How do you feel about using Rezz tools?

Hello my motley meta-friends...

I was wondering what you thought about the use of rezz tools--tools that allow you to use temp objects in a permanent fashion.

Prims are expensive, and they run out quickly--especially when you construct in higher detail. Besides landscaping or the build itself, as we all know--or should--many products benefit by having a 3d version available for viewing. However, due to alloted prim counts, many people just slap up single prim ad-boards for their product.

Anyway...I recently purchased a rezz-tool...and placed eight high-detail 3d items up for display. Now, this normally would put me way over my prim allotment, however, every object is considered only 1 prim by the land...the only downside is that every so often, the objects will disappear and re-rezz....but it's pretty quick, and only happens once every few minutes.

The question is, is this OK to do? Am I breaking some cardinal rule? Do any of you take advantage of these kinds of scripts/tools? Shall I be hanged in public for such trashy business ethic?

I know these tools/products aren't new, I'm just wondering whether land owners care, and whether people feel the server takes a hit from this kind of work-around.

One thing I do know...is that sims may have an alloted prim count, but this count could be much higher...it's not the prim counts of sims that slow things down...it's scripts and textures (so my dev friend agrees with).

What do you think?

A friend uses this tool on her 512 lots, to entice folks into buying. She actually had a Linden come and look. No problem as it isnt against TOS. However, I believe some here may say it affects performance of the sim. Also, once the sim prim count is hit...things just start disappearing, if I understand it right.

I can't speak for every case of course, but generally what I've seen is this:

Time dilation spikes down to anywhere from 0.85 to 0.70 or so at several second intervals - usually once rezzers are abused past this point even the most non-techie noob notices and starts to hunt or ask for the culprit.

Rarely do people do less than this to a region, figuring "I haven't lagged it yet, let's do more" and rarely does it get much worse - with the exception of the satellite-store shopkeep, who lags the region to hell and gone, and doesn't realise it's bouncing off a time dilation of .030 every several seconds for weeks on end.

Major factors:

Forget about the prims. The issue is the launch of:
- a bazillion textures
- a whole bunch of script starts
...in whatever is being rezzed.

Usually the rezzed items are loaded with 512x512 textures, being dropped in a burst. Ouch. It's like teleporting into a region, over and over and over.

The other factor is that yeah, those prims gotta come from somewhere. Your typical 'full' sim usually has only maybe 9000-13000 prims in it, due to people leaving some room, &c. Well, not so with temp-rezzef infested regions. You are right up against maximum capabilities of the servers, pushing client software hard by pushing more ktris than it's used to getting, all that stuff.

Can you get away with doing it? Yeah, probably. I personally don't ban reasonable use in my own regions, because sometimes a temp-rez effect is alright - there are appropriate uses for it.

But using it to exceed limits is going to be devastating if everyone else in the region says: "Hey, I should do that too!"

Finally - I'm not sure, but I think regions are capped at 15000 prims including temp-rez - I'd have to look it up. If so, the temp-rez prims are actually borrowed from your neighbours, once your parcel is full - but I could be wrong about this.

I'd recommend extremely light usage - and good luck with it.

This is been hashed and re-hashed several times.
Temp rezzors are not inhierently laggy, but if there is a script in the objects to be rezzed, they are horrible on sim performance.

There is a finite amount of prims on any sim. 15000. Temp prims count to this limit. While you may be able to go over your specific parcel limit, you are doing so by reducing the over all available prims. For example, say a sim is quartered. Each resident gets 3750 prims. If all of the residents have 3725 prims used that leaves 100 prims free. Now suppose one resident wants to temp reaz a garden. They drop in 1 prim and it resses 11 bushes at 4 prims each. Of course to keep from flickering, there are times that 22 bushes are up. That 89 prims total. 1 permenant and 88 temp. If you are following along, you know that any of the other 3 resident have 25 prims let to thier allotment they pay for. But none of them can rez an object with more than 11 prims. Go to about land and there will show 25 prims free but they are not available to use because 1 resident has them tied up with a temp rezzer.

Short version. TINSTAAFL. There is no such thing as a free lunch. You are getting more prims with a temp rezzor but they have to come from somewhere. And that somewhere is from your neighbor's allotment.

