Srcript count

[Ralph Bergan]

What is the truth about script counts? How much is too many?  many have told ne that you should always be under 200 but for some of us that is very hard to do with our heair and all .

[Rolig Loon]

There's no rule, but a decent guideline is to stay under 50 scripts and a total memory use of about 2 Mb. It's very easy to stay under those limits.  I typically have 8 or 10 scripts on me at a time, for a total use of about 350Kb of memory. 

The big trick is to avoid wearing clothing and hair that are loaded down with color change and resizing scripts.  In the "old" days -- before last year -- that was hard to do, because every single prim had to have its own script.  A single head of hair might have 400 scripts or more.  There's absolutely no excuse for that any more.  Modern hair and clothes can do the whole job with one script.  Not only that, but responsible designers today offer hair and clothing with copy/mod perms, so that you can make a copy, adjust its color and size, and remove the script completely. 

The other big trick is to reduce the number of HUDs you are wearing. Viewers now have built-in AOs, flight assists, radars, and other features that used to be available only in separate HUDS, each with its own script. Today, you can trash all those extras.  No Zhao, no Mystitool, no flight feather .... just your viewer, which doesn't bloat your script count.

Why worry about any of this?  Because the more scripts you carry around, the more likely it is that you will have problems with teleporting and crossing sim borders, and the more you will be contributing to lag for everyone.  Ask the guys in the RP sims if that makes a difference ..........

[Charolotte Caxton]

How do you know how many scripts you are running and how much memory you are using?

[Rolig Loon]

It's very easy with Firestorm. Click on World >> About Land and then click the Scripts button at the bottom of the General page. The window that opens gives you two tab choices. Pick "Avatar" and it shows you exactly what scripts you are wearing, where they are attached, and how much memory they are using. If you're not using Firestorm, you can find many free script count devices in SL -- in clubs and malls, on the Marketplace, and in shops. I'll send you one of mine as soon as I get home and can log in to SL, Charolotte.

[Ceera Murakami]

Rollig, I'll have to disagree with you about how "easy" it is to get to such low script count levels.

It may be easy if you're Human. It's almost impossible if you're a furry.

I put on my default three-tailed anthro fox avatar. took off my AO and my hugger HUD, both of which I use a lot. That left me with just my furry avatar and non-bling clothes. Script count? 78. Memory? 4032 kb. 

Tried another anthro fox avatar, older design, doesn't look as good: 72 scripts, 1152 kb memory.

I finally found a really crappy looking anthro fox that is a design several years old, that only needed 28 scripts and 448 KB to exist. Compared to the others, it looks like a sixth-grader's crayon skeych compared to an adult artist's semi-realistic portrait. Completely unacceptable in appearance.

And none of that was from resizer scripts with scripts in every hair prim, or similar badly designed stuff. I don't buy anything with resizer scripts in it.

While it's a fine goal to go for lower script counts, it just isn't possible for some of us noin-Humans. Scripts define what the LL default avatar can't hope to represent.

[Rolig Loon]

That's a really good point, Ceera. Thank you. Any av that has a lot of attachments is going to have a hard time with script limits that are designed with human avs in mind. I think it still makes sense to aim for low script counts, regardless of what sort of av you have, but clearly the definition of "low" has to be different for some than for others. That's really why I started my reply by saying that there really is no rule. I'd much rather have people be aware of what they are carrying around and make an informed choice about how much of it is truly necessary ---- sort of like deciding what MPG rating is "right" when they choose a car in RL.

[Charolotte Caxton]

Ah! It's the exact same in V3! I never would have thought to look in About Land for info on my avatar! lol, thanks!

[Syo Emerald]

Scriptcount is not a safe way to say how many resources your avatar needs. I have several avatars, all of them use a different count of scripts, but the range between their real need of mb is as big as the grandcanyon.