scanners

I was curious of any one knows of a few good examples of scanning. We are all painfully aware with the limitations, and needs for hacking scanning.
Now I could start from scratch, and then try several different approaches to scanning. Witch would hopefully lead to an effective system. But I recognize there are many smart, educated scripters, who have already created similar scripts. Witch may be even more efficient then what I would end up creating.
Is any one willing to share their knowledge, experiences, and or code? Not just for my sake, and other scripters sake, but for all the people who have to deal with the sims while such scanning scripts are running. It's like teaching new scripters to use channel 1 instead of 0. It makes every ones life easer.

This is my current plan:
First to be efficient the script has to identify the area that need to be scanned.
To identify the plot of land: I'm thinking of using a 2d matrix. Mark the current point of the primitive in the matrix. Then using a loop, scan the matrix, each iteration would check the 8 squares around the spot that have been marked by the prevues iteration. If a square is not marked, and belong to the same owner, mark square with current iteration number. The process would be repeated till no new squares are being added.

For scanning I'm not sure what to do. I could have a scanner move systematically through the defined space. Or I could randomly chose points inside the 3d space. Or a mix of both.

Also do you think it's better to use the scanner as a cone, or as a sphere. Taking into consideration; I'm assuming I'm going to have to move the object around, to be able to scan the whole cube of area.

I'll probable store object keys in a list. when a key is found, compare to lists(s) of keys. If the object is not on any of the list(s), add to the appropriate list. Ie if object is in the define space, add to list on plot, else add to list of off plot.

any thoughts, comments, or suggestions?

Yeah... don't do it very often. What you're describing is workable, but you'll lag your whole sim any time you run it - why not just use a good enough sphere? Or cone scanning from on high... much better than trying to get every little bit of volume over a land parcel...

ditto.

if you are going to do it, a good systematic algorithm (think quad-tree or oct-tree based)
will be much better at complete coverage than random positions and hoping for the best.

Scanning for *what*? And *why*? You can't put the implementation before the requirements... well, you can, and people frequently do, but it's a bad idea. I take it you're talking about land scanning - exactly what are you trying to find out?

Use strings as much as possible. Instead of a list of keys, use a string, it will be much more memory-friendly. It isn't even necessary to separate the keys, because of the way keys are formatted.