Public Land Scanner

So how much lag is this causing worldwide so the land leeches can get their cheap land?

i could pontificate profusely using a myriad of excitingly complex verbal structures but it would all boil down to "i don't know."

i am interested in purchasing one of the 16sm blocks from chance though. if he's through with them and anyone can put me in touch. his profile is not findable again except by examining land that he owns.

are you out there chance? /wave

People who steal land allocation (prims) and FPS cycles from sims for their own selfish needs, across the entire grid, should have been driven out of SL already. Shame on the Lindens for letting people like this suck the very resources that the rest of us pay for, and still exist in SL while flaunting their scum sucking methodology.

Alternative Viewpoint: it doesn't matter.

Alternative to the alternate viewpoint: yes it does.

Why? Because if an inefficient, laggy, hackneyed land-scanner is being used by an inactive account, it's sucking down a lot of resources for ZERO gain. none. It's making your avatar move slower, the clubs clubbier, and the Sims slower.

LF

Do you own land in a sim with one of these things, or similar ones like it? Have you had to live with lag when one of these things goes through one of it's cycles/scans? Maybe it does matter to some people, and doesn't matter to you. These land scanners are typically placed on 16sqm of land (that's 0.02% of a simulator), but can consume a large majority of the simulator's resources when they are scanning.

In Davenport, I noticed a huge slowdown every two minutes when the land scanner did its sweep. It's not an insignificant effect, especially for a sim running on borderline hardware.

i dunno, how do you tell if one's going off? and don't say "things get laggy" cause that happens all the time.

what i meant in the middle of getting all flippant was it's not worth getting upset over. sure it sucks big toes and something needs to be done to make sure people don't hog server resources but at the end of the day, bleh, lag happens. people are dickweeds. you can still have fun. be concerned sure but don't get upset.

Zuzi, perhaps I should buy several 16m blocks in the sims that you own land in and visit frequently and lower your fps with my scripts. Maybe then you may realize that this matters. Then I'll do this on a scale of what Chance has done pissing off many many people.

But by your definition... how much lag would it take for it to matter to you? Until you're creeping along at 3fps? Until you can't move? Until the server is crashing?

Come on, now.

Yes, but it's also something Linden Labs can deal with. They can magically request that land scanners not be used, or they can limit the amount of script resource in a particular sim by the amount of land owned by the individual in that sim. I don't like that idea though. But the point Hank makes is that this person does not spend personal time in the sims that could be largely affected by these scanners. Therefore, the impact is on the many people who don't care about such things. Lag doesn't just happen. It is created, and objects such as this scanner contribute to that lag, without benefit for those who "live" in the sim.

I totally agree that these land scanners should be stopped. ANY extra lag in a sim due to a scanner is not acceptable.

Ban the scanners Lindens

And the use of this 16sqm isn't just by Chance. Chance is just the one bragging about what he has done. There are other people doing the same thing, several in fact, lagging sims on a world-wide scale for their own selfish purposes. They don't care about their impact on a sim other than how much L$/US$ it can make them, and making sure that it's not bad enough to have the Lindens step in because the sim has crashed or is in the single digit fps all the time.

There are groups also using a similiar technique for non-selfish purposes, and they do care about the impacts they have on simulators and the people who buy the land and live in them.

I understand that this particular use of land scanners is unpopular. But here's my honest question. If the Lindens can't or won't do anything to stop a club from conspicuously sucking the life out of a sim at the expense of its neighbors, is it realistic that they can or will do anything to stop a script whose effect on a sim is questionable?

I've only thought of two ways to disable these things. One is to remove the offset parameter from llGetLandOwnerAt(), so it always returns the owner at the object's location. But this would sabotage some interesting real estate statistic gathering, and it would motivate the speculators to build roving drones. The other way is to not have public land.

Gee, if I get the same lag is there a difference to me?

Basically it is a LL issue. Right now script cycles used are like prims used in the "old days" where limits were not tied to the amount of land owned. LL needs to tie the amount of script resource usage to the amount of land owned. OTOH, LL can leave things as is, it's their choice. It is our choice to lobby LL albeit LL does not seem to listen.