It does work like that and usually causes much headache since people (and sim owners) tend to only focus on "About Land" where it says there are free prims while any attempt to rez a new prim fails with "Sim is full".

And as Ceera (I think ) usually brings up in these kinds of threads, some rezzers actually use twice the amount of prims since they rez a new copy before the old one vanishes.

Interesting.

As a consumer....I just had an experience with such a thing last night.

I shopped high and low for some kind of cool space station skybox to rez above my land..... wanted to add a sort of sci-fi area to my photogrophy studio. Finally after bouncing all over the place I find this place that sells these really cool space station and I thought...ooohhhh perfect!

They came with a temp. launcher that launches you to your destination altitude.....rezzes the station and then disappears......how cool! Also...the station itself is set to disappear after 2 minutes of no avatars using it.....again...perfect...I only want it for studio purposes anyway.

So.... first thing that happens is I launch myself to 800 meters to rez my new station.....and the dam launcher disappears before the sation even rez's!! So....I plummet the 800 meters back down to my beach... ouch. Ok.....fine...I have my flight feather...I'll just fly back up myself......well...... now I can't get IN the sation....the only thing that lets me in is the little escape pod attached to outside of the station....Doh! Once again....I am
on a fast descent back down to my beach....only this time in a spinning escape pod that disappears in a poof of smoke once I hit the ground. Joy.

I try yet again to fly up to my space station..... I can't get inside.....and it disappears of course, after 2 minutes of vacancy.

So.....you can porbably guess my opinion as a consumer on temp rezzer systems. Great in theory.....but lousy in practice if you happen to be trying to launch yourself into space with one.

If you want to use more prims than you have space for, then either buy more land or cut down on the prims you want to use. That's the only real answers.

"Temp on rez" is *not* meant to overcome prim limits, rather to allow, exactly as it says, 'temporary' things like bullets that you don't want to have to go round and find every one after you fire it.

'Temp on rezzers' do affect other residents of the region, do have the potential to damage other people's enjoyment of their land, and thus shouldn't really be questioned as whether they are permitted or not - in the majority of cases, they can more easily be argued not as are.

Rather than overriding your prim allowance, there are many ways that 'low prim' construction and good texturing can be learnt to streamline your building without any real degredation in build quality.

Land is indeed expensive, and the biggest reason why so many people drop out of SL. But until any real competition comes along, we just have to either put up with it or do without it.

My experience of temp rezzers and land prim counts indicates that the prim count tends to vary, depending on the state of rezzing. It is most annoying, and the symptom Kitty cites above is a real indicator that someone on the sim is temp-rezzing lots of objects.

As I understand it, temp-rez was originally developed with bullets in mind ... low-prim objects that obviously needed to go away after a while. It works well for acorns from my squirrel. My neighbor had a 285 prim temp-rez spacestation above his land, with scripts for doors etc.. Then a friend of his also got one. That seemed to be enough to begin to cause downspikes in performance.

<edit> Btw, the downspikes were in a class 5 residential sim which is generally empty, has few scripts/m2, 4K lots. In other words, this sim usually screams.
>_<

I see. I understand.

The sim I'm on is pretty unpopulated, I can assure you. I'm not stealing from anybody else's prim count yet. If there comes a time, when the sim fills up, and I notice a lot of builds, I will cut down on my use of temp-rezz items.

This particular temp rezz item says it never goes above _____....I can't find the number, but it was really low, and boasted a very minimal lag count.

ps. the temp rezzer I use doesn't rezz two copies, just one at any given moment.

Did you manage to keep a straight face when typing that? Heh. Good one!

I think you'd be better off with a vendor that rezzes one of the eight items at a time. Shoppers should be able to select the one they want to see rezzed. Items should disappear when a new item is selected, or after some period of time (say 3-5 minutes).

I've seen this approach used by some places that sell buildings or skyboxes. It is natural for those products, because they're typically sold with a rezzer (not a temp rezzer) to help with moving and repositioning the item. But there's no reason this approach couldn't be used for other items.

There are various tricks that can be used to preload textures, which would speed up the rate at which shoppers get to see the item.

I read somewhere that in one of the new or upcoming releases of the Havoc4 sim, temp-on-rez objects will *not* count against the 15,000 prim pool. Can't find it again, though, so, could be just a bad synapse.

