few scattered gifts, and voila. A unique Christmas tree.

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