1 second Orb timing, is it necessary

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, StarlanderGoods said:

Are you claiming that you havent participated in any of the previous threads about Orbs and Banlines? Because I find that hard to belive.

In defense of Codex, although I would not speak for him, he started some of those threads! 

I'm mighty proud of the fella!

[Love Zhaoying]

6 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Interesting.  I've been on my bicycle, my motorcycle and my horse travelling around mainland and have not run into that at all.  Cars, I have no idea since I couldn't drive one if my life depended on it.  Aside from my little mouse car which I have used with no problems either.  I guess YMMV.

Good one! ("YMMV" in comments about vehicles!)

[Love Zhaoying]

Idea - is it possible these "so-called" events that were "0 second", were actually longer but perceived as such because of..lag?

[Ceka Cianci]

6 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Interesting.  I've been on my bicycle, my motorcycle and my horse travelling around mainland and have not run into that at all.  Cars, I have no idea since I couldn't drive one if my life depended on it.  Aside from my little mouse car which I have used with no problems either.  I guess YMMV.

Ya, I've been all over the Atoll with my horse and never even seen a warning from an orb.

Had to dodge a lot of vehicles though, but never a warning.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

11 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

22 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Interesting.  I've been on my bicycle, my motorcycle and my horse travelling around mainland and have not run into that at all.  Cars, I have no idea since I couldn't drive one if my life depended on it.  Aside from my little mouse car which I have used with no problems either.  I guess YMMV.

Ya, I've been all over the Atoll with my horse and never even seen a warning from an orb.

Had to dodge a lot of vehicles though, but never a warning.

Maybe the people with issues either are really bad / reckless drivers, or have a lot of lag?

[Ceka Cianci]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Maybe the people with issues either are really bad / reckless drivers, or have a lot of lag?

I just figured everyone had a lot lag on mainland.. I know I do a lot of the time.

But the Atoll, it's worth it, it's such an enjoyable ride.

[StarlanderGoods]

19 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

In defense of Codex, although I would not speak for him, he started some of those threads! 

I'm mighty proud of the fella!

Your Honor, if I may aproach the bench.  Im trying to prove that the issue is not of a practical nature, being inconvienced by the Orbs, but it is of an ideological nature, he belives 0 second Orbs should not exist on mainland.  And that the statement about his recent interest in the thread being because of an uptick in 0 second Orb events to be a misdirection, a fallacy.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, StarlanderGoods said:

Your Honor, if I may aproach the bench.  Im trying to prove that the issue is not of a practical nature, being inconvienced by the Orbs, but it is of an ideological nature, he belives 0 second Orbs should not exist on mainland.  And that the statement about his recent interest in the thread being because of an uptick in 0 second Orb events to be a misdirection, a fallacy.

Maybe, but we've all got some kind of agenda. Just because someone is "right" doesn't mean that..

Screw it.

Y'know..Brilliant!

[Love Zhaoying]

If someone were a true "libertarian", wouldn't they be OK with the current situation?  

Each to his own, look out for yourself, the strong make the rules, and all that.

Scenario: There's no such thing as "griefers", because you could just defend yourself as you see fit.  Trap, orbit, eject, ban, teleport home - it's all good! In return, they can try to overrun you all day and night. 

Chaos is fun! 

[animats]

28 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Scenario: There's no such thing as "griefers", because you could just defend yourself as you see fit.  Trap, orbit, eject, ban, teleport home - it's all good! In return, they can try to overrun you all day and night. 

Chaos is fun! 

That's Ultima Online.

[Qie Niangao]

44 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Idea - is it possible these "so-called" events that were "0 second", were actually longer but perceived as such because of..lag?

