Am I a responsible citizen?

I have purchased a bird avatar which comes with its own AO. I'm very fond of it. But I've been reading here that AOs are a big source of lag for others and that a clothing allotment (index? something or other) more than 2 is bad. (Where would I find out what my clothing index is?) This AV has a wardrobe that uses every available clothing item. Am I being a bad citizen?

No.

(Edit, no to your last sentence, not to the thread topic)

IMHO you are being a responsible citizen by even asking these questions ..

the AO only adds to sim lag if it constantly "open listens" on channel 0 ..

i.e all commands are issued in normal chat .. and not say /5.

the outfit composite limit ( your words "clothing index" ?) is only affecting your client draw time.


EDIT to add ..

Your "clothing index" comes under advanced graphics ( I think lol )

actual title "Outfit composit limit" .. as all other avatars recieve the "Baked" version down the stream it affects no one but you.

No, a naughty bird maybe!

There's really much more to it than that. A recent thread ("The TAO of AO" or something like that) explores why AOs cause various forms of lag, but an open listen wouldn't even register on the scale of laggy stuff an AO does, just to be an AO. (One big part of it is that an AO script must poll, there being no event triggered when an avatar's animation state changes.)

All that said, I wholeheartedly agree with the statement "IMHO you are being a responsible citizen by even asking these questions."

I think the one thing that a responsible--and well-informed--resident might do, though, is to remove their AO before entering a very crowded sim (like a town-hall type meeting, where one can be sure in advance that the sim will be maxed out with gray avatars). In those conditions, nobody (but oneself) would be able to see the animation used by the AO anyway, but it *will* cause lag to be forcing that animation down to all the other avatar's viewers--a download doomed to complete several minutes after it no longer applies to anything your avatar is doing.

And in a sim that isn't maxed out? I think just enjoy the AO.

No, the lag claimed by AO's is being blown out of proportion. Most AO's only have a few scripts that run, they do not really affect the sim nearly as much as some people seem to think. Recently the author of the ZHAO AO rewrote his to cut down the number of scripts it uses, and the lag it can cause.

40 people with a ZHAO II AO would only be about 120 scripts operating. A normal sim has 3,000, to 5,000 scripts running normally. This would not make too much difference. Now some avatars will be a bit laggier than others, but in most cases I really do not see that much of a problem.

Now that is not to say that lots of scripted attachments won't be a problem. Some listen for open chat, so they process every spoken word around them wasting lits of server time, and some, like radars scan a large area around them on a regular basis.

From my experience with scripting, AO's probably are one of the less likely items to case major lag in a sim.

I ran across one person once, that was wearing a bunch of scripted weapons. She bragged about having over 3000 prims worth of weapons and armor, containing over 2000 scripts. Now that was a person who would bog the sim down when she arrived.