Kudos to Luc Aubret - we need more scripters with this skill

I'm not a friend of Luc's nor affiliated with him in any way other than as a user of some of his products. But he's done something recently with his very popular psiTEC product that deserves some recognition, IMO, not to mention some emulation by other scripters of popular SL products.

In the psiTEC II, Luc has managed to make this serious "orbiter"-style weapon (although it's really much more than that) have practically no impact on a sim, lag-wise.

The original psiTEC impacted sim performance to the tune of 410 active scripts and 1.2 ms script time. (Some orbiter-style weapons are even far worse than that, such as the Souls of the Damned, which weighs in at a whopping 1036 active scripts.)

However, the new psiTEC II impacts sim performance by a mere 12 active scripts and less than 0.1 ms script time!

This is for a very complex weapon, folks. That's nothing. I can afford to wear the psiTEC II full-time along with my normal must-have gadgets and still keep my total impact on a sim to roughly 150 active scripts and 0.3 - 0.4 ms script time.

As an estate manager who's carefully tested tons of popular items, I wish more scripters would pay attention to the impact of their active scripts and script time when their gadgets/weapons/whatever are sitting idle on an AV. I mean, there are some items that people love to wear all the time which are in an idle, non-used state most of the time, yet which have a significant impact on a sim to the tune of many dozens or even 100+ active scripts, and up to 0.5 or 0.6 ms script time, even when the object is doing nothing at all! This is one reason why clubs are often so laggy. Some of the weapon makers, in particular, are quite guilty of this. For example, practically every katana sheath or holstered or over the back weapon tends to have quite a high impact on sim performance--AND THESE ARE PURELY "for looks". They're not even the active weapons! Here's just a few such offenders:

96 Archatek Flame Naginata Sheath (0.4 ms script time)
110 Outland Tech CFS01 "Jahi" *display-only copy on back* (0.6 ms script time)
153 Musashi Black Rose Katana Sheath (0.5 ms script time)
179 Ashes Jin-Geom Katana Sheath (0.7 ms script time)

Bear in mind that many such techniques, especially used in making weapons, are deliberately made hard to emulate by their creators!

True, I'd be surprised if Luc were to share his techniques. But hopefully at least the knowledge that it can be done will inspire some other scripters to figure out methods of their own for doing this. I'd especially love it if the Samurai Island scripters could figure out how to make their katana sheathes more like this, because I love wearing one as part of my "look" but simply cannot do so in good conscience.

Well, it can go deeper than that. There are some scripting techniques, which often crop up in weapons, that depend using various loopholes in the SL engine itself. Often when LL fix these up, they prevent the loophole being exploited again, but people who've already used it get to keep the things they created. What that means is that, in weapon making, it is not safe to assume that just because one person managed to do something, others could too!

That said though, there are some clear methods for minimising script lag that I'm surprised don't see more use.

I'm a Long time Owner of Luc Psi/ProTEC systems (Though i have actually only twice been forced to use them Defensively) and i have been Eminently Satisfied with both the systems performance and the Customer service response of Lucs Organization.
Actually though my Favorite toy from his Collection is the Tagger. I have Fun occasionally Pranking close friends of mine with it. I made myself completely Invisible once, and snuck up on a Friend while she was attending a Party. Zapped her with a "Kick me" sign, then watched from Afar as she discovered the sign, and suffered the Jokes of her Party mates. When she discovered it was me, she almost fell off her chair laughing (I don't do silly things like that Often, so it has that effect).
Great work Luc.

Angel.

Scripting tips is no place for ass kissing and product placement. Do it on the Slexchange review page or something.

