Client side poseballs?

So, like, SL as we know it is cluttered in polygons and text that only serve as clickable icons to sit down, dance, sleep, shower, etcetera. Poseballs are everywhere.

Many, but not all of these, have a script that listens to the open chat channel for hide and show commands. By my understanding, this, along with the added polygon count, add to lag when running SL. Not to mention, someone needs to turn the poseballs visible to use them, even if the rest of the room as no need for them at the moment.

Wouldn't it be possible to make all this work on the client side of things? So instead of a sim-slowing script running for each and every poseball, each individual person could switch the poseballs off and on, without affecting anyone else.

( "Maybe there should be a generic client texture mode of some sort. Like you set a prim to "client texture" and when residents toggle their "client texture view" on and off it will appear and dissapear just for them"

-Aimee)

Even if the sim lag caused by these scripts aren't so much of a problem, it would certainly make SL *look* a lot nicer. That's got to count for something, right?

I think this could be an extension of another idea, client-side scripts. There are a LOT of script functions and entire scripts that could be run client-side, perhaps sending certain data back to the servers. This wouldn't work for vehicles, but for furniture that uses poseballs, I see no reason why it wouldn't work. The client could download the script, run it based on the commands (requiring a voice command for show/hide instead of a touch event is poor coding in my opinion), and send the "X avatar is doing Y animation at these coordinates" data back to LL.

Just an idea.

Err, yeh, you can do this just by having the poseballs hide/show on touch or something else that isn't broadcast. Nothing to do with them being "client side" or not.

Oh, and the people who make objects that listen on 0 or chat on 0 without a damn good reason are probably not smart enough to handle client-server programming anyway.

But Argent, changing the method of telling them to appear or dissapear wouldn't help the clutter of poseballs dotting the landscape. If you could turn them visible or invisible on the client side, no one would ever need to see a poseball, except for the couple moments they, themselves, spent picking out a seat or animation.

I do agree with you about the people who have scripts listening to the regular chat channel, but if it were a generic client-controlled texture, it could be something you just slap on poseballs with no scripting whatsoever.

Visibility or invisibility is a client side concept as it is, it's got nothing to do with the sim.

What you seem to be asking for is some kind of "make this prim only visible to one avatar/only visible on request" scheme. Calling it "client side" is a really confusing way of describing it...

You can always leave them invisible and hit ctrl-alt-t to see them.

Visibility being a client-side concept is only really true so far as graphics being a client side concept. I can make all of SL invisible without affecting the view of anyone else, simply by shutting my monitor off. However, if I run into a lobby filled with poseballs for sitting and dancing, or whatever, and say "show", then the poseballs appear for everyone. That's if they aren't already visible, and most are just left visible by their owners. Some of them don't even come with the handy hide/show script.

I'm suggesting that people are lazy, and it has a detrimental affect on resident created content and the landscape of SL in general, and that LL could curb that by simply making things so easy, that even the laziest people out there can just slap a property or texture onto things like poseballs so that everyone else only has to look at the things if they, themselves, need them.

Since all poseballs are created by SL's userbase, and not LL itself, I do not expect such an option will solve the problem overnight. And so there's no confusion, I don't see this as a major issue, just one of those little things that I see as easy to implement, while generally making the whole SL experience more pleasant.

I describe it as a 'client side' option because you'd toggle the visibility of the poseballs in your own client (or viewer, as they seem to prefere to call them for SL), rather than activating a script on the server side of things, which would also affect everyone else in the immeadiate vicinity.

I understand what you're saying.

What you're looking for is a texture that is optionally transparent, like the media texture can have different appearances to different people.