lag by script

Im not sure if this should go here or ?? I wonder about having something be done about careless or thoughtless script. I'm not really into setting limits & controls because there is a learning curve (Dont I know that! lol) with scripting. I also know that heavy scripting can live in peace & harmony on a sim (like Federal). But what I guess I am wondering is if there can be some process for handling script the is effecting performance and therefore other players experience.

What Im thinking is maybe having someone (or group?) help or redirect scripters who may be unknowingly bogging down a sim.
If it is later learned that the bog was intentional that could be handled in some other fashion but I guess Im thinking & hoping most will be error error based and not a greifers.

Im sure its only going to become more of a problem as new members come in. Heck once I get down to the buisness of learning script I may end up guilty of bogging a sim.

I don't know how much practical and public knowledge there is about script drag coefficient (or lack thereof) on a sim. I would like to know if there are some points that could be described that would act as a "Don't do this:" guideline.

For example, I was going to expand the scripts running my doors by adding a real parser into each one so the doors could all be given specific names so I could open and/or unlock one door instead of an "unlock" command that unlocked all doors.

I know I could just modify the listen commands for each door script, but I wanted something more modular and reusable, so I was developing a parser where the "listen" statement basically listened to "" (which means EVERYTHING that is said) and then started to tokenize/parse the message string.

Before I did that though, I realized that it would not only hear my words by default, but also the words of everyone around, whether they were my guests, my neighbors, or just random people walking/flying by. I was not sure if doing something like that would totally hose Lusk, so I decided not to implement that feature--even though I developed and tested the technology.

I know that the scripts I have heard of that impact sim performance are some of the "rave-related" scripts (rapid color and/or texture changing of multiple large objects, etc.) and other such things.

But is there a list of things (not source code, as we don't want to encourage griefers by providing them any more tools than they already have figured out) that are known to drag perfomance down? Or is even that list enough to give griefers ideas? I only want to know as I want to write the most advanced scripts I can while still begin a good and concerned script-writing SL citizen.

Zanlew, for your doors, just make it so they only listen to you. That should cut down their traffic fairly significantly.

Also make sure the first thing you do is check for your key phrase that lets the doors know you might be talking to them, and put everything inside that if statement. That way you aren't processing a bunch of stuff when you aren't talking to the doors, they just do a simple check and move on.

I really don't know what slows down the sim the most. It used to be particle effects, but I think .5 introduced some really nice improvements in that area. Overused timers can cause problems I think.

Something some people may not realize is that scripting isn't always the source of the lag. Sometimes poor modeling techniques can slow down or even crash a sim. For example, don't make things hollow that don't need to be, if no one is going to see the hollow part or notice then don't make it hollow. All those polygons on the inside are still being processed and sent to everyones computer, even though no one can see em. And hollow tubes (not hollow cylinders) are the worst, with twice the polygons of a hollow cylinder, and most of them never seen.

From what I have heard, things that slow down sims, in order from most slow down to least:

Avatars
Scripted Physical objects
Physical Jointed Objects
Physcial Non jointed objects
- more or less depending on object complexity, it doesn't take many hollow cut torii to make a sim unhappy.

scripted passive objects
non-scripted passive objects

Now - this is what I don't know - what scripted(non-physical) behaviors degrade performace? It has been my understanding for quite some time now that flashy, spinny objects are not the problem, since I have had a store in taber with a roof made of flashy, spinny objects since december, and no one has ever accused it of being a lag bomb. Also, witht he new llSetTextureAnimation, I understood that animated textures don't hurt bad any more.

I could see a script with a timer that calls every .0001 seconds causing some trouble, but it was also my understanding that the scripts ran on a virtual machine (here is where my lack of h4x0r skillz becomes apparent) that makes it so only x% of the servers processing can be used to run the scripts - so even if you have 1000 objects all running processor intensive scripts, the sim won't fail, the scritps will just run a lot slower. (this does not mean that physics on a scritped object is similarly limited - which is why scripted physics objects are second only to avatars)

Of course, a official statement of how to intelligently balance scripts would be really nice - so lets all hope its Cory's turn to get up for the baby soon

BBC