As Des and Kitty point out, rezzing prims is an expensive operation, so rezzing the same prims every minute is being sorta profligate with the shared sim resources. (Textures are a big part of it--and a good reason that the owner with all those textures cached doesn't feel the same lag experienced by a fresh, prospective customer. But just a bunch of blank-textured freshly-rezzed twisted tapered tori can make lag for all around--and even the sim itself, if those prims aren't phantom or are, god forbid, scripted or physical.)

*However*, I really don't think it's inherently evil to use temp-on-rez objects for merchandise display, if one is reasonably responsible about it. If you understand what the costs to customer experience are, for example, you really wouldn't re-rezz the same stuff all the time just because a timer expired, but rather because there's a possible customer present who somehow showed an interest in the item. Of course, if your place is crawling with customers all the time... well, you probably have a sim or two all to yourself to hold them, and don't need temp-rezzed displays anyway.

At best, ignoring potential script lag issues, a temp rezzer will cost the sim 2x the prim count of the item being rezzed, plus one prim. It takes 1 prim for the rezzer + one full count for however many prims the rezzed item normally would take up, plus a duplicate that rezzed each minute, just before the former temp copy de-rezzes.

You may not see that against the limit for your parcel, but it DOES count against the 15,000 prim limit for the sim. If the sim is close to full, this can prevent others from rezzing things that they have a perfectly legitimate right to rez on their own parcel, because you are hogging the 'excess', including their unused prim allocation.

Worst case example. I buy a 256 M2 parcel in your sim, and set up 50 temp rezzers, each of which rezzes a 250-prim statue, once per minute...

50 prims for the rezzers
+ 12,500 prims for the temp copies
+ 12,500 prims more as a temporary spike once per minute, but most likely spread out over that minute since they rezzers are not perfectly in synch.

At any given moment, that batch of 50 rezzers is using between 12,550 and 25,050 prims, or is trying to... And no one in the sim can rez any of their own stuff. I have only paid for about 58 prims, but I am using most to all of the resources in the sim.

There is no free lunch. If you need more prim count, buy more land.

Can a temp rezzer be used responsibly? Yes, but not as a way to exceed prim count for your parcel. Responsible use of a temp rezzer means counting what it rezzes as (2*prim-count + 1) prims, and not using those prims elsewhere. An example of that might be a firefly generator. It makes 1 to 10 1-prim fireflies, that float around for a minute and then vanish. Count that as one prim for the rock that makes them (which does count agains your parcel total), and 20 more for the fireflies, and you're being being responsible, if you leave 20 prims free on your parcel count.

If you are using it for a vendor, then have it rez the product sample on-demand, and not renew every minute. Customer presses the "show me" button, and if enough prims are free, they see the item for one minute.

Well a certain defender of temp rezzor rights has pointed out that the temp rezzor does not use the 15,000 prim limit but another reserve for those prims.

So I don't know .. maybe it doesn't.

A lot of people do say they contribute a lot to "lag" for people in the sim and possibly the sim itself.

I don't see how it would avoid contributing lag in just the basic sense of its operation.

At the very least it has the potential to push the sim over 15,000 prims - a limit thats there for a reason.

As well as it contributes whatever lag is caused by rezzing an object over and over and over again.

At best it would contribute to "lag" in a sense the sim can handle ..

at worst ..

Well shit. I put a lot of work into setting this all up to look reeeeal nice.

I had the option of going with a selective product rezzer, or an unlimited rezzer...and I chose the unlimited. I didn't know the temp prims go against alloted sim counts, and would steal from neighbors, hindering them from laying prims they are deserved.

I suppose, since the sim I'm on is practically a ghost town...I'll talk to the land owner, and see if I can 'temporarily' use the temp rezzer...see what they say.

If they don't like it, then I can use the one-item-rezzer option...

I just took a dump on all yesterday's time spent.


BTW: the rezzer I'm using does NOT rezz two items at once...only one.

I always have my stats-bar open and I can see the temp-rezzers are affecting the simwide pirm count. I first noticed this when I was the only person in the sim and the prim count kept going up and down, and I couldn't figure out who the heck was rezzing stuff since nobody else was around. After a while I located the culprits. Some waves are temp-rezzed, so they rez offshore, move ashore, crash, and vanish. Some things, like the aforementioned fireflies. Some things, like one-prim chairs which consist of a single sit-target prim, plus 20+ prims of temponrez details. And a whole house (?!) flickering with temp-rez.