I think the Beauty is in Simplesety,, was my moral when i started and it stays that way,,
I think the more you let out and simpler you keep it that would do the trick,,
I also believe that is the goal of sl scripting to keep it as simple as posseble! why overdo it??
Lots of orbiters use like 10 prims, whit (yes i have seen this) 150 scripts in it!!!!!!!
i can not say i been manage to orbit somebody to 75000000000 meters,, but whit my 5 scripts in a single prim, believe me you get pretty high! why go to 75000000000 if 75000 already takes to long to fly down? I say, The nice thing about luc is he takes the time figgering out,, what only is needed,,, Ow, did you know he made a rule in hes non phys
so you unsit from it!! that is only posseble when you use a llGetCreator, or preinstaled remote exess to the non phys,, (by email or llShout for example) that makes me wonder what more he does whit the items he sells to the people, put a spy in them or whatever,,,,
Conclusion,, its a man whit skils, and smart in a way to use his owne sold object to let work the annoter one,, like the unsit,, or there must be a way to unsit you,,, but as we know, that is not posseble outside the script (if you are sitting on a object you owne) ow if not plsss let me know!!,, Wel as soon i figgerd that out,, i didnt trusted work from him no more,, aldo he makes nice stuf and is a good scipter,, he had me thinking whit the telephatie,, figgered it out, also simplesty,and commen logic,

Dont look for a boot on the otherside of the river!!!!!
ehm then i mean,, dont search to far in what your goal is, keep it simple!!
oww what a preach,, im sorry for that,, i had to say something!!

Greetings Lexi Foley

I dont even know what to say about that last comment lexi, it was ridiculous and confusing to say the least, I dont mean to tease but you seem very young or not so fast, because you misspelled more words than i have ever seen in my life. Common sense tells you that you should not spell it commen logic. Seems sense isnt so common after all now is it... I barely understood a bit in the middle portion of your ranting but other than that please leave the conversation to grown folks, thanks, hehe db

Is psiTec a combat system? Or an orbitter weapon? If it's the latter we're comparing apples to oranges in terms of what the scripts are being used for. As far as the CI weapons that you mentioned, script counts are gonna get cut back by 70-80% patch we're workin on, just thought Id throw that in

psiTec is not a combat system, it is a weapon of sorts, but not a simple orbitter... So yes, a comparison between psiTec and the CI combat system (which are definitely more than just 'for show' as mentioned previously) is like apples and oranges in my opinion.

But I also own several aubreTec items, and have tremendous respect for the skill and ingenuity that went into their production. Kudos to aubreTec!


P.S.: Looking forward to that patch, Archanox I already love the swords now, but decreased scripts sounds awesome.

You forget the other possible reasons.. English is not her first language, or has hearing problems - both with cause spelling errors in common words.

There really is no need to attack someone's grammar or spelling - if you can not understand, just skip it. How does someone's spelling or mis-spelling cause you harm? And the world would be such a better place if we all try to lift each other up, rather than knock them down.

Back to the topic, it would be very nice if SL would give more than Island estate owners ways to check a scripts run time and 'tightness'. So often the script is technically correct, but has flaws that cause the lag and slow behavor.

Agreed. I suspect, without having any proof, that the vast majority of scripters are not island owners. A great many probably don't have good friends that are, either.

Without good feedback, how are we to be most responsible when it comes to creating scripts? As much as I love SL and lsl, it find it kind of frustrating that it is the only programming language/environment that I commonly use (out of several) that does not allow for the simple gathering of performance metrics.

Seems a basic requirement to me. And in the long term, will surely increase in priority for LL, I would think.

(edit 3:06pm SLT - After getting back into SL I could verify my exact measured numbers instead of quoting fuzzy numbers from memory here in my original version of this post)

Hi Archanox. As was pointed out above, the psiTEC is not a combat system in the same vein as the CS:I combat system. A better analogy to your product are the Black Widows, also coded by Luc Aubret. The Black Widow system consists of a thigh holster, a HUD, and a held weapon, which is analogous to the CS:I sheath, weapon, and HUDs.

Let's take a look at the general UI and workflow of the Black Widow, and you be the judge of how similar this is to the CS:I weapons:

1. You equip the holster and the HUD. The holster contains a rezzable copy of the Black widow gun itself. You never separately equip the gun from inventory to your hand. Note that the holster uses 0.004 ms of script time. (Compared to the CS:I sheaths which can range from .201 ms to .586 ms)

2. You left click the holster to literally rez a gun right in your hand. (When you're done with the gun you just drop it straight from your hand.)

