Script Time Awareness!

[Anlysia Gregoire]

The HUD uses a sensor that polls on a timer, if the sensor returns nothing it does nothing. But if there's anyone within range of you, it has to do a bunch of stuff...and the more people in range, the more it has to do (determine name, range, etc.), then it has to take all that stuff it just did and use an llSetText on the prim in the HUD that displays everyone within sensor of you.

My assumption would be that it uses a loop, and the more people within range the more times it loops. Up to a limit, of course. Then there's the logic of determining who's within 20m to put that little separator bar in there, which is more...though not much.

Ideally I'd tell people to use the Gemini/Emerald clients, which have a built-in radar that measures every single person on the sim, regardless of distance. (Sensors are limited to 96m, by design.) But Emerald was the victim of a built-in keylogger (yay open-source) and Gemini is supposedly built on Emerald (and also supposedly safe, but YMMV) so at this point I'd not recommend either.

Perhaps we could ask Nexii to implement a similar built-in simwide radar into VL so we could use that.

[Cyphre Iredell]

That would definitely be an appropriate add-on to VL, it being a more combat oriented client... get rid of HUD radar altogether, and much more useful in the much larger vertical sim concept.

[Emma Roy]

for now, people could just use llGetObjectDetails or something to prevent having to run a sensor a dozen times a second.

http://www.lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=llGetObjectDetails

[Niiya Narayan]

I don't use the radar at all, and i don't miss it either. I do however use Vertical Life (client) which shows you people's look-at recticles. You can see them right the other side of the sim and if the person is in mouselook; you can see their name in yellow above their head.

For all others i just use the default SL minimap to check who's who.

Sensors also have a hidden performance cost on a sim. They use CPU as well as standard script time, which can't be detected either.

Add that to every person on base, polling even once a second; and we have a good reason why Titan runs sluggish at times.

[Trevor Russell]

Niiya, the radar still has its uses in raids, even with Vertical Life. I rely on a variety of methods, and find that using all of them in tandem gets me the best results.

[Niiya Narayan]

I'm not disputing it's uses... I agree it's quite handy to have a buggy radar display that craps out in heavy lag to tell you who's nearby.

What i'm saying is that i get by just fine without it. I wouldn't consider myself among the less-caipable as far as both air and ground combat go.

The fact that a repeating sensor is so damaging to sim performance just adds a negative factor to using it.

[Kytec Switchblade]

The radar breaks in combat anyway. It's only usefull on defense i find, to check whos nearby. Personally i can't stand VL's minimap, snowglobe shows yellow or green, i'm tired of squinting at a mass of 30 dots trying to tell what one's green and what ones blue in a cluster. Other than that i don't use any other VL features.

maybe if it was light green and dark blue or vica-versa.