The Tao of AO

(Forgot to address this in my previous post.) This, in fact, highlights another way that AOs cause lag in crowds: download of exotic animations. When an AO pushes a new anim on one avatar, every avatar in the vicinity has to get a copy of that downloaded to their client. So, when a new AO-wearing avatar arrives on the scene, not only does the sim have to tell everybody about their prim hair and high-res skin and clothing textures, but it also has to introduce everybody to each animation, the first time each is played by the newly-arrived AO.

That said, having been Ruthed a few times, I wouldn't walk anywhere with the default female waddle--*especially* if my avatar were, in fact, female.

This is kind of a dumb question and it'd pull the market out from all those animation makers who make sexy walks or studly walks or whatever, but why can't LL just make a sexy walk or studly walk the default walk animation depending on which sex you make your avatar?

About lag:

The lag that scripts cause has NOTHING to do with slow movement and slow rezzing. Scripts only cause lag to other scripts (and possibly to chat, though I'm not sure about that).

This is because of the way sim CPU time is allocated. Physics gets a guaranteed portion if it needs it. Scripts get a guaranteed portion, and use any remaining that physics doesn't need. If physics doesn't need it, there's no lag in movement! If physics does use up all its time, laggy scripts will not have any affect.

Laggy scripts cause things like the following:
- When you sit on a poseball, it'll take a long time to animate you
- Doors are slow to open
- Menus are slow to appear, and after selecting the menu item, the action doesn't happen right away.

Laggy scripts do NOT cause the following:
- you can't move -- your av is slow to respond to your controls
- your av sinks into the ground
- the world is slow to rez
- slow display frame rate, causing the world to look jerky

Caveat: Scripts that rez and/or move prims (like machine guns) can cause server-side physics lag as well as display lag. That's a special case, and has nothing to do with this thread. It's the prims causing the delay, but the script is causing or moving the prims so it is indeed at fault, indirectly.

I'm all in favor of the suggestion to make it so AOs don't need to poll. Polling is wasteful. Just keep in mind it's NOT causing your av to be slow to act, or your display to be jerky. Flexi prim hair is FAR more likely to be the cause. The biggest cause is too many avatars.

(Flex slows down your display rate. Lots of prims slow down your display and also the server, causing things like "movement lag".)

HTH. Lots of misinformation about scripts and lag!

because someone somwhere loves that waddle that goes with the hair

I just got a zhao II at NCI the other day. Looks great.

There doesn't seem to be a good male walk out there. I think I went all through animation island and checked every single one and they all look weird.

Probably Dan Linden.

We were created in his image I guess....

I quite like the male walk from the DNA package by LostDog Designs. Not sure whether it's available separately, though.