Actually yours was the only post I thought made any sense. I mean sure we all want to love the openspace sims, and I have seen many used to buffer full sims beautifully. But when people claim they perform as well as a full sim, I sort of have to shake my head a bit. It is just a shame that the people who really don't know the difference are the ones who seem to get screwed by the lag of the open space. I guess it really is buyer beware.
Here's what's going on, generally, with openspaces:
- low script performance,
- much fewer textures to cause problems.
Some pro's and con's - and why people remain ignorant of both very good and very bad conditions:
1) The "Babe in the Woods" scenario:
Say you abusively, crushingly, horrifically load down an openspace region with scripts. It's suffering, and you can practically hear the electrons screaming when you turn on statistics view.
Drop a noob in there... and guess what, they walk around just fine, textures load fine - they can't even seem to find any problem!
Of course, if you tried operating a scripted nonphysical vehicle it would be just about frozen, but for *that user* walking around they see nearly 45 FPS, no time dilation, and don't even realise what you are talking about.
Lag? What lag? Yet the region is on its knees.
In many cases the new resident will think "the vehicle is broken" or "the script is broken" when in fact nothing could be further from the case.
2) The "Lol, What?" scenario:
Say you have an openspace region - nay, *any* region absolutely bereft of scripts and prims. Nothing. In. It. At all.
You are standing in one corner looking out across the empty region enjoying ridiculously awesome performance.
However, that region borders three others: A, B, and C. Smack at the corner, region A has a furniture yard sale, B has a texture shop and C has Fast Eddie's 5000 prim Mecha Robot Avatar Camping - and there are 40 customers idled there.
Not one of them are in the same region; all just across the border.
You turn around from your pristine view and look - and your computer locks up for two and a half minutes. While you play with the little hourglassy thing that replaced your mouse pointer.
But there is *absolutely* nothing wrong with the region you are in!
3) The "Typhoid Mary of Lag" scenario:
So you've got a standard region... it does alright, not great, nobody complains much.
Then one day, you get five reports of absolutely devastating performance.
Resident A reports that his scripts are a bit off - would you check the region please?
Resident B reports that he's having a bit of trouble but only after dinner, east coast time, and the mornings are fine.
Residents C, D and E say they asked one of the estate managers to restart a region three times, but each time it kept coming back "laggy." Resident D was particularly upset, complained of "all the lag that SL seems to have lately" and said the game was junk.
You log in mid-day, and can't find a thing wrong. Alright. You try again east coast "after dinner" hours. Residents A and B are there, and both say it's been bad all night, but seems to be working just as you show up. Okay, whatever.
Suddenly you get an IM from Resident D, who is at wit's end. You are on another service call in another region, but you TP Resident D to you - and suddenly enter a slow-motion time warp.
Unbeknownst to you however, Resident D has Scammer McFly's HUD of 666 Active Scripts, is wearing the equivalent prims of 1/3 of a region and each one of them seems to have a unique texture.
Just as you type "Hi" the blade-tips of your graphics card fan spool up enough to break the sound barrier, and scare your cat.
And Resident D is here to tell you how bad all these rotten regions are, wherever they go these days. But in spite of that, offers you a copy of the cool HUD their super-genius friend just made.
* * * * *
So yeah, it's a bit like swapping racecars and delivery trucks, depending what you are doing.
Openspaces tend to handle lots of avatars okay - I've seen them operate even to the 100 avatar limit and maintain time dilation over .90 with ease - sometimes better than a standard region.
Why? Because a standard region typically and easily contains 10k or 12k prims, and multiply a huge number of those prim sides with unique textures. Multiply those runaway #'s of textures by the number of av's needing to see them, too.
Openspace regions are so empty there's not generally not enough prims to slather textures on like that, and what there are, are often spread far apart - out of draw distance. So you don't get anywhere near the performance hit from textures - one of the top offenders if not the #1 lag problem in most regions.
Scripts - this is where openspaces really break down. Forget about mono coming for a moment - if you are going to do anything that uses scripts heavily, you may want to think twice about openspace regions. But seriously, I've seen regional script usage in dozens of sims across two years.
The top offenders are stupid things like "wind chimes" and "patches the squirrel" at 1.480 each or some ridiculously high number, followed by 90% of everything else at .025 or .010. Zap three or four things and suddenly everything works.
This is generally why openspaces + estate managership works so well - give people the power to see what's going on and they typically zap their own problem items.
Okay, big long technical post. It's just frustrating to see situations where people say "this crappy Ferrari won't let me carry my oil drums effectively at all!" or "this fourteen wheeler has no acceleration!" - the devil really is in the details.
That said, I'd like to see more of these details. Part of the problem is that performance is a moving target, every time the server software gets an update.
Let's all do what we can to nail down as many facts as possible.
" - Prospero Linden