3. With the HUD, equipped gun, and holster all on your AV, the total script time is .267 ms of script time. (Compared to the .436 to .914 ms script time overhead when the CS:I sheath, weapon, and HUD are equipped.)

4. The gun has a bazillion functions or "attacks", and color/effect options, AV animations, etc. These are accessed either by multiple menu pulldowns, or by discrete chat commands. The coloring affects both the rezzed gun *and* the holster at the same time, and is done via a separately-rezzed (from a menu command, not manually from your inventory) "colorizer" multi-prim object with its own scripts and menus.

Sound familiar? Granted, your *weapons* themselves are doing a lot with animations and tracking damage and communicating with the HUD, etc. The problem isn't really with your weapons and HUDs, which seem to have a reasonable script size and script time for all that they do. The problem is really only with your sheathes, which are remarkable resource hogs for merely being the equivalent of a gun holster.

Anyway, I'm not bashing on you folks, because I love your products and I wear my katana sheath as often as feasible for looks. But I take it off in crowded sims because I know what hogs they are. If they could be whittled down to a mere dozen active scripts and .007 script time, I'd wear my katana sheath all the time. And I wouldn't grimace when I hit the dance floor and see 3+ AVs sporting the really laggy Musashi and Ashes sheathes.

Again, I'm not bashing on anybody here. Nor am I trying to promote a particular product. I'm just pointing out that if one person can figure out how to take a *popular* object with 410 active scripts and 1.2 ms of script time and whittle it down to a mere 12 active scripts that uses only .041 ms of script time, that's a sigificant deal, worthy of kudos and hopefully an incentive to other scripters of similarly popular and complex objects.

Arch did mention we are reducing the script count by quite abit. This applies to the sheaths too. ^^ Hopefully it will be a very noticable change.

I will love you to pieces and be glad to sport your excellent looking sheathes more often.

Who is this Luc Aubret you speak of? I think I remember his name from the Geneva Convention...mon dieux, these asshats are everywhere now!

Oh wait I remember him now...his alt. is Evan Oud!!

!!!!!

Even though this thread was resurrected, I figured it's an opportunity to answer late, so..



What makes you think that there aren't more scripters out there with his level of skill or better?? Maybe we apply ourselves to something other than weapons. Weapons are a tiny niche space in terms of overall scripting skills.

Maybe you should get out of the weapons store and look around a bit; there's some majorly awesome stuff done (with more being done every day) out there.

Actually Ive searched for that holy grail of scripts and found Luc Aubret, Eckhart Dillon, Ares Desmoulins, Jiminy Roo, Francis Chung and a few others to be on that level and more so motivation to apply their skill set (esp with regard to this thread)...the rest sadly do not exist in the world of weapons, but as you mention there is a whole universe beyond guns and things that go bump-push-bump in the night.


...but alas I reckon that debate is grounds for a new thread.

Weapons are one of the most complex items that people care about. They care about them because of the confrontational aspect - your weapon has to beat the other person's shield, or you lose. So it isn't too surprising that many of the more technically devoted scripters want to make them.

Beyond that, there's plenty of complex things that can be done, but a lot of it is in things that people won't care about very much about or that will be too hard to use, and that therefore won't sell. There was a reason why, on the SLExchange website when they called for help, they asked for "experienced advanced builders and texture artists, and basic scripters" - because once you get to the more advanced scripting, it becomes only useful in relatively esoteric functions that many people won't use. Even the ones that are popular tend to be dominated - the most obvious example is networked vendors, and opening a new webstore would be very difficult at this point, and it's been shown before that JEVN is practically unbeatable for networked vending within SL (there was a major security breach found in it, and still nobody switched - the breach is now fixed btw).

The "pure scripting" market is far more about having neat but simple ideas that are accessible to many people, or about building on existing ideas and/or outadvertising or undercutting them. Weapons provide a good venue for the "hacker" types to do what they enjoy.

I don't think Fushichou was at all suggesting that my level of scripting talent was somehow above and beyond that of other SL scripters. Rather, I think the point of the post was that more scripters should take the time to consider script impact on the sim. The point was made using an example of a previous product I made (before I owned a sim and could do proper testing) in contrast to an update that was considerably more sim-friendly.