So for now, I will continue to belive that the temp-rez prims count against the simwide 15,000 prim limit, as I can see them affecting the simwide count on the stats bar.

One other comment I have is about the scripts. While not all scripts are created equally, when I check the 'top scripts' for the estate, I've found that the temp-rezzers all tend to rate very highly in there - that single prim rezzer can be demanding as much script-time as a multi-prim animated animal.

Edited to add: The reason people are saying the number of prims is doubled + 1 is not that the rezzer rezzes two items at once. It rezzes the item once. 59 seconds or so later, it rezzes the item again. A second after that, the first instance dies. You have a (roughly) one second overlap when there are two instances of the item. Hence, the usage is object prims * 2 + 1. If the rezzer waits till the original instance has died then rerezzes it, you have 'flicker' where the object in question vanishes for a moment before getting re-rezzed. So, either it flickers, or there is overlap.

-Atashi

I find their use alright in low quantities. If you're using it for half of your house, I'm very much against it. If you're using it for a couple chairs on your deck, it's fine by me. Far too many people, it seems to me, try to use them for things that are huge, and that reallyt bothers me.. it brings down sim performance, and to me it's just plain bad manners anyhow (Not sure how but it's my opinion so there)

The thing is I heard for entire Sim there 500 temp prim limit.
If a whole bunch of people with 512m lots use them what happens?
Just curious.

For future reference and anyone searching this thread later, from the knowledgebase article on region performance:

The same search also turned up the article on "Someone in Second Life is doing something that makes the whole region run much more slowly than it should" which recommends ARing for these things which shows up as "disturbing the peace".

That's true. There is a relatively small limit on temp prims (Though not sure if 500 is exact, I do know it's at least somewhere round there.. sounds right)

If you try to temp-rez beyond that I'd assume either some temp things disappear faster, or the 'new' ones just plain don't rez.

That's why once in a while you'll see them flicker, disappearing and reappearing. To make them appear completely static, they would have to be re-rezzed every minute, which means a little bit of overlap in time. There's actually a trade-off there, too, because if they don't overlap in time, it usually means the rezzed object has a script with a listener to make the object die on command from the rezzer, just as it's rezzing the replacement. The alternative, probably equally laggy and much more prone to flicker, is for the rezzer to run a very frequent sensor scan to see if the rezzed object is still around, and rez a replacement when it's not. The reason for this kludginess is that there's no way for a temp rezzed object to report back that it's being garbage-collected by the sim.

If you do have to switch to on-demand rezzers, I hope maybe there's a way to recover some of the effort that went into setting up the current installation. The scripts for these things are far from rocket science, but I can sure see that setting up a store full of them would be a lot of effort.

There is a flicker--a time when there is no object there.

Ya, it's a lot of work. I only had to do it for eight objects...but that's still very time consuming, setting it up, installing, and then setting up the POS kiosks that sell the item...it took some time...not to mention, I was so happy with the 'look' of the studio.

Live and learn. I don't mean to mess with other peoples' enjoyment or performance...


I found one of the comments above interesting, and it brought something to mind. If a customer is looking for a product, and they TP into a region to have a look at that product, what's the pay off of performance to product scrutiny? Meaning, do customers care more about frame rate when they are shopping, or do they care more about being able to get a great glimpse at the actual products?

Of course, the above example is only applicable to regions which are far from the alloted prim counts...as long as neighbors aren't being jacked.

Personally, I'd rather TP into a store with a bit more lag, but well designed, with products I can clearly mull-over.

Anyway...just a few thoughts.

A temporary prim isn't guaranteed to last exactly 60 seconds though (sim stress, actively selected, being sat on, etc can make it last longer with the latter two indefinitely).

I'd think that the most common solution would involve a script in the temp prims to derez them as the rezzer rezzes a new copy?

If you're sitting on something though, and it gets killed cause it's rezzing a new item, you don't want to have to re-sit every minute.

So, the most 'friendly' manner would be to poll the surrounding area for the items, and have them reply, and only rez a new one when they don't respond. OR have the items say they're sat on to pause the rezzing, and then have it say when un-sat. Gets kinda confusing >.<