Warning! Self-replicating Land Scanner on many sims!

turn off fog and clouds.
set drawn distance to 128m

if you stand at x, y, z
and you create 10mx10mx10m cube and set it to x,y, z+400m
and you look straight up
you will be able to see the object.

what the client thinks it can see seems to be determined only by x-y coords

note: you won't see much beyond 128 meters in the x-y distance

Okay, Talen, I'm back from 24 away from the forums and you seem to be "last man standing" trying to defend these satellites.

Let me stick a fork in your arguments in this thread once and for all.


Which rediculous facts?

- That these are clandestine and done without permission or warning?
- That no other scripter has dared done something this audacious? (And it's not a matter of lack of talent.)
- That SL grows tenfold every quarter, and by that mark, if there are a hundred people doing this in 6 months, the servers would be ground to a halt?
- That these Satellites have no similarity to vehicles, players, hoochie hair, or other returnable items?
- That this is trodding over landowner rights?

The only discernable "rediculous fact" I have seen addressed as a concern has been the possibility of these causing lag spikes. Now, no one ever said it was true, just as a possibility. Ergo, no one ever presented it as a fact. This is commiting at least two logical fallacies:
Straw Man: trying to show that your opponent is saying something different, that is easily rebuttable.
Unrepresentative sample: claiming that we "all" are making these arguments, when the majority of us have acknowledged that, currently, it's likely a low-impact on the servers for one person to be doing these satellites.



Ad hominem (attacking the person): ignoring the arguments and attacking the person behind them.

Also, the tests done by you and two others are completely unscientific for a variety of reasons:
1. You drew your conclusions in the thread before you did your tests.
2. Limited scope of the test on only 1 test subject.
3. No way to reproduce the experiment.
4. No controlled conditions.

The only ideal way to test this is to have a sysadmin at LL actually look at the process running on the server and examining the actual memory / clock cycles this is eating up on both the sim and the asset server.

Lemme see... 100s of sims x approx. 10 satellites at a time x once a minute = 1000s of rezzes per minute. I would even argue that this volume of rezzing is a significant number of the rezzing done by the asset server.

Now expand this to 6 months from now using the 10x rule: 100 data miners doing this... 100s of 1000s of rezzes per minutes x 100 times the sims =
10s of millions of rezzes per minutes that the asset server has to deal with.

That seems like a problem to me.

Talen, please, I urge you, consider this is NOT:
(a) - a bash Pete thread / drama. In fact, it's been pretty damn civil for a 20+ page thread. Extremely damn civil.
(b) - a dismissable issue. Land ownership rights affects everyone in SL and to dismiss this thread as a lynch mob, as you would suggest, is not considerate of the larger issue.
(c) - a matter of one satellite network. It's about the rules behind it.

...

p.s. - Blaze, why can't all of your posts contain insightful, thought-out stuff like this?:

there are other purposes for land scanning other than looking for land.

Which aren't as time sensitive and don't require a constant scan. Freed-up land scanning needs to constantly scan to get the jump on buying the freshly released land.

Something like a topographical map, on the other hand, only needs to send a satellite through once. Two whole different animals.

Boo-hoo people. Lets make a thread about it!

Return objects own by others.

Ryen, if you read the topic, you'd know that doesn't work with these.

actually demographic information about where people congregate, or which shopping areas are heavily traffic'd etc would be scan intensive and lag causing, or who owns land for how long.

and there are other things that would/could be done with satellites.

there's lotsa useful data out there. some forms of data require more cpu intensive data collecting than others.

I went out to check on this one, as this IS NOT the way these are intended to work. I spent about 30 min out here, adjusted my code, and came to the understanding of why this is happening.

This has been a problem that almost everyone that has ever played SL has delt with. Ghosting.

Simple, repeatable proof of concept follows:

Find 2 people, and make your way to Ainu 254,35,400.
Turn on object beacons (View, Object Beacons)
Hang out for 10 min.
You and your friends should see about the same amount of beacons there, much like the pic qouted above.
Have 1 person teleport out, or log off. In my testing either one did the trick.
That person should return to coords listed above. Once there, person that has left will see zero or few ghosts, whereas, person that has been there the entire time, will still see them all.

Please let me know if you mileage varies.

Actually, you've probably done the world a favour.... Linden Labs are looking for repeatable ghosting cases so they can try fix it in 1.6.

Here here. Gov't of laws and not of men.

And all that other stuff you said, that too.

Interesting how you dodge the problem.
Please go sucking resources on the land you OWN, i don't want your scanners on mine.

