Interesting snippet on how listens are processed

This was in the sldev mailing list today. Kelly Linden was responding to a post on listens and said something interesting:

"You are pretty close. The actual order of events is:
1. Chat that is said gets added to a history.
2. A script that is running and has a listen event will ask the history
for a chat message during its slice of run time.
3. When the script asks the history for a chat message the checks are
done in this order:
- channel
- self chat (objects can't hear themselves)
- distance/RegionSay
- key
- name
- message
4. If a message is found then a listen event is added to the event queue.

The key/name/message checks only happen at all if those are specified of
course.

So, the most efficient way is llRegionSay on a rarely used channel."

interesting that it will filter the channel before self, wonder how much overhead could be killed by that being re-ordered

I like that it is better to use llRegionSay instead of llShout, llSay or llWhisper.
Kind of surprised me but then when you think about it, I guess it makes sense. One less thing for the simulator to process, it doesn't have to check the distance of the different objects to see which is in range.

heehee I guess if I was a simulator then it would be a major bitch if one object was talking to another using llWhisper but the objects were 10.001 meters apart

You would increase overhead. Think about it, checking channel would remove many more messages than checking self would, so the other way around your checking self on a whole bunch of messages that you are about to discard when you check channel.

good point

Interesting item, Jesse. Thx.

It is kinda counter-intuitive to me that llRegionSay would be more efficient than llShout, llSay or llWhisper "on a rarely used channel" but now I know I can see why that might be & will make sure I use it.

...learn something new everyday, or usually with LSL, far more than one-a-day!