SLUniverse Forums

Walker Moore · 06-05-2008, 01:50 PM

I just noticed when visiting the auction site that you don't appear able to bid on land for a group.

Can you really not do that?

Aisuru Rieko · 06-05-2008, 01:52 PM

I wonder about the toll of script processing. I'm in the midst of rebuilding my residence on a new low-prim sim, and theres a lot of stuff that has scripts in them. So I wonder, does a simple "animate" script (in every single prim of my waterfall) hit as much as a "poof out some butterflies" script, or how about a "sit here" script? I have a clear indicator as to the number of prims I can use, common sense about the number & size of textures, but how about number of scripts? And how am I to know what all my neighbors are running, and the ones I can't see that share the same server?

Added: If you're talking about scripted objects like say, a chair that changes color? I already ran into that just yesterday. the creator was kind enough to replace them with a version that had a more efficient script in it, but before that the color change dialogue would come up but never work.

Love · 06-05-2008, 01:55 PM

Hmmm. OK, the only way that makes sense to me is if the interpreter wastes memory like mad. Or are you supposing that each sim gets its own interpreter? LOL, that would be a poor design decision.

Sarah Nerd · 06-05-2008, 01:55 PM

All of the full sims ending today have been bid on.

Sarah Nerd · 06-05-2008, 01:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Walker Moore

I just noticed when visiting the auction site that you don't appear able to bid on land for a group.

Can you really not do that?

Nope. I forgot to take my tier out of group, so when I won a sim I was bumped up 200 bucks.

Walker Moore · 06-05-2008, 02:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sarah Nerd

Nope. I forgot to take my tier out of group, so when I won a sim I was bumped up 200 bucks.

How crappy is that?

If you can buy for a group in-world, I don't see why you can't bid on behalf of one in auction.

Wildefire Walcott · 06-05-2008, 02:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Walker Moore

How crappy is that?

If you can buy for a group in-world, I don't see why you can't bid on behalf of one in auction.

Well they took most of the Suck out of the Land Store, and had to dump it somewhere, so they just infused the new auction system with it.

Siyu Suen · 06-05-2008, 02:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aisuru Rieko

I wonder about the toll of script processing. I'm in the midst of rebuilding my residence on a new low-prim sim, and theres a lot of stuff that has scripts in them. So I wonder, does a simple "animate" script (in every single prim of my waterfall) hit as much as a "poof out some butterflies" script, or how about a "sit here" script? I have a clear indicator as to the number of prims I can use, common sense about the number & size of textures, but how about number of scripts? And how am I to know what all my neighbors are running, and the ones I can't see that share the same server?

Added: If you're talking about scripted objects like say, a chair that changes color? I already ran into that just yesterday. the creator was kind enough to replace them with a version that had a more efficient script in it, but before that the color change dialogue would come up but never work.

You can get a count of active objects and running scripts under the region tab of the statistics bar

That's in the view menu. There's also a console SOMEwhere that lets you look at the scripts running nearby, but I really can't find it right now

But I know it's somewhere!

Wildefire Walcott · 06-05-2008, 02:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aisuru Rieko

I wonder about the toll of script processing. I'm in the midst of rebuilding my residence on a new low-prim sim, and theres a lot of stuff that has scripts in them. So I wonder, does a simple "animate" script (in every single prim of my waterfall) hit as much as a "poof out some butterflies" script, or how about a "sit here" script? I have a clear indicator as to the number of prims I can use, common sense about the number & size of textures, but how about number of scripts? And how am I to know what all my neighbors are running, and the ones I can't see that share the same server?

If your estate owner is awesome, cool, and beautiful to boot, she'll give you estate manager access to your sim so you can see which objects in the sim are using the most script resources. I've been shocked by the things I've found...

A few weeks ago we discovered that a single sculpted object that cycled the sculpt textures to simulate animation was using 1/3 of the entire sim's script resources, and causing noticeable lag. A friend of mine discovered that a similarly designed furry penis was crashing her sim whenever the attachment's owner visited a build on her sim.

And I discovered a radio- a damned SL radio that does nothing but set the media stream on a parcel- that was using 1/4 of my sim's resources and causing lag.

ZATZAi · 06-05-2008, 04:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Khamon

This amuses me to no end Z. Have you ever seen an inworld residence that didn't run at least twice the average number of scripts most businesses require? People are always saying residential is prettier and less lagacious than commercial properties but that's simply not true. In fact, my experience is generally the opposite.

