Whatever happened to global experience keys?

[ItHadToComeToThis]

There was such a hype about this being a feature and if they had released it, it would have been probably one of the best features ever released on SL. And yet, it just...didn’t happen. Does anyone know the reason?.

[Qie Niangao]

I used to ask about these "grid scope" Experiences at the Simulator user group meetings whenever there was an excuse. Never got any real answers; it seems to be a Marketing decision rather than any real development topic: they already work, and a few folks who participated in the beta test had the good sense to convert their test Experiences to grid scope. (Not me, stupidly.)

Any time the "Premium Plus" feature bundle comes up, I make a point of saying that I'll be super interested if and only if it includes at least one grid scope Experience, to polite acknowledgement as response.

Such a dependency would make some sense, inasmuch as Experiences can pose some performance load, and they may even need to find a way to bill "on the meter" for high volume use. Also, they probably shouldn't consider promoting Experience use (particularly use of the Key Value Pair persistent store) until after Uplift is complete because, at the moment, KVP is yet to migrate to the cloud, so KVP performance on cloud-hosted regions is said to be much worse currently, and that's expected to swap once the KVP service is cloud-hosted.

Although personally I'd love to develop an Experience with all features grid scope, I bet there'd be great demand for grid-scope KVP only.

Even if they need to devise some way to bill for it, not making it available at all is really snatching defeat from the jaws of glorious victory. I mean, god forbid a new feature actually succeed and make Second Life a more powerful platform for engaging scripted interactions. 

[Phate Shepherd]

I would fall over backwards if they just allowed for grid-scope KVP!

Grid-scope KVP would solve sooo many problems with region to region communication. For example, no external DNS service would be required for http comms. Objects could have global settings without needing an outside DB.

Since they went with a single experience, with 128MB max storage, raising the count or size could be a premium feature. One problems I see is that there is no ability to revoke keys. So, if you sold an object that is out there gobbling up KVP storage, you can't revoke a key to force end users to update to a later version of your object that doesn't gobble up space.... and there are no DB tools short of iterating through the keys one by one to manage/delete them.

Edited October 30, 2020 by Phate Shepherd

[KT Kingsley]

To really excite me, grid-scope KVPs would have be separate from experiences.

Currently land owners have to deliberately enable specific experiences on their land. To be useful to me, KVPs would have to be available anywhere, anytime, and without intervention from individual land owners.

[Lucia Nightfire]

19 hours ago, Phate Shepherd said:

One problems I see is that there is no ability to revoke keys. So, if you sold an object that is out there gobbling up KVP storage, you can't revoke a key to force end users to update to a later version of your object that doesn't gobble up space.

You can disable an experience for this reason. This can be done in the Experience's profile with the Edit button and on the next menu, unchecking the "Enable Experience" checkbox. It can take up to 10 minutes for the effects to be seen grid-wide.

There is no way to negotiate with support to blacklist a script asset in the wild, though.

17 hours ago, KT Kingsley said:

To really excite me, grid-scope KVPs would have be separate from experiences.

Currently land owners have to deliberately enable specific experiences on their land. To be useful to me, KVPs would have to be available anywhere, anytime, and without intervention from individual land owners.

Grid scope experiences do not require they be explicitly added to a parcel's or region's Allowed Experiences list for them to be used like Land scope experiences do.

Edited October 31, 2020 by Lucia Nightfire

[KT Kingsley]

On 10/31/2020 at 11:14 AM, Lucia Nightfire said:

Grid scope experiences do not require they be explicitly added to a parcel's or region's Allowed Experiences list for them to be used like Land scope experiences do.

Thanks - I hadn't realised that. I guess I was fooled because I'd seen the AVsitter experience explicitly enabled in places that use it, and I'd somehow incorrectly assumed it was grid-scope.

[Da5id Weatherwax]

Grid scope KVPs or experiences - they have to know that what we really want is ANY kind of persistent writeable storage, right? Just letting us write lines to notecards in an objects inventory from a script would be MASSIVE. Something that wouldn't be lost when the script resets, is copied with the object and doesn't require us to host some external data server and rely on it being available or our scripts go spectacularly pear-shaped. Even if it needed special handling that would break the asset code for notecards and they made a "notecard-like" asset called a "datastore" or something that could hold as may strings as a notecard does lines and made one cost the standard upload charge to create, I'd be all over that like white on rice...

Edited November 4, 2020 by Da5id Weatherwax

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

Grid scope KVPs or experiences - they have to know that what we really want is ANY kind of persistent writeable storage, right?

No, KVP is way more valuable than mere persistence, and especially so if it's grid scope. Anything you write to a KVP store is almost instantly available to be read by any other script using the same Experience anywhere else on the grid. This means that you can very efficiently broadcast information to any number of distributed client processes without needing to manage subscription, address resolution, etc., and with much less overhead than any solution involving an external web service.

Before KVP I would occasionally long to write notecards or something similar, but it's really no substitute for KVP.

[Da5id Weatherwax]

5 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

No, KVP is way more valuable than mere persistence, and especially so if it's grid scope. Anything you write to a KVP store is almost instantly available to be read by any other script using the same Experience anywhere else on the grid. This means that you can very efficiently broadcast information to any number of distributed client processes without needing to manage subscription, address resolution, etc., and with much less overhead than any solution involving an external web service.

Before KVP I would occasionally long to write notecards or something similar, but it's really no substitute for KVP.

Not gonna argue with a word of that - but something persistent that could be tied to and differ between each instance of an object would be great too, which would have to be an inventory asset