Last night I logged in and saw Pete was inworld, so I sent him and IM asking a couple of questions regarding the objects. I explained to Pete that I had had two Lindens over the other night and we noticed some significant fluctuations in the sim fps for Stillman. Pete came over and took a look for himself. Sure enough, the sim fps was dropping by about 40%.

Pete turned off the objects, although I don't know if he just excluded Stillman or turned them off completely, and we watched the Stillman sim fps for another half hour. The sim fps was *still* periodically dropping by about 40%. It would hover around 1050 and dip down into the mid-600's every minute or so. Clearly, this is being caused by some other factor and not from Pete's objects.

Most of the land in Stillman is owned by my group and the few neighbors we have are rarely seen and have very few builds (if any at all). Our sim is also home to the free bazaar and a telehub - I suspect thats where the flux may be coming from.

Oddly, after Pete removed his objects, we discovered another set owned by someone else. I'll have a look at those later tonight and detail what I've found.

I would suggest if you're really concerned about sim load, send him an IM and talk with him about it - he was very helpful and seemed to be interested in making sure his objects didn't significantly contribute to lag.

...or just carry on screaming for his blood here and DEMAND that he tell you what he's up to.

Sheesh! Stop with the being reasonable, Juro! And then daring to suggest that it wasnt Pete's objects that were causing lag as well! Are you looking to join him on the bonfire?!

Pete and anyone else doing similar work could save themselves and everyone alot of time by including notecards on touch in their objects to explain what in general they are doing. But if the script is over land he owns then no explanation is needed.

Kris: There's only 1 or 2 people that I see as carrying torches. However there are just as many if not more people creating more drama and unneeded comments from the other crowd. Like Hiro said, 2 or 3 people aside, this has been a very reasonable discussion. The anti-torch crowd is just as guilty if not more in creating drama.

I do like it hot!!!! MMmmmm!

Surely 'screw you' could just be IM'd? seems a bit overkill to use a notecard.

This is absolutely true and something I spoke to Pete about. Personally, I think that one of the reasons people get so upset over this is that having someone scan your land w/o permission *feels* like a violation - even though it is not against the TOS.

Hi! Drama class is down the hall. Thanks.

Thats not drama. Thats just my reply to anyone who demands to know what my scripts are doing, or demands that I come account for my actions to the pitchfork wielders. And what I'd put in the 'about' information in my objects should I decide to pursue a career in grid scanning. Of course, undoubtedly someone would turn it into a drama, fling accusations and eventually bring up nazi concentration camps for comparison to my behaviour. But that's ok. It livens up the forums for a bit.

Except the Lindens, of course. If they asked, I would answer. If they ask me to remove something with good reason, I will comply. After all, they're the only people any of us are accountable to, and the only people we are compelled to work with in such situations, assuming we'd like to keep our accounts.

I demanded to know? I didnt. You are creating drama on false pretenses. I made no demands. Here was my comment:

Notice I said 'could' and not 'should'. There's a huge difference. And there's a lack of emotion in my comments. No pitchfork wielding here.

LOL. Cos it's all about you, isnt it? This may come as a shock to you, but I wasnt actually explicitly referring to you. There have been demands in this thread and in others. Just like I said. Those are what I am referring to. Creating drama under false pretenses? lol. Did you actually read the thread?

So you wanted to comment about all the demands being made by quoting one that you now admit had no demands? Ok. Makes sense. Backpedal much?

WTF? I quoted a comment of yours about a notecard to make a joke/observation originally. Why in the fuck do you think it's (a) about you, and (b) backpedalling?

You do understand how forums and threaded discussions work, right?

Annah, stop feeding the troll.

Pete,

Did you stop to think why ghosting occurs? In general, ghosting happens when the asset server can't keep up with derez requests. Sometimes it happens when you delete an object still compiling, or create and delete one so fast that it beats race conditions.

Now, if your objects are regularly ghosting somewhere, then there's a good chance its because of their nature, and not because of LL. I think it's real easy for you to pass the buck and say it's not your problem; it is. And if it is causing the asset server to lose track of it, then certainly there's a(nother) legit problem there.

And you still haven't responded to the two main issues:
1. This is completely unscalable. Why should you be able to do it if lots of people can't?
2. Why should you be able to keep objects constantly above someone's land? Period. Not even about the prims. It's about land owner rights. This isn't like zeppelins or birds that fly through, it's about something that's always hovering and refreshing.

Further, this is disruptive to anyone who has a build around 400m - it can interfere with building objects because I will have trouble linking objects because I'll be accidentally highlighting on your satellites.