Bots shot themselves in the foot

Finally. It sounds like Linden Lab is getting its act together to tackle important issues that make the SL experience frustrating. After announcing that they have a Linden devoted to listening to the SL community, they are tackling the immense traffic numbers problem.

Taking the content of their Showcase site to the 1.21 version of the viewer soon, the Lindens are telling us that they truly want us to discover the top SL creations. At least without being gamed by camping or hours of travelling around the grid just to find anything

According to the Reuters news agency, the camping bots that look for empty camping spots drove down the value of time spent camping. They also sucked good money out of camping spot owners by being there at all times. This made the practice of camping even useless as a revenue source for users who cannot inject funds in their SL account.

By overtricking the system, they got even camping spot owners and the Lindens wary.

There is just one weakness with Showcase. The content selection is great, but whenever I look at it, I often feel that there is less space for great individual projects than "big" organizational ones. Don't get me wrong. I prefer editorial choice to traffic numbers. Relevance is what I like. But I also hope that "up and coming" creators get their space in that Showcase feature. Still, this worry is healthy in comparison to the concerns many of us had about the quality of search results and the impact of camping and bots.

The avatar rendering cost

The avatar rendering cost, which the Lindens introduced in the latest version of the Release Candidate software, is also interesting. Based on a number of criteria, it gives us an indication of how much lag we cause when our avatars are rendered. Multiple flexible prims with plenty of textures or particle emitters always cause more lag than a naked avatar.

Once I got past the shock that my lag count is over 3000, I realized that this count gives us only a part of the big picture. Anyone who knows lag knows that the multiple sources of lag vary on avatars and sims.

On an avatar, wearing scripts with "listening" features - you type something, the script takes the command and does something in return - cause a elephantesque amount of lag. Imagine a club where everybody dances with the Chimera dance machine attached to their butts. Dozens of listening scripts like that will help slow down the place.

Now, on a sim, any "physical" object that reproduces dynamics such as gravity, collisions and movement adds to the lag. Combine all the above factors and lag has a more complex face than just the hair and clothing you wear.

This feature can make people feel guilty about the way they tailor their style. But that guilt isn't fully justified when scripts and physical objects can smash a sim's performance all by themselves.

Besides, I felt less guilty when I did business with a customer whose lag count is almost 15000 :-)