I tend to agree with this, because of the sexbeds, pillow talk, couches and what not. Residences do tend to use up resources more (Except for texture usage, commercial still has residential beat there). But there's one big difference, in people's home you don't mind waiting.

Script lag is much more painful when your browsing through a vendor than when your waiting for the "Fuck Me Harder" pose to load.

...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Love

Why is that? When you figure that LL allocates the same resources to 4 openspaces that they do to 1 normal sim (for an equal number of prims to manage), and assuming an average scripts/prim usage, I don't really see there being more scripts per processing power as with a normal sim.

I agree there's extra overhead - 4 times as much land, 4 times the overhead, but not really 4 times the number of scripts to process.

The gotcha as I see it is that you don't know who your neighbours are. The others on the same processor but a different sim. If one of them is going nuts with scripts, you'll suffer and not know why.

In my experience people have the same amount of scripted items, to a large extent, on an openspace sim that they would on a regular sim. They just have less trees and other gunk, overall it can be less scripts yes, but I've not seen it be a one-to-one ratio. People still have the same basic set of essentials no matter what.

Touching on the physics load again, since Havok 4 came out it's been a huge boon to Openspaces. They still frickin die when there gets to be enough people or vehicles in the sim but it runs much better than it used to. That said all sims continue to suffer from cyclical time dilation, but especially openspaces, and it's been JIRAd many times. Basically every 10 to 20 minutes the sim will suffer anywhere from a 20-80% TD for 5-20 seconds. It happens on regular sims as well but the drop in performance is more like 5-10%.

On openspace performance and how people at large use them, I speak from a fair amount of personal experience of course. Experimenting with my own sims and those of friends, I've been involved to some extent in the development of a fair number.

To measure script performance I actually use a HUD tool called the "Advanced Border & Performance-Scanner" by Thomas Conover (SLURL), the HUD can also drop a tool that stay in your sim to provide the readout and alert you if the sim lags badly. It gives you a readout on sim performance script wise, a numerical value from 0 - 6,000, the higher the number the better. I've tested it a lot and found it to be a very good indicator of region performance, Artificial Isle tends to get 4,400 - 5,200 which is very good. Most sims get around 4,000.

An absolutely empty openspace can get 5,000 on a good day, but as you load it up it quickly drops to 2,000 (Which is what I consider very good for an openspace). Once it drops below 1,000 you start to see noticeable script lag in vehicles etc (Makes a big difference with sailing). The simple fact with openspaces is, they have less redundancy to fall back on and when they are taxed they really show it (10 people in a sim does not constitute taxed).

ZATZAi · 06-05-2008, 04:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aisuru Rieko

I wonder about the toll of script processing. I'm in the midst of rebuilding my residence on a new low-prim sim, and theres a lot of stuff that has scripts in them. So I wonder, does a simple "animate" script (in every single prim of my waterfall) hit as much as a "poof out some butterflies" script, or how about a "sit here" script? I have a clear indicator as to the number of prims I can use, common sense about the number & size of textures, but how about number of scripts? And how am I to know what all my neighbors are running, and the ones I can't see that share the same server?

Added: If you're talking about scripted objects like say, a chair that changes color? I already ran into that just yesterday. the creator was kind enough to replace them with a version that had a more efficient script in it, but before that the color change dialogue would come up but never work.

Depends on what your script does. If it's just a llSitTarget with no pose you can go ahead and set the script to not running. Some things like that are considered state effect (Like particles) and you dont need a continously running script for it. That said while active scripts are loaded into memory they are not always being processed, at least not as far as the Top Scripts debugger in the estate menu is concerned.

Some items like a simple llOmegaTarget or llSitTarget that never changes will popup in the TopScripts debug menu taking up 0.001 or 0.003 in script time (Which is barely anything), but they'll only show up now and again. They are not constantly being processed, or atleast not in a way that is reported by the debug console. If you have a script that you can set to not running because its a state effect, you should do so.

While all scripts are allocated the same amount of memory simply for existing, it is ultimately their processing time that will pull away from other scripts. For example a script that constantly changes textures on an object, like for an animation or changing a sculpty as Wildefire mentioned will take up a comparetively large amount of resources. So will physics vehicles in motion, but not so much vehicles at rest.

