A prim in every sim?

Anyone able to help with a flood fill style algorithm for putting a prim in every sim?

...
Why?

There are like 1k sims and 250 islands.
Whats the project?

Should be relatively easy to get a self-replicating prim that moves one sim N,E,W or S then replicates again in whatever available directions (with a call to llEdgeOfWorld() ?).

then you too can be ostracised, insulted and abused by a paranoid and clueless community who think you're creating sinister virii or spying devices! You will also be blamed for any and all lag in every sim.

Enjoy.

The tricky bit is knowing which directions are unavailable due to there already being another prim there - or more subtly, detecting cases where an empty sim is about to be populated from two different directions.
I can think of 2 strategies worth considering:

1. The seed prim knows that he is responsible for the whole map. He divides that into 4 regions, rezzes 3 buddies and gives them each a quadrant, keeping one for himself. Each prim moves to his target area, divides it into 4 smaller areas, rezzes 3 buddies, etc etc etc until you hit areas of only 1 sim each
   
2. Each prim blindly rezzes 4 girlfriends, who go off one sim as Jesrad describes. Once in the center new sim, each prim scans for a friend. If she is alone, she may divide as well (simple optimisation: exclude the direction from which she came). If there are two girlfriends in the same sim, the one with the lower key dies, while the other replicates.
   

These are, in a way, representative of the two opposing AI philosophies of complete, up-front planning and no planning at all, fully reactive.

It would probably be a good idea to continue discussing the algorithm and safeguards that you choose with others before actually implementing anything. Just in case

SNAFU

No projsct really, just want to see how long it takes to get a prim in every mainland sim using some form of automatic system traversing the grid. The prims would all be in existence at the same time. More than one prim in a sim would be ok, but hardly elegant.

A related question would be what is the least amount of time to get a prim in each sim when they don't need to all be there at once.

There is a worthwhile page on flood fill algorithms at QuickFill: An efficient flood fill algorithm

When I think of doing a flood fill algorithm to paint the the grid like a flood fill paints a polygon I think of using llSetPos to move the prims, but when I think of a race to get a prim in each sim I think of using the physics enabled objects and forces, or maybe the moveto command.

Some people have claimed that it would take hours to get a prim into each mainland sim, and I don't believe that, not even how slow LSL is.

I've done it.

I'll do it again, too, eventually.

It doesn't take hours. Depends on where you start though.

If you don't care about the consequences at all, and don't care about how cleanly you do it, it'd take... oh... six or so minutes. Ten would probably be a nice, safe estimate, if you wanted to do it from a far corner or something, since you have to figure in time for the things to go 'round corners in the grid and such.

If you honestly care about things however, about making sure to get only one prim in a sim each and such, then it takes longer. Much longer. 30-45 minutes or so, at the least. Unless someone has a better method than the one I used. (I honestly used the second method mentioned above by Ben Bacon.)

Using physics to move prims might be a bad idea, however, since once you get into large velocities, I'm not sure what would occur to prims crossing sims faster than 255m/s

I remember Sue being one of the first people I met in SL about a year and a half ago, warning me against such things as wild-slime drones... She seemed like such a NICE, conservative girl too...

Next thing I know I see posts from her about "more realistic, detailed, AV Pr0N and this attempt at prim-flooding-terrorism! Who are you and what have you done to Suezanne>!>! And she seemed like such a nice girl!

Disclaimers : No, I'm not serious. Ever. Yes, I know that she probably intends to do something useful as opposed to filling sims with wild-slime drones. Yes, I actually agree with most of her points on the "using sex as a selling point" thread too... Yes, I know this was "off topic", and probably not funny or in poor taste to some, for which I profusely appologise. My posts have been shown to cause cancer in lab rats, offer void in Missouri, Florida, and on the teen grid.

How i would do this (if i wanted to be the center of drama)

1. Central Prim server rezzes a prim
2. Chats central prim server & target location
3. Prim goes to location
4. Prim sends email to central prim
5. Central prim checks sim name against list, if not on list it adds it and sends email back to prim; if on the list it ignores the email.
6. If prim fails to get email in 2 min period, deletes it self. If prim gets email it rezzes new prims; goto Step 2.

The major trouble with using a technique that relies on detecting if a sim that is already filled is the trouble of finding the other prim. Sims are big, sensors and chat distance are small.

Also you may want to look at llScriptDanger and llGetLandOwnerAt as well as maybe having an object_rez event to fire a link message to tell it actually rezzed the prim, you would only need that if their were no public land in the entire sim though.

Suppose you filled the entire mainland grid with 10 meter cubes , as far up as you can rez a prim - how many cubes would that be?

Ballparking... 21250000? Maybe?

You technically can't go faster than 255m/s. The physics engine cuts everything down to that.