And let's be honest; the psiTEC I vs. psiTEC II is a pretty brazen example of this, given the much more compact and responsible method of super push used in the update.

Ironically enough, I think it was Fuschichou that presented me with the sim data in the first place that caused me to rethink the way the psiTEC worked to use less script time. Since then I've purchased a sim and become very prissy about how much script time each product takes up.

BTW, I came across this post very late on a random Googling of my SL name. Sorry it's taken me so long to respond to any of this.

Ever since my second week of SL, I have taken into account sim impact of my script's performance; of course, that comes from years of programming experience, some from doing embedded systems where every instruction and every byte saved made a significant difference.

..and no, I don't buy the "weapons are always more complex and require more talent" argument. Networked vendors, vehicles, security products, builders' tools, AOs, posing systems, the list can go on and on. None of these areas are any less complex than weapon systems and, I would argue, more in demand, since the weapon market is mostly useless in SL with, what, a whole handful of sims dedicated to allowing their use. That doesn't mean they are not popular; people will buy with them and play with them for a while, just like any neat and nifty curio, but that's no indication that they are the only things which people buy for similar reasons.

I stand by my original assertion; there's more than enough talent out there which is at a similar level or better. The OP saying otherwise is looking at the world through colored spectacles.

I am pretty sure that the vast majority of active scripts in most items is caused by two things; draw/holster/sheath ability and texture/color changes.

Draw/holster/sheath occurs because designers want to make weapons that can be pulled out or put away as cleanly as possible. While it is possible to use a long series of llSetChildAlpha commands to toggle the correct parts of a sheathed weapon as it is drawn or holstered doing so is also very slow and results in a very visible 'disassembling' and 'reassembling'. The obvious solution is to have a script in each prim that needs to be changed and to send a link message to all the prims. In the case of things like the CI swords which have a large number of prims in those areas that's an awful lot of scripts.

Texture changing is even worse because while its possible to use llSetChildAlpha, even if the results are less than visually appealing, there is no llSetChildTexture command. This means any prim that can have its texture dynamically changed must have an active script.

While it is really easy to say that designers should just suck up the loss of quick hides/shows and suspend the ability to alter the textures of their items in the name of script load it's important to remember that a lot of these people aren't just making items for fun; they're making them to sell and if they give up these features people are going to buy items made by competitors who aren't as conscientious. The average person who buys these attachments probably has no idea about script loads on sims. All they see is the effect. Even if players should become educated you'll have those who simply don't care that they are using more than their fair share of system resources, just so long as they look cool.

What I would really, really love would be two new commands, llSetChildListAlpha and llSetChildListTexture, that could be passed a list of prims and which would effect them just as rapidly as commands sent to the entire object. At that point both resource hogs could be done away with and the active script loads on sims would probably be sharply reduced.

"The great script is one that brings no attention to itself."

True, in weapons it may be obvious after using badly made arms that one is particularily efficient. In the vast majority of other objects you use every day, you don't don't take much notice for a very good reason.

That's not what I was saying. What I was saying was that although there are many talented scripters producing other things, there are also many making weapons because of the appeal to the dedicated "hacker" type who wants to push what LSL will allow to its limits.

Many of the items you list are also excellently made, but they are effectively cornered markets now. Although I'm not sure what you mean by a "posing system"?

I daily push what LSL will allow to its limits; I don't need to script weapons to do that, either. I'm a pretty dedicated "hacker" type, too; I'll use whatever tricks I know, having learned over the years, which give my products that extra "zip", too.



It could be argued that the weapons market is effectively "cornered" in the same way. Neither does that stop people from entering it at any point. JEVN isn't the be-all end-all of networked vending, for example. Neither is SexGen the last word on posing systems (that's what I was referring to).

Even still, that hardly implies the people who make such products are somehow "inferior" scripters, which IS what the OP heavily implies.

"We need more scripters with this skill". We're out there. We're making cool things. We're optimizing for performance. We're pushing the envelope. It's kind of disingenuous of anybody to assert otherwise.