If the orb proudly announces you get zero seconds to scram at the very instant it boots you, it's probably set to zero seconds. On the other hand, lag could very well delay both the detection and the announcement…

… and lag or not, turning the orb up to eleven is just silly. I'm not sure whether it actually inconveniences intruders any more than a longer warning interval* but I'm pretty sure it doesn't result in them being removed much faster—at least it better not, because the whole process of wading through the list of avatars on a parcel to match against authorization criteria really shouldn't be done more than a few times a minute, at most, so if the script is set to scan llGetAgentList more often than that, it's likely being hostile to a lot more than the intruders.

This function is actually quite a bit more efficient than the old sensor-event-based approach, but it's still doing a bunch of list processing, something that uses a lot of script time. One way to be a little more thoughtful to those sharing a region is if security scripts throttled back to running very infrequently until they detect one of the authorized avatars on the region.

_______________
* I have not argued in this thread that the 0-second interval needs to change. That's not only because I think the whole thing is futile, but also because it doesn't seem to matter how much time I'm given: if I'm disoriented enough that an orb notices me, I'm not likely to find my way off the parcel in time anyway, assuming my control inputs are even still operating.

[StarlanderGoods]

6 minutes ago, animats said:

That's Ultima Online.

Trinsic represent!

[Love Zhaoying]

51 minutes ago, animats said:

That's Ultima Online.

Fun Fact: Lord British graduated from my high school.  He came and showed our computer class whatever version of Ultima was out then (for the Apple II in 1983, I think).

[Love Zhaoying]

50 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

This function is actually quite a bit more efficient than the old sensor-event-based approach, but it's still doing a bunch of list processing, something that uses a lot of script time. One way to be a little more thoughtful to those sharing a region is if security scripts throttled back to running very infrequently until they detect one of the authorized avatars on the region.

Which function, assuming you mean an llFunction() call and not some built-in functionality?

[Rolig Loon]

8 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Which function, assuming you mean an llFunction() call and not some built-in functionality?

I assume that Qie meant llGetAgentList.

Edited June 1, 2022 by Rolig Loon

[Qie Niangao]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

Which function, assuming you mean an llFunction() call and not some built-in functionality?

I just meant llGetAgentList() and all the processing a script will do with the return list. Getting that result is supposed to be much faster than running sensor scans (the way ancient security scripts worked), but then the script must wade through that list result. A sensor event, in contrast, leaves the script to process singletons, one llDetectedKey(n) after another, which probably isn't that cheap either.

There's also collision-based detection, but I don't think that's common.

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

I just meant llGetAgentList() and all the processing a script will do with the return list. Getting that result is supposed to be much faster than running sensor scans (the way ancient security scripts worked), but then the script must wade through that list result. A sensor event, in contrast, leaves the script to process singletons, one llDetectedKey(n) after another, which probably isn't that cheap either.

There's also collision-based detection, but I don't think that's common.

Consider, it needs an extra / secondary call after the timer expires to check if the agent is still there, before ejecting!

[Qie Niangao]

7 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Consider, it needs an extra / secondary call after the timer expires to check if the agent is still there, before ejecting!

Yeah it needs a timer() (or something like it), but the call to determine if the agent is still around is cheap. I used to use llGetAgentSize() but lately I've switched to llGetObjectMass() for such things, on the theory a float is cheaper than a vector, but have yet to bestir myself to actually measure.

Edited June 1, 2022 by Qie Niangao
llGetObjectMass, not llGetMass

[Rolig Loon]

33 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

40 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Consider, it needs an extra / secondary call after the timer expires to check if the agent is still there, before ejecting!

Yeah it needs a timer() (or something like it), but the call to determine if the agent is still around is cheap. I used to use llGetAgentSize() but lately I've switched to llGetObjectMass() for such things, on the theory a float is cheaper than a vector, but have yet to bestir myself to actually measure.

That's probably unnecessary overhead. As far as I have ever known, neither llEjectFromLand nor llTeleportAgentHome throws an error if the agent can't be found.  They just quietly ignore the action.  On the other hand, a call to llTeleportAgentHome does cause a 5.0 second script delay. That means the script won't be able to handle a roving gang of Hell's Angels invading your parcel at once. 

