Animation Overrrider Kill

How many times have you been at an event, only to be lagged to death because several people are wearing AO devices? How many times have you heard a host call out "We're lagging! Please turn off AO devices!"

AO devices can be nice for just general everyday play, and some avatars (such as Tinies) actually require them. But they are murder at events, where many people are gathered. It's great to look good, but what good is it if no one can move or chat?

Wouldn't it be nice, during an event, to have a landowner option to kill all animation overrides in a parcel or sim? Please visit this vote site and vote for this proposition. ZAP! No more AO lag!

http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=1256

This isn't a Technical Issue, this is a feature that you want........

Not feasible. To do this you'd have to know that a script is specifically an AO and the only thing universally in common with ao's is that they have animation permission. You could request the ability to turn off anything with animation permissions. You could also request the ability to limit the rate that a timer can fire on your parcel which should do something like what you want without killing the ao completely. Timers and listens are what make AOs use so much script time. If the ao is well written then it should be able to slow it's timer down or use the control event to reduce it's script time impact.

Also, the better, more recent AOs, such as the ZHAO, are *much* less laggy than previous generations - no listens, and the timer is a fairly non-impacting four times a second by default, I think.

What we could use is built-in custom animation overrides so we don't need scripts, instead.

Never in the last 6 months. Anyone who's still using an AO that's running on a fast timer instead of monitoring controls needs to update it. And anyone who's using ANY device that chats on channel 0 or listens to owner commands on channel 0 needs to be permanently banned to the Group W bench.

AO's shouldnt use channels, period. those are outdated, get rid of them and get a hud ao already


SL would benifit from having a option to let us set our own anims instead of relying on a script to do it, would be a nice additions, however, stop adding things till you fix some of the major bugs it has now, this has lower pri imo.

Chan 0 is evil <.<

I think most of us wouldn't have even thought AO did this. I didn't.
You can bet when i'm in a heavy sim, i'll remove it though.

Thanks for the heads up, Way.

Now there's an idea and I wonder why we can't do that yet in the first place. We can set most everything else, why not an options window for animations? Someone should make a proposal for that as there does not seem to be one yet. If it was an SL built in function then at the very least it should reduce lag somewhat.

There is one, or probably several since the voting site is so well organized.

Been a while since I was in the ZHAO code, but IIRC, the one thing I absolutely needed a timer for was to detect the change between sitting and standing. I couldn't think of a non-polling way to achieve that. I don't remember if I reduced that to a 1/4 second... I'll take Aliasi's word that I did

It does monitor controls, again IIRC. And I did take the listeners out, they only come on if a dialog menu is presented, and then on a high channel. I could probably also set the minimum event delay to 0.25ish seconds... don't remember if I did that or not. People don't really need faster response than that when they start or stop walking

Really? I used the search function to look for animation but that didn't turn it up. I went back, went to stats then selected the animation group and there it was at the top.

As for the organization problem that is really the fault of the people adding them. Most seem to just slap a misc label on it even though it probably could go other places. Then some put labels that don't really make sense like the guy calling for a new Mac PPC client put it under animations.

heh, you're probably right about the organization. Moderation and the ability to edit propositions would go a ways toward helping however.

Another problem. Almost 800 votes there, propositions a year old. It does have a response, but it's just the typical, we'll look into it and get back to you.

I don't want to badmouth LL. I know they have a ton of things to do. just a way to select an animation from your inventory, couple o drop down boxes.

There's nothing wrong with high channel listeners. In recent versions of SL the lag from a high channel listener on a channel that's not actually carrying traffic is literally too small to measure. I tried.
1/4 of a second poll is probably small enough it doesn't matter, but... did you try moving_end()?

ooh, does that work? (writes note to try it).

I'm not convinced that AO's actually do cause lag. When we got the new estate tools, I found that in a very fast sim, worst case runtime, an AO uses about .02ms of compute time, per frame. Assuming 45 frames per second, this means that it's using less than one tenth of a percent of a sim's compute time at most.

[These tests conducted in an almost empty sim, because that's the only place you can measure values this small]

As the sim gets busier, the proportion of time the sim will devote to processing any single script will be reduced, so that it will use even less compute time under times of stress. (which is the behaviour you want in this case)

What this means is that when you have a sim that has high load, the amount of compute time devoted to processing an animation overrider should be significantly less than one tenth of one percent.