Use fewer scripts where you can, look at the list of functions on the wiki. There's a lot you can do with or as a result of action on child prims for example (Though not everything just yet). For example a lot of people still put scripts in every single button they make on a console because they don't know this simple trick...

Code:

    touch_start(integer total_number)
    {  
        string button = llGetLinkName(llDetectedLinkNumber(0)); //Name the child prim with logical names like "one" or "next"

        if (button == one) { //If a child prim named "one" was touched
                llSay(0,"One");
        }
    }

Sarah Nerd · 06-05-2008, 06:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Walker Moore

How crappy is that?

If you can buy for a group in-world, I don't see why you can't bid on behalf of one in auction.

It used to be that when you won a sim, the land was set for sale to you at 0l once you were billed on the website. Then you could buy or use buy for group. Now it goes right in your name.

Able Whitman · 06-05-2008, 09:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sarah Nerd

It used to be that when you won a sim, the land was set for sale to you at 0l once you were billed on the website. Then you could buy or use buy for group. Now it goes right in your name.

This sounds like a bug; the previous method of transferring new sims via L$0 sale would be much more flexible and useful. I suggest you put it in JIRA and point Jack Linden to it at his next office hours.

The fact that the new system can inadvertently screw you by forcing you into a higher tier is really dumb, and I think there's a reasonable chance LL would fix this issue.

(Is there a smiley that means I'm trying not to be so cynical as to think that the tier-bump problem might be an intended side effect?)

Able Whitman · 06-05-2008, 09:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wildefire Walcott

I've heard tell it's because the script interpreter's a real pig, but don't know if that's memory or there's more to it. Even if there are the same number of scripts across 4 openspaces as a single full sim, there's also 4 instances of this supposedly inefficient infrastructure running on that core. There's speculation that mono will eliminate this issue. We'll see. If the current interpreter is very computation-expensive, I can see how script performance would degrade as you add more sims to a core, as it would mean that core has to devote more and more of itself just to support the framework that runs the scripts.

I can't for the life of me find the reference, but I'm positive that on SLDev one of the Lindens mentioned that each instance of the simulator software has its own script interpreter. So a server running 4 openspace sims would be running 4 instances of the interpreter. This sounds like a lot of overhead, but it makes sense if you consider that it allows an individual sim on that server to crash and restart without impacting the scripts running in one of the other sims.

The overhead of the interpreter is small compared to the inefficiency with which the current interpreter allocates memory and resources to scripts. There are a couple major deficiencies with the current implementation:

1. Currently, every single script active in a sim is allocated a static 16K of memory, regardless of how much memory the script actually uses. So a one-line llTargetOmega script consumes as much memory as a complex networked vendor script.

2. There is no code sharing between identical scripts. So if you have 10 identical vendors or animated pigs or whatever, every rezzed instance has its own copy of the script bytecode, even if the bytecode is identical, which uses 10 times as much memory.

The LL Mono work addresses both of these shortcomings. Script memory is allocated and deallocated as needed (which is the reason max script memory increases to 64K for Mono scripts), and the Mono runtime does code sharing so that 10 identical scripts will share 1 copy of the bytecode (and also 1 copy of the JITed machine code).

Tomato Contepomi · 06-09-2008, 07:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Able Whitman

This sounds like a lot of overhead, but it makes sense

This makes a lot of sense; it does not require development and maintenance of two different versions of the interpreter and prevents the introduction of (interpreter-related) bugs that are specific to openspace sims.

In principle separating the interpreters would allow more scalability, as the number of sims per CPU increases proportionally with CPU power and amount of resources (which is not currently the case, hence the performance hit).

Ray Figtree · 06-11-2008, 01:04 AM

Base of L$3.4 a meter for mainland. Lowest I've ever seen it. The devalue experiment continues...

prinţesă nină · 06-11-2008, 02:21 AM

and despite the super low price i am not the least bit interested in buying any. im so happy i got out of mainland at $9+/m. i wouldnt have been very happy paying hundreds of $ in tier every month on land that had been devalued to $3.4/m

Quote:

Originally Posted by Walker Moore

I just noticed when visiting the auction site that you don't appear able to bid on land for a group.

Can you really not do that?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ray Figtree

Base of L$3.4 a meter for mainland. Lowest I've ever seen it. The devalue experiment continues...

