On Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:35:27 -0500, Kent Quirk wrote: > First, sarcasm isn't the best way to get a positive response. > > Second, we do listen -- not only this time, but many times in the > past. We hear a lot, including a fair amount of contradictory advice. > .../...
Not wanting to start a flame war or add more sarcasms, but I'm afraid Linben Lab did not take very wise neither profitable (for both LL and the residents) decisions in the past, thus why old-timers can only fear more hasted and illogical/harmful decisions... Examples ? Here are only a few: - The new (well, now over two years old) decentralized groups system (which used to work just fine as a centralized architecture before the v1.17 viewer and correpsonding server were issued), which has proven totally unreliable and unscalable (see the JIRA about "more than 25 groups", and all the complaints about group chat and group notices failures). Note that this was an unilateral decision from LL and that no discussion whatsoever occured prior to this change, and that LL ignored all complaints since... - The search system, which again used to work just fine and provided both relevant and, most important, *fair* results before the web-based search engine was forced down our throats, here again, without any discussion whatsoever and is now universally recognized as a distaster among all merchants and customers alike (by the day the official viewer lost its "All(old)" search tab, my incomes as a merchant droped by a whooping 50% !). Here again, LL did nothing to date to correct the problems. - The dramatic changes in sim pricing and prim support limits (and the consequences with closed and reduced number of sims). - The Adult segregation fiasco (again a drop for "Adult" merchants incomes: 30% for me so far, thank you LL !). There has been a "discussion" but it was pretty moot since LL had already decided they would create an "Adult" continent and did not change a single thing in their plan despite the vehement protests and numerous interesting and viable counter-proposals. The true solution was to make a PG continent, but of course, since LL already decided and worked on the adult continent even before they opened the "discussion" about the coming changes, it was too late... The result ?... A user base which at best stagnates and actually goes down (In now over two years, the "logged in last 60 days" figure on the login screen went from a little over 1 500 000 in November 2007 (all times record) to under 1 400 000 nowadays), and merchants who struggle to no avail and will soon leave SL "en masse" for greener pastures (the next disaster to come for merchants is the new XStreet policy about freebies which, curiously, will mostly impact non- freebies ! LL's greed is simply infinite... and will kill their own business !). Well, I guess you got the hint... Now, let's go back to the topic: scripts limits... My dear Q, since you say you do listen, and since I'm ready to believe you, here is an advice: Do not do things the wrong way around. Before imposing *any* limit on scripts, provide scripters with better functions. My own scripted products are high quality with a lot of features, and they do use a lot of scripts. Not so much because they need mega-bytes of memory to run (I started programming back in the 70s, on 6502 and 6800 processors, with 1Kb of ROM and 256 bytes of RAM, so I think I do know what optimization means), but simply because there are no other way than to use slave scripts for child prims (and often, in average you need one script per prim in the final object): with the proper functions, I could easily reduce by 70% the number of scripts, in turn lowering the load imposed on sim and asset servers when an avatar with scripted attachments enters a new region (70% less scripts to serialize in the departing sim, send to the asset server, then fetch back from the asset server and finally deserialize in the arrival sim)... Many LSL functions could (should !) be added to avoid having to use secondary scripts, such as llLinkParticleSystem(), llSetLinkText(), llGetLinkDesc(), llSetLinkDesc(), llSetLinkName(), etc (in short, it should be possible for a script in the root primitive to retrieve and change all the parameters of any of its child primitives), and also fix the broken functions (see https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-93 for example)... These new/debugged functions should be made available to scripters long (at least 6 months) before any limit is imposed to them, so to let them enough time to adapt their scripts and for merchants to update their products. Unless LL's new mission is to break existing contents and bring features below what is already possible in OpenSim, which would definitely hasten the "en masse" migration (for your info, the ONLY reason why I did not myself completely migrate to OpenSim grids is precisely because scripts are so much more reliable on SL)... Regards, Henri Beauchamp. _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
