Mercury OIC development status

[Inoue Katsu]

Because I keep getting the occasional question about the greeting dialog in Titan which asks if you want to be lined up for OIC I decided to make an info post about how it works with a little background info.

Just to clear up a common misconception first, the radar display is -not- Mercury itself. The radar is a separate system which uses Mercury to classify people and acts as its 'eyes' at the same time. Any radar system, with only minor added scripting, can be used as in game eyes for Mercury itself. Mercury is a database which responds to outside triggers like authentication requests and by evaluating all the different input channels that it gets fed. It will whine in seconds after it detects rule based events like low friendly population or a sharp increase in hostile/unknown people. The system does not reside on SL but is off-course reliant on input that it is getting from scripts on the SL grid which is where its Achilles heel is.

So here is how the OIC stuff works right now:

Someone enters Titan or Chronus.

Person gets picked up by the radar.

Radar tells mercury 'hey, look at my shiny list of people that I'm tracking!' ((<-- Sim stress and Linden updates make it break here.))

Mercury goes 'hey nice list, this meatbag is new, does it belong to the group who owns the sim, if so, what rank is it in case we need to nag it about OIC, send the proper greeting message and maybe follow it up with a question about OIC after a minute rez time waiting'

If you hit yes you'll get lined up in the list.

If you hit no, nothing will happen.

If you hit 'Claim', it will compare your rank to the current oic, if you outrank the current one it will replace him/her. If there is none, it will give you oic. This bit is still being worked on.

On the event that someone marked as OIC or possible OIC leaves the sims they are marked for, it will wait 3 minutes before removing the person and possibly wanting to declare a new OIC on its own if the person was the OIC. Just to catch crashes and the likes.

Mercury will keep someone in memory up to an hour after they leave, and it will not send a greeting to anyone who has not been gone for more then 10 minutes. I might actually change this timer or add some kind of 'ongoing raid mode' to make it not nag people who pop back in during a raid, but as most sims have a local spawnpoint now, it should be fine.

In case the OIC list gets empty:

Mercury will complain in game if the list is empty. It will then just forcefully add *every* Ordo member on sim and go down the list from high ranking to low ranking to see if they want command. If you hit 'No' when it asks it will remove you from the list, if you let it time out (I can only wait 20 seconds for a reply) it will ask once more before going to the next person.

It will keep doing this until there is an assigned OIC.

What needs work:

The claiming of OIC needs work and isn't finished.

The handling of 'Was I already looking for an OIC or not' in the backend daemon needs work, for some reason it can glitch there and stop looking while theres no assigned oic while thinking its actually still looking.

All in-game interaction like removing yourself from oic, the que, removing someone else etc. This will not get done before the automatic stuff is working with minimal glitches.

Automatic load balancing of in game servers where it reliably rezzes and de-rezzes extra servers as it needs them. This is a priority so it can keep up with mass teleports into the sims.

[Jester Spearmann]

[insert skynet joke here]

Nice work inoue, I like how it now tells people who the OIC is. instead of it being a blank slot.

had a rather interesting thing happen a few nights ago, it asked me twice in a row if i wanted OIC

then listed me twice o:

[Inoue Katsu]

[insert skynet joke here]

Nice work inoue, I like how it now tells people who the OIC is. instead of it being a blank slot.

had a rather interesting thing happen a few nights ago, it asked me twice in a row if i wanted OIC

then listed me twice o:

It gives a blank slot when it glitches and stops looking half way, the asking twice is related I think.

[Trinity Heckroth]

I think it might should be possible to query the OIC remotely (/1 oic:check) and list/claim yourself remotely for oic (/1 oic:list/claim) in case someone logs in and goes afk, or cant be listed because of possible upcomming RL stuff but it clears while theyre in sim.

[Jason Backer]

Yeah some slash commands like Trin said will be very helpful.

If they're not in we'd have to log in and out to see who is OIC and to claim?