Scripting Question?

[Evolving Yin]

I have been notified by SL that I need to reduce my scripted items on one of my Sims. I have been in the process of reducing cats but it does not seem to be fast enough for the SL support team. This has caused me to look very closely at the cats scripting. I turned off all the animation scripts, but doesn't seem to help much unless I put them in low prim mode.

I would like to keep my cats in the museum on a different Sim in full prim mode. There are lots of them and it is causing lag issues in this Sim as well, but fortunately I have not been contacted by SL support to reduce my scripting objects in this Sim yet.

So now to the point. I don't understand why the cats with the disabled scripts don't change the size of their Parcel Script Memory usage when I disable the animation scripts. Is there anything I can do to further reduce their scripting impact on the sim short of putting them in low prim mode or removing them?

Thanks,
Evo

[Tad Carlucci]

Because simply disabling animation (for example) does NOT disable the script itself.

The script will still be there, will still take up memory and will still snag a few microseconds of processing time even if it's not doing anything as the engine checks with the script to see if it has anything to do.

The only suggestion I would make is to move off Mainland. Most Estate Managers are fairly lax about watching performance and most won't complain when all your cats drop the FPS a bit.

I've been asked by some KittyCatS market Estate Managers to take a look at this issue on their regions. They have one more choice you don't have: have their regions relocated so you can't walk, or see, from one to another by putting a one-region buffer around each. This, of course, is not acceptable and is just a stop-gap measure; eventually the problem will grow to the point their only option is to evict a few hundred cats, or reduce the number of avatars allowed on their, and neighboring, island(s).

***

To KittyCatS, let me rephrase the question into an feature-request you can actually implement:

Please investigate a low-script 3D "Statue" mode which contains just one script which provides just one function: switch back to "Normal" 3D mode. This should be a half-in-half-out mode: technically the cat should be in the Cattery (so it can eat, drink, sleep, breed) but visually it should be in-world. So the menu would have just 2 options: Send to Cattery (ie., self-destruct) and "Switch to Normal Mode" (which is actually retrieve-from-Cattery). The only complication would be handing transfer of ownership; which I would consider dis-allowing by making the "Statue" mode non-transfer.

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Thinking on it a bit more, we could reduce the load on the region further, and make the switch to non-transfer simple, by using a specialized "Dock" to handle the normal-to-statue transition (I'll call it a Sculptor): send the cat the the Cattery, pull a Statue back in-world. The cat, then, only needs a script to self-destruct and listen for a HUD/Sculptor command to send it (or all statues) back to the Cattery. If we used the Sculptor for the HTTP communications, we would further reduce load on the region by consolidating the HTTP socket. (We'll want to do this, and have the Statue self-destruct if it can't find a Sculptor, to prevent hoarding Statues of cats you've sold .. the Statue would, on rez and periodically, ask the Sculptor if it's still allowed to exist and self-destruct if not, or if it does not get an answer after a few retries.)

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Another option would be to have the Sculptor handle the in-world heartbeat for several (say 10) Statues. In this way, the cats are actually in-world, but 10 cats are sharing a single Sculptor, which could also handle being a food and/or milk dish. This would be a bit more work on the scripting but would avoid a new Cattery mode. I've not fully considered the implications but it should achieve up to an 80 or 90 percent reduction in non-texture resource use.

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I Note that none of these ideas reduce the main source of lag from KittyCatS: texture lag.

[Evolving Yin]

(07-09-2018 09:08 AM)Tad Carlucci Wrote:  To KittyCatS, let me rephrase the question into an feature-request you can actually implement:. . .

Thank you Tad for your response and for addressing this issue! Max and I have been on the two Sims mentioned here since 2006 and have a considerable amount of time invested in creating our snow village and ocean front marina. I really don't want to have to move off the mainland just to display and breed KittyCatS. I was hoping for just what you have suggested here, a future update that would address the excess scripting issue.

A statue version while keeping the original in the cattery is a great suggestion for the display cats. I will add that all my live cats in the museum are perma-petted. Even if this was only an option available with the perma pet solution that would at least address the collector cat display issue.

Sincerely,
Evolving