Channel Numbers

[agentronin]

I do a lot of combat in Gorean sims. My weapons I use there have the option to be set to a private communication channel. The idea is that my weapons would get the command faster if a channel is used that is not the default one  (channel 1) used by many other fighters. Right now I am using a number that requires I lot of decimal digits to represent. So the weapon commands in my gestures look something like this:

/1234567890 draw great axe

That is not my actual channel number, but the actual number has the same number of digits.

In combat, the ability to get such commands executed quickly is crucial. Will using such ten digit channel numbers take more time for the server to process than shorter ones?

How are these channel numbers in the stored in the server? Is it converted only once into a 4 byte signed binary number and stored that way when the gesture is saved? Or is it stored as decimal ASCII digits that have to be converted every time the command is sent?

[Qie Niangao]

Aren't gestures played on the viewer? If so, the text length of the channel number would affect how long it takes for the gesture's message to get back to the server.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

We're talking about very nebulous things right now.

The question essentially boils down to "does it take longer for the sim to parse my longer message string than the speed increase of using a higher/lower channel?" There's no way for us to objectively determine that, and even LL's internal answer should be "it depends."

It doesn't even matter how "fast" the channel is because the main bottleneck is the script-scheduling system. Then how the listener is set up. Then how the listen event is set up. How many checks it's doing and what order all of the different commands are checked.

SL is not built with speed or precision in mind. You're not going to be doing 360-no-sight decapitations no matter how performant your particular script is. Sometimes the sim just won't let the script run because other scripts need to go first.

Edited February 12, 2020 by Wulfie Reanimator