yes, more questions about "lag" :)

In the process of creating a sim plan, i'm curious about what a sim's layout can do to help keep everyone's experience as best as can be.

assuming the default 128m view range:

As far as the user's performance goes, would 30 people sitting in a 10mX10m room show the same performance as those same 30 poeple evenly spaced through the sim? What i'm getting at is a population density situation. Should one plan a shopping area spread out as opposed to compact and several stories high?

Same question for prims (polygons).

server OR client performance issues...

Is my understanding correct that communication between client and server happens on a whole sim level as far as avatars and physics are concerned but amount of visible polygons are handled by draw distance?

thank you in advance
~Lefty

Where do we start lol, Mmm

I wish there was a basic explanation but everything adds to everything.

People themselves will add lag to an empty sim, in the most basic form transmitting their positional data and getting land terrain as well as images of other av's and chat, if you then add any attachments which need to be rendered or even if they contain bad scripts, nothing stopping you wearing a av scanner for example, and someone is bound to mention the hoochie hair lol (but not me, not gonna let a woman go bald)

Then there is what you can put on land, with some of the worst being things that scan for info, like av detectors, land scanners, visitor counters, online detectors, security systems. Some can be configured more friendly to scan less often, or only scan once or on touch, but most combine scanning with timers to constantly scan every x seconds or . of a second.

There are more but dont want to get killed for spoiled peoples enjoyment lolol, but active scripts along with av's and a few other minor things add to server load and bring down sim fps, while client fps is due to the build around them combined with how they have their machine configured

If anyone else could answer my question I would be very happy!

I didn't ask what causes loss in game performance, I asked if proximity is a factor for performance.

~Lefty

If you put your room in the center of a sim and everyone has 128 view distance, they'll be happily able to see the entire sim, which could in theory have some, what, 15,000 prims in it? I don't know if that's really going to answer your question or help, but yes, proximity to a large number of prims (avatars are a large number of prims) does matter. They made some changes recently that drop off how closely you see smaller prims, but it still won't affect the largest ones. So your best bet is to go to a sandbox and do some testing for yourself with a large chunk of prims of various sizes, and a few willing test subjects.

You need to understand that there are three types of lag:
- Server
- Network
- Client

You can't do anything about a person's network latency, and everything you put in a sim will increase the bandwidth requirements (rez time).
Agents and other physical objects will cause physics lag no matter where they are on the sim.
They will also cause lag by forcing the server to update more clients with more changes.
Scripts will also cause server lag anywhere in the sim.
Client lag is mostly due to rendering. If you are at the edge of a sim, you won't feel lag if you are looking towards the infinite blueness, but you will lag like crazy if you turn towards a high prim build.