Hm. I'd still worry about things like other scripts pushing the prim around, and that infamous "crossing a sim to quickly" bug that affects avatars a lot.

I've done it.

Make sure you put a if (wallclock > x) llDie() in all your scripts during the testing phase.

Well... This isent exactly what ya may want but its an idea... Modify the hyperteleporter to listen to another script insted of only owner.
Create a 2nt attachment and have it tell the teleporter what sims to go to
have another script detect when you cross into a new sim to drop a prim... in that prim have it scripted to go to the center of the sim. and do whatever and this will repeat in every sim you cross. >.> Not exactly what you wanted but its a work arround

It is interesting to me how hard it is for me to stop wanting to program MY computer where I-ME-MYSELF have easy control of the memory and can define global variables and arrays and data structures and make the functions talk to each other as needed and count on statements written in a sequence to execute in the same sequence.

The flood fill algorithms performed in a normal programmming environment are challenging enough to satisfy many folks who just want to program something for fun. The simplest ones don't kill your brain, and as with many little programming tasks, you don't always have to understand the math or the process in order to code it in a particular language, if you can find an explanation that you can follow the steps in or a piece of code of pseudocode that you can translate piece by piece.

Many years ago I wrote a little routine in Pascal (turbo pascal I believe it was, version 2) that did a flood fill on the screen. It was just a little thing to do for fun. Later in Delphi I wrote a routine that traced the outlines of shapes in a black and white bitmap. This was motivated by the constant use of raster to vector software in my job and wondering if I could ever figure out how these programs do such things as smooth curves, straighten lines, and detect corners.

Converting these relatively simple ideas to work in in Second Life using LSL is a whole different ball of wax.

Condensing some ideas from the other responses gives:

Above all: make sure you don't accidentally create a billion prims and crash sims and get your account closed.

Make sure the prims go away when the fun is over by using "if wallclock is greater than x, die". If my memory is right you may have to stick that line all over the place to have a better chance it will work. "

The prims should send you a message telling you they exist and where they are periodically in case you need to go find them and get rid of them. "object_rez" is called when a rezzers rezes, and on_rez is called when the rezee is rezzed.

You mey need to check ilf you can run scripts at a position and can rez objects there. This involves llScriptDanger and llGetLandOwnerAt.

Certainly one would need to know for a fact that the prims really got created, so that would mean sending messages to verify the prim's location and existence.

The prim could get rezzed in a place with a time limit for objects to exist, or a liaison might remove one, or, well, you know, this is SL, it might just vanish for no reason at all, so when you think you have the fill complete, you need to able to check to make sure that all prims are still present.

We don't have object to object messaging yet, right? So the prims distributed around the grid have to talk by email. Is email the only option?

The code will need to know when it has reached a boundary like a hole in the grid or the edge of the grid. This is done with llEdgeOfWorld.

And one might want to consider working on a small scale mock up before going all over the grid.

Problem solved! There is already a prim in every sim. I checked it out, holy crap how did you do it? Oh, wait...

"A roast in every pot, and a prim in every sim" - Theodore Roosevelt?

That was so funny I forgot to laugh.

Maybe then you can forget this totally misguided, selfish use of the enitre grid as well. Failing that, might I have the location of your land where you would have me rez my experimental code? It only takes 1000 prims and I promise you that you won't mind my use of your resources to sate my curiousity.

kthxbye.

Just in case your "one might want to consider working on a small scale mock up before going all over the grid" moment of moral impairment has caused you to fail to realize this, I'll make it somewhat more attention grabbing:

A nap and something to eat can sometimes work wonders to brighten a person's outlook.

Make a cube that has a few commands in it (Replicate, move, die, and whatever else you want). Have them open a RPC channel. Create the actual logic code in a real programming language on an external server, with real flightpath logic (aka ROAM).

You do realize that

A) there are real, legitimate reasons for wanting a prim in every sim,

and

B) there is very little impact a single prim in every sim will have,

right?

Sandbox Cordova, Sandbox Goguen, and Sandbox Island. Sandbox areas are in the southeast and southwest of the Morris sim. There is a sandbox area similar to the Morris sandbox area adjacent to the oldstyle Lime WA, in Plum I believe. There is a private sandbox in the Mauve sim operated by the Learning Center. Anshe chung runs a Mature private sandbox for those who wish to creae a thousand copies of something other than a cube. As of a few months ago, Anshe Chung had many parcels for sale with build enabled do that others could build and script on them pending sale. I am not aware of her current policy. Putting "sandbox" in as a search term in the Find Places dialog yields many other private sandboxes.

One of those is where I would do my scripting expermentation. I am at work now, and it's not convenient to check the prim capacity of the sandbox sims, but my memory says it's something like 15,000 or so. Using a thousand prims as part of learning about scripting is precisely the sort of use Linden sandbox areas are intended for.