Pathfinding... estate only?

[Jenni Darkwatch]

Did anyone else notice that the video mentions pathfinding tools only being available to estate owners and require a pathfinding mesh to work? That's going to pretty much make it useless for most residents (including me), if true.

[Vincent Nacon]

You can use normal prim objects, what he was talking about was... object requires mesh's prim accounting weight.

 

As for estate owners, it's part of anti-greif tactic, I believe. Of course, not forget to mention that pathfinding is generally for creating a sim-wide game than having your own "pet".  Cause...  object can't teleport with you.

[Falcon Linden]

Pathfinding is in no way limited to estates or even to land owners. If you rent a parcel, you can use pathfinding to let your pet navigate your home. Or bring your pathfinding creations to a public region.

 

Falcon Linden

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

So if you're comewhere you can create an object, you can use Pathfinding? There are no complications involving data about the content of a Land Parcel?

[Lucinda Bulloch]

I have created some of my own so called path finding tools for things like my fighting dummies, I am making a drone and are making that grid wide, if the new instructions allow sim wide coords then it is not hard to convert them to grid coords, the problem I have found is parcels with no object entry or parcels just in the next sim with no parcel entry, this stops them dead, but it is not hard to convert sim coords to grid coords, all the vector math's works, so they don't have to be limited to less than 256, will be interesting to see, I made the fighting dummy 3 years ago and never updated its engine, in fact I have only needed to slow it down as the sl servers get better

[Qie Niangao]

Right.  No object entry, and no-script.  The pathfinding functions need options to enable navigation avoiding parcels with those settings.  (I don't really know how to test if they already have that ability, on Aditi.)  Otherwise, for Mainland and many other applications, one would still have to use other functions to find a safe path.

[Lucinda Bulloch]

Yes, with a combo of cast ray and setregionpos(small rezzable phantom sensor) I should not be hard to sense the path and into the next sim, would be nice if castray worked across boarders, then rezzable sensors would not be needed, but with a combo of the 2, you should be able to scan the whole grid for paths well ahead of the object.

[Vincent Nacon]

Oh.. well that's good, I think. Will have to test it for myself to see how much performance it could rob from the sim and how to abuse it if we're gonna be careless without hard limit.

 

I don't hear too well on the video, didn't hear both of them mention about estate stuff. Wasn't sure.

[Jenni Darkwatch]

That's great news, thanks for clarifying Falcon. I got a little worried there.

For the record, I wouldn't mind some kind of registration requirement to get access to some of that functionality (as a creator, not as user), as long as it's a reasonable requirement.

Overall I agree btw, I think functions like that will make content on SL more dynamic. Iif I understand the possibilities correctly, this could also be used for automated vehicles (for touring a sim or creating amusement rides for example). If it's reasonably sim-friendly it could possibly also be used for trivial things like elevators.

[Qie Niangao]

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Jenni Darkwatch wrote:

Iif I understand the possibilities correctly, this could also be used for automated vehicles (for touring a sim or creating amusement rides for example). If it's reasonably sim-friendly it could possibly also be used for trivial things like elevators.

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I think we already have all we need for the amusement rides and elevators, using llSetKeyframedMotion(), which is very sim-friendly.  Automated vehicles, on the other hand, might benefit from pathfinding, especially if they're supposed to dodge dynamic obstacles (e.g., pedestrians).

[Jenni Darkwatch]

I've not yet mucked about with llSetKeyframedMotion (or elevators or rides really).

[Miranda Umino]

On aditi servers , you could decrease performance quickly .

But it s because aditi servers are testing machines , and often with huge debbugging traces on the server side who doesn t exist on agni servers . Their hardware is different too .

[Joeey Aura]

well as someone who has been long anticipating this I have to say im a little dissapointed in it already, Since the server totally controls the movement of the object using the physics engine, and there seems to be no non-physical option for it. As a creator of one of the only popular player vs npc games in sl, having a massive amount of enemies is not viable. from already playing with it on aditi physics load goes real high with very few of them on the sim at once.  If i could simply return a path list and then handle the movement myself i'd be much happier with this..  lets hope that as vincent said  its just like this because its in beta and on aditi servers.

[Falcon Linden]

Hi Josey,

 

The poor performance you've seen is almost certainly due to the fact that the sims are, as Vincent said, running debug code which can easily spend 50ms each frame validating data, cutting frame rate at least in half. In testing, we have measured characters taking approximately 30-50us (microseconds) on average, less than one third of the time slice allocated to each script in the region each frame. The only thing we've seen cause significant performance issues is when half a dozen or more characters pile up on each other. The upcoming viewer tools will allow you to see how expensive each character on a region is and take action accordingly.

 

Falcon