I believe the reason that event hosts will ask for people to turn off AO's is mostly psychological.

PS. moving_*() events were mostly meaningless on attachments when I looked at it.

That's good to know.



Don't remember. I'll check tonight if I remember Off the top of my head, probably not. But I wonder if the same thing could be achieved in the control event, when (level == 0), i.e. no keys are held down. I'm pretty sure the control event is handled (and controls are taken), but again, I'm going from memory here.

How reliable is moving_end()? I vaguely remember reading something about it not firing correctly every time.

To be honest, for the most part I left the core of the Franimation AO code alone. There were too many "SL does X weirdly so we have to do Y to compensate or you'll get stuck" comments everywhere. It was clear that Francis Chung had put a lot of testing into that design, and I saw no reason to try and re-invent those wheels.

Argent Stonecutter

I was talking about chan 0 ao's , sure you can use a higher chan for ao's just dont see a reason for using a channel on AO's at all anymore.

Use hud, click to activate/on/off, change poses with clicking / menu , instead of using chans.

llDialog() still needs a channel, and handcrafting a menu out of prims instead of just calling llDialog is too retro even for me.

I have to disagree. I appreciate the testing... but I also know that testing on SL.. even on a blank sim (which shares a server with another sim) can be flakey.

I have seen event after event where it was lagging to a standstill. Event holder asked everyone to turn off AOs. People did... and lag vanished. Every time we run BattleMace tournaments we have to ask people to turn off AOs. When they do, tourney runs much more smoothly.

I also know I've been on a sim and everything is running fine... until someone TPs a friend. Then LAG! I've asked, "Are you wearing an AO device?" Yup, sure enough. When device turned off, lag vanishes.

Like I said, this has happened over and over again. As one person pointed out, the modern AO devices are scripted a lot more intelligently. But... that doesn't alter the fact that most AO devices on SL at this time are super-laggy. The freebies certainly are... and that's what a lot of people use.

When I designed my Li'l Bits line of tiny avatars, the AO script was specially modified to majorly reduce lag. Set the timers way down and removed pretty much all the listeners; realized they really weren't needed. But most AOs that I know of lag like a fiend.

I think there is a thin line between a "feature" and a technical issue.

Is it a "feature" to try to reduce lag? No, it strikes me as a technical issue. How do we do so? Besides, where are we going to discuss techincal problems/"features" in that useless vote system? LOL

I think the informed responses on this thread indicate there may very well be technical methods to reducing this problem... which is why I put it here. It's not likely this will be fixed by LL within the next few weeks, so maybe the collective minds of locals can come up with a solution.

How many times have you had people on these boards (or in the game) ask people to turn off their AOs because they are lagging like crazy, despite being in a sim with 50 people that have large poofy dresses and hair composed of a zillion tori? How many times have you had people with apparently little techical expertise or at least a willingness to experiment with said cause randomly asserting that [insert random victim] is the cause?

I apologize for the parody, but this is rediculous. If you are in a club or a sim with 20 other people, animation overriders are not really going to be on your priority of scripts to shut off. And neither will xcite stuff, either. In reality, all these little 500 scripts contributes some to the degredation of sim performance, and singling any single one out is going to do you absolutely no good.

I've run dozens of tests with the Franimation override (specifically, a mod which almost everyone uses in their products that slows the timer down by quite a bit), and the Mood Mixer, which is also a popular animation override. Neither really seems to 'lag' a sim any more than any other of the zillion scripts other avatars are using when they are packed into a tight area, at least nothing that would be verifiable to the point where you could justify specifically asking people to take off their AO as opposed to, say, their 500 torus attachments.

In addition, lag, lag lag lag lag lag lag. It's laggy, it's lagging, it's lagtastic, it's lagorama. What the hell does that mean? Specifically, is the time dialation high? Is your framerate low? Is their packet loss? Is the sky blue? I'm sick and tired of all of these people saying 'It's lagggy, take off your... [pick a random victim] because it's the cause of all ills, and runs on the blood of CHILDREN!' People are spreading so much misinformation about various technical aspects of SL, that other people being believing it, and then look at you as if you have two heads when you tell them that's not the case. I think this is just another obvious example of that. People have been told for a long time that AOs cause lag... who started this information? Has anyone else actually personally verified this is true?