Khamon · 06-11-2008, 09:49 AM

Me too, with 10ksm of leftover tier, Landshark Khamon can't find a single Mainland lot that I'd sink 4L/sm into, not a single one. Are these cheap lots selling or just flipping over and over and over? It seems odd to me that we claim such low standard prices when the land is relatively useless.

We have used car lots in town selling working vehicles for $300US; but we don't claim that used vehicles are devalued based on those pieces of junk when the lots have cars a person *would* be caught dead in selling for a few thousand dollars.

I'm more interested in knowing the average cost of land that brokers are managing to sell on the market these days. That seems a more realistic method of gauging the value of Mainland.

Walker Moore · 06-11-2008, 10:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ray Figtree

Base of L$3.4 a meter for mainland. Lowest I've ever seen it. The devalue experiment continues...

It really hasn't been that low since before our time has it?

Mainland base price hovered between 4 and 4.9 in the months after I joined in May 2006, but that all changed shortly after private island prices increased.

I never thought it would get as low as 4.9 again, never mind 3.4.

06-05-2008, 01:52 PM	#27 (permalink)
Aisuru Rieko Yoroshiku Onegaishimasu! Plurking Join Date: Apr 2008 Location: US Posts: 408 SL Join Date: 1/18/08 Business: Beloved XBOX Leaderboard: 17^th My Mood:	I wonder about the toll of script processing. I'm in the midst of rebuilding my residence on a new low-prim sim, and theres a lot of stuff that has scripts in them. So I wonder, does a simple "animate" script (in every single prim of my waterfall) hit as much as a "poof out some butterflies" script, or how about a "sit here" script? I have a clear indicator as to the number of prims I can use, common sense about the number & size of textures, but how about number of scripts? And how am I to know what all my neighbors are running, and the ones I can't see that share the same server? Added: If you're talking about scripted objects like say, a chair that changes color? I already ran into that just yesterday. the creator was kind enough to replace them with a version that had a more efficient script in it, but before that the color change dialogue would come up but never work. __________________ Kami-no-Aisuru ][ Flickr ][ Plurk Trout rated: 7.9

06-05-2008, 01:55 PM	#29 (permalink)
Sarah Nerd I BUY LAND Can I play with your land? Join Date: Sep 2007 Location: Shermerville Posts: 7,143 Harpoon Lagoon Champion! SLShopper Ads: 1 My Mood: Awards: 2	All of the full sims ending today have been bid on. __________________ www.SarahNerd.com http://www.your2ndplace.com/sarahnerd

06-11-2008, 01:04 AM	#41 (permalink)
Ray Figtree All good things One love. One heart. Join Date: Sep 2007 Posts: 1,197 SL Join Date: 5/13/2006	How low will it go? Base of L$3.4 a meter for mainland. Lowest I've ever seen it. The devalue experiment continues... __________________ Eckhart Tolle/Pema Chodron in '08! Pema's Platform Offline pursuing RL dreams.

06-11-2008, 09:49 AM	#43 (permalink)
Khamon Taco's Grammar Slave Some Flowers and Trees Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: Alabama Posts: 2,978 SL Join Date: November, 2003 Business: Fate Gardens Flowers and Trees SLShopper Ads: 2 My Mood:	Me too, with 10ksm of leftover tier, Landshark Khamon can't find a single Mainland lot that I'd sink 4L/sm into, not a single one. Are these cheap lots selling or just flipping over and over and over? It seems odd to me that we claim such low standard prices when the land is relatively useless. We have used car lots in town selling working vehicles for $300US; but we don't claim that used vehicles are devalued based on those pieces of junk when the lots have cars a person would be caught dead in selling for a few thousand dollars. I'm more interested in knowing the average cost of land that brokers are managing to sell on the market these days. That seems a more realistic method of gauging the value of Mainland. __________________ Please Visit Our Gardens and Our Website

06-05-2008, 01:50 PM	#26 (permalink)
Walker Moore The Son of Avatar Hiding Join Date: Jul 2007 Posts: 8,138 Doom Rider Champion! My Mood:	I just noticed when visiting the auction site that you don't appear able to bid on land for a group. Can you really not do that?

06-05-2008, 01:55 PM	#28 (permalink)
Love Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2008 Posts: 1,405	Hmmm. OK, the only way that makes sense to me is if the interpreter wastes memory like mad. Or are you supposing that each sim gets its own interpreter? LOL, that would be a poor design decision.