Finding "good" servers ..

Not sure this belongs here but ... I've got a club I'm trying to develop ... on the boundary of a mainland sim ... and the feet of the dancers sink into the floor ... I've heard "collision detection", "lag", "bad servers", etc. ...

I wonder how we can judge the potential of a sim using the "statistics bar" or other devices ... to determine the effect of surrounding, lag-intensive activity, etc.

Thanks!

I suppose the dancers "sit" on poseballs, dance pads or something like that? Some kind of stationary object with a poseball script that animates the person using it? I'd say that's the most likely reason for feet sinking into the floor. In an animation, only the position of the hips is absolute; where the feet end up depends on how long the legs are. Long legs = feet vanishing in the floor. If you set the poseball / dance pad higher (or change the llSitTarget parameters in the poseball scripts), larger avatars might look right but short-legged persons will hover in the air.

If people also sink into the floor while walking around, your floor prims could be bugged. I never heard of bad servers, but there are corrupted prims. It can happen when prims are duplicated from another prim. After creating a duplicate of a duplicate, it sometimes ends up bugged and has no collision detection, i.e. people fall through it as if it was set to phantom. Only way to change that is to delete those floor parts and replace them with new prims.

Another thing to think about is that you are on a sim edge.

Where 2 sims meet they actually overlap into each other about 5m or so.
In this overlap area, strange things can happen such as sinking into the ground, disappearing objects, etc. As it was explained to me: the server has difficulty in that overlap area trying to figure out where a person or object sjould be... if it should stay in 1 sim or move to the other.

You can see a similar effect if you take a vehicle and try to drive a mainland road. Watch your minimap carefully (you'll see the sim borders there) and you'll notice a very similar thing happen as you approach the sim border (vehicle sinking).

This is pretty much correct. If you'd like to see this sort of thing in action: visit the Shelter. The build is split between two sims, Isabel and Wingo.

Its certainly a challenge trying to straddle a build across a sim border, but it can be done. One method of circumventing the 'sinking' issue is to double-up invisiprims across the sim border - so you have a prim rooted in each of the sims.

Some things dont work well at all across sim boundries, like dance machines. You just have to decide for yourself whether the advantages of being in two sims (load balancing & redundancy) outweighs the technical challenges you'll face.

*waves to Travis*

Hi Neighbor!

Your comments have been very helpful in explaining a number of phenomena in SL ... I wish all posts resulted in such a consummate display of knowledge!

Thanks!

there are scripted prims about that collect server info and present it as floating text. you can use these to determine the health of any given server.