First off.. Way wrong forum. Are the resmods busy trying to log in or something?

Anyways... *if* you told me to turn off my AO, I wouldn't until after all the bling was turned off, massive prim hair, and zillion attachments were gone.

I don't understand why people blame the AOs more then the above. It's your choice to pack that many people into a sim, so deal with what comes with it.

*if* your idea goes through, which I HIGHLY doubt, it would just add more places on my "don't no go ever" list. Along with places that have camp chairs and fly turned off. Some people want to express themselves by the animations that they have, especially animators.

The latest versions of the freebies are NOT super laggy, and the older versions of the commercial ones are.
Did you start with Franimation overrider? If so, did you release your modified version as open source, as the license for Franimation Overrider requires? Because that's one of the main reasons for having the GNU Public License in the first place... so that improvements get distributed.

What forum would you recommend Luth? I consider this to be a technical issue. If you personally disagree... just ignore it and move on to another post (unless of course, you yourself are a resmod, in which case move it to where you feel appropriate).

Replying in general to several posts:

In regard to those who say, "I'm not going to turn off my AO unless..." well, that's your choice. No sense fixing one problem unless ALL the problems are fixed, right?

Regarding claims that AO devices don't lag, having run "dozens of tests"... if that is true, why are AOs known far and wide for lagging? What is that, a case of mass-crowd hallucination? People decided to just pick on AO devices for no good reason?

We don't have to have 50 avatars on a sim for AOs to cause lag. All you need is ten. How is it that a device with 20 listeners and individual avatar activity override doesn't lag? Yes, some of the new AOs don't lag. By far the majority of the AOs on Second Life do. I'm not a tech, but as far as I can tell it doesn't have to do with just the scripts themselves... it has to do with how client-side software handles avatar movement. Standard walk/run/fly is built into the system. AO movement has to be individually translated (I don't know for certain that is true... as I said, I'm not a tech. That's just what I've been told by those techier than I).

I have not recommended that AOs be totally banned-- just that land owners have the abilitity to make that decision-- especially at times when excessive lag is being experienced. It would be nice for a landowner to just be able to hit a switch rather than announcing repeatedly, "Please turn off AO devices!" to people who cop an attitude and refuse to comply with event host wishes.

Folks have long been after LL to include a no-lag AO system in the base program, to eliminate the need for AO devices completely. There must be a reason for that request. As a co-manager of four sims I've run as many tests as anyone and I and others have observed that shutting off AOs does considerably cut lag at events, no matter what the attendance.

Regarding the old "what is lag?" argument. Sigh. I'm tired of going there. How about this: Lag is anything which causes a degradation in the user-perceived speed of Second Life. There, that's not so hard, is it? Just because there are dozens of potential sources of lag doesn't mean you cannot single out individual sources and try to correct that. AO devices are widely recognized as one of those sources.

Lag is one of the oldest and greatest issues on Second Life. Linden Lab is constatnly working to reduce it, and they have found that rather than one thing being responsible, it's a conglomerate of things (although to be honest, I think there may be 2 or three major things that just haven't been found yet). Their attack on the problem has been to reduce one lag-causer at a time-- with positive results. Each individual thing that cuts lag helps the overall picture. So the suggestion for land/sim owners to be able to cut out certain things that are widely known to cause lag is a sensible concept. And discussing methods in which this can be done is a technical issue.

Argent, people are not *required* to do anything in regard to any open-source software. The idea of open source is so that it can be modifed to personal need and use, not to attempt to force people to publish every single change they make to such software. One of the advantages is that people who discover overall improvements can publish these if they so desire, but they are by no means required to do so.

I did not adapt code myself; it was adapted by a professional scripter for my specific use for a specific purpose, not as a general "improved release" of the software... especially (as I indicated) since we disabled many of the command sets that were found to be unnecessary for my use.

The point being made was not that I had improved the package overall, but rather that when I use AO devices, I make sure they're low-lag. If you wish to make such changes to suit your individual needs, that's also your right.