Aside from that hypothetical drawback, I have never worried much about the efficiency of security systems, on the theory that they spend 99.999% of their time idle. Their primary demand on a region's script time comes from the timer. Unless it's firing extremely fast, that's not much of a drag on region resources.  A typical region has many more script events to worry about.  I've just had a quick look at a few typical Bellisseria regions, for example. They have around 2000+ scripts active at any moment, using less than 2.5 msec of script time.  If there are roughly 25 residential parcels per Bellisseria region, the maximum load created by the timers in  25 security orbs is a miniscule part of the total ... not a serious contribution.  (Besides, the typical region still has over 19 msec of free time.)

That's not an invitation to rev up an orb's firing speed.  IMO, it's still a wasteful effort for a script that's doing absolutely nothing but contemplating its own clock most of the time.

[Myntz Mysterious]

Are you driving on roads? Or across parcels?

 

3 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I haven't run into it either because I no longer use vehicles or other modes of transport to travel across regions in S/L. When I did, I really did not get far before being bounced home or to other various places I wasn't intending to go. Not so much fun when one is unexpectedly bounced without warning. I'll only travel across regions in Opensim now as those are the only grids where I can avoid that.

Are you driving on roads? Or across parcels? 

My rule of thumb when sim crossing:

HANDS OFF THE KEYBOARD!

And dont use vehicles that use ridiculous speeds...

[Phil Deakins]

6 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

That's probably unnecessary overhead. As far as I have ever known, neither llEjectFromLand nor llTeleportAgentHome throws an error if the agent can't be found.  They just quietly ignore the action.

That depends on the type or setting of the security device. All of my devices are capable of protecting whole parcels, but they all specialise in protecting parts of parcels - levels and spaces. An agent can wander into a protected area within a parcel, receive a warning, and move out of it but remain within the parcel. The script shouldn't continue and remove the agent after s/he's moved out of the protected area but still in the parcel.

Then there's the warnings to consider. When an agent receives the first warning when spotted trespassing, and then moves out of the parcel, a device should not be sending further warnings, which it would do if it didn't check whether or not the agent is still trespassing.

So checking is actually necessary.

[kali Wylder]

Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!

[Rolig Loon]

That's true, Phil. That design is considerably more sophisticated than most security systems on the market today. You could of course make it more efficient by running the timer at a fairly slow speed unless there are avatars (other than the owner) within a reasonable distance.  But that's a minor tweak, hardly worth writing the extra code for. Your model does require those extra checks you added.  Still, it's not executing them until it actually detects someone within your parcel, which means that it's idle almost all the time.  Putting that into the context of my response to Love and Qie, even those extra checks aren't doing much to increase total script time on the region.  No big deal. 

Edited June 1, 2022 by Rolig Loon

[Love Zhaoying]

48 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

On the other hand, a call to llTeleportAgentHome does cause a 5.0 second script delay. That means the script won't be able to handle a roving gang of Hell's Angels invading your parcel at once. 

* raises hand * Ooh! Ooh! I know, I know! Use multiple scripts!

 

Edited June 1, 2022 by Love Zhaoying
Is my Horshack impression!

[Love Zhaoying]

28 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

That depends on the type or setting of the security device. All of my devices are capable of protecting whole parcels, but they all specialise in protecting parts of parcels - levels and spaces. An agent can wander into a protected area within a parcel, receive a warning, and move out of it but remain within the parcel. The script shouldn't continue and remove the agent after s/he's moved out of the protected area but still in the parcel.

Then there's the warnings to consider. When an agent receives the first warning when spotted trespassing, and then moves out of the parcel, a device should not be sending further warnings, which it would do if it didn't check whether or not the agent is still trespassing.

So checking is actually necessary.

@Phil Deakins, do you care to weigh in on "1 second Orb timing"? Is it "necessary" (per the OP), or ?

I'd like to know your opinion!