Gotta keep in mind it is a game, LL creates rules and we play within those rules. If the rules allow then there is really no room to complain. If the complaint is that the game is being "gamed"...

Maybe if people would be a little more conscious when designing or implementing some scripts, Lagg wouldn't be soooo common world wide, and maybe they wouldn't be soooo severe once they occur. It's a question of majority-well-being. Some people don't seem to get that.

Lag is based solely on LL. The servers they employ, the bandwidth limitations they impose, the design they implement and the rules they impose.

i thought they were doing this? weren't they going to have it release to Linden owned or something? i might be wrong.

Bran, i'm a newbie and even i got to call bullshit on that one. i guess you could get all metaphysical and say Linden is responsible for all lag because they made sl and without that there wouldn't be any lag but that's like blaming god because your neighbor plays the stereo too loud.

if Linden makes all the lag and we don't affect it i guess i can go ahead with my script that listens on every single possible channel and has a 0.1 second timer that runs every function every time for demonstration purposes hehe. thanks!

serious part.... what are some sims affected by land scanning and how do you know it's going on other than some lag?

The scanners look for public land (as described in Hank's quote) so that it can be bought at below-market prices before other people notice it. I do remember something about released land going to auction rather than to public, but apparently people are still scanning for public land. If there's no public land, problem solved

Like I said above, it is a LL problem that LL can resolve--if they choose, if they feel it is a problem. Heck, the could ban land scanners if they wanted, but they don't.

But I have to ask, to what extent do these land scanners _really_ affect lag? Numbers please, no touchie-feeelie stuff.

To what extent does increasing the number of players affect lag?

This is not true. If you have a slow comp, or you are in a area with newbie builders using very large textures, UDP packets will congest, expire and you see packet loss (aka lag).

If everyone had a faster comp and textures had stricter rules, you'd see less lag.

I don't know whether you're asking me about lag, Bran, since you quoted me. But as a test I built a public land scanner with 8 scripts and didn't notice any performance difference. This didn't surprise me, since calls to llGetLandOwnerAt() don't involve physics or client updates, and presumably sim server code is optimized for retrieving terrain data. I didn't do anything statistical though. I imagine someone could.

Thus the bandwidth setting in the client prefs. Also smarter servers would figure out to slow the packet rate to computers that can't keep up with it.



As it turns out many non-newbs want large textures. But a _good_ client caching scheme would go a long way in resolving this.

That is a good starting test, at least somewhat quantitative.

Now can we hear some measurements from those claiming it is the land scanners that are causing substantial lag?

As i posted in the other thread where hank got that quote from. I was in a rather lagged sim and asked for linden help in diagnosing the issue. At first in 1.4.x there wasn't a whole lot they were able to do. Then with the advent of 1.5.x they got some new tools and i asked for help again.

It turns out that chance, with his 16sqm and one object, with 17 active scripts in it, was the second most lag-causing thing in the sim, behind a physics enabled elevator that had broken and was causing collisions. but *AHEAD* of an antiquated leaf tree that was known to have caused about 10% of the sims timeslice (it was removed and thats how much the sim went up)

so chance with his little scanner setup, was using *MORE* than 10% of the entire sims resources, so he could get that land. And he did this across many *MANY* sims.

There are other scanners out there, quite a number of them actually... but none of them are as atrociously conspicuously designed to cause lag like chances (most only involve a single script, with a rather SENSIBLE scan rate (every half hour, or hour, etc)

chance's was just silly.. and he *was* effectively punished by the lindens for what he did. They removed the game mechanic that *WAS* his get-rich-quick scheme.

Of course that didn't make him happy, or want to remove the scanners he did have in world which at this point (with now accidentally released land going to head to linden hands too for easier recovery) is pretty much just a monument to how little he cares about the damage his excessive scripting caused, or still causes to this day

There's a statistic then At least 10% with 17 scripts. I guess we don't know how efficiently or inefficiently they were written.

Although I'm no fan of this kind of scanning, I still don't see how the Lindens are going to police this if they don't police things that more conspicuously consume sim resources.