I'm thinking about Yet Another Script that'd have to ask The Grid periodically if I'm online.
I'm trying to be a good citizen about the polling interval, but even if I take care to restrict polling to only those times when I'm likely to be on, I'd be pinging the dataserver a LOT to see if I'm around.
A request here, a request there; pretty soon, you're talking about real resource consumption
I'm wondering if it'd be worthwhile to have each avie able to set a key for one (1) delegate object. Maybe just paste the key into a hidden field on the profile?
The idea is, the Grid would push events to the delegate script. Say, push an
owner_did_login( string sim_name, float time )
at the start of a session and a complementary event at the end of it.
You could maybe sweeten it up with some extra events. My second choice would probably be
owner_did_change_sims( string old_sim, string new_sim, float border_crossing_time, integer via_tp )
which could be useful, I guess. But it's really the login and logout events I'm after.
I think that'd let folks shut down a lot of online status polling devices and create a central object per avie that could message other objects as needed, when the owners entered or left The Grid. If you limited the environment to having to track at most one of these objects per avie, it seems like there'd be opportunity for saving some processing cycles Grid-wide.
== danny d.