Some weeks ago I was astounded when I saw some people wearing 800 to 900 scripts. Since then I have been watching my script weight. I even went to the Market Place and got a scale, so I could weight myself. That feature is built into some viewers. But, I use some viewers that do not have that feature. Here are some interesting things I learned.

Weight Conscious - Weight Your Scripts

Weight Your Scripts

Once I started weighing scripts (with a free scale) I learned that some of my jewelry was a bigger problem than my hair. Literally some of the jewelry’s sizing and coloring scripts number in the hundreds. I knew hair typically has hundreds of scripts. But, jewelry?

Also, some of the hair I thought I had cleaned scripts out of, still had a load of scripts. With my script scale, I realized that and went to work cleaning them out.

Neat Animations

Animation Overriders (AO) HUD’s have scripts. Several viewers now have built-in AO, so a HUD is not needed. Switching from viewer to viewer during the day and installing 1 or 2 new viewers, or at least new versions, per week it is easier to use a HUD based AO. I love my sexy runway walk and I’m not giving it up. With my nails, hair, AO, and other necessary HUD’s my script count is 8 with 272kb of memory used. Not bad.

Recently I was in Hair I Love. They have some nice hair, it is reasonably priced and they have a load of Lucky Letter boards spread through part of the shop. Follow the arrows on the floor to find those freebie boards. The Lucky Letter boards there are the best implementation I’ve seen. They are scattered around the room. You cannot see them all from one place. You can hear all of them from anywhere in the room. The time between letter changes is long, you need that. When you hear your letter called, you have to find which board somewhere in the room has your letter. So, they have you looking through ALL the shop. It’s a good use of a neat marketing idea.

Back on topic, while looking around, I found *V* Alisson Hair Black (L$440 SLMP). It is a classy ponytail do with curly hair. With my South Pacific ancestry I have straight hair, which I love, but curly is a nice change. It appeared to come in up and down versions. It is noted on the promo that it is script animated. I got the Demo and tried it on.

This one also had a big click-me note in the demo sigh floating over my head. Clicking it changes the do from up to down. Surprisingly my avatar hands went up and let the hair down (there is an odd scripting thing that requires you initially click 3 times to see a change. After that it works as you expect.) The animation is very cute. I love it, had to have it.

Checking the Weight

Getting home I checked the script weight. Wow! From my normal 8 scripts with 272k of memory and an ARC of 11,484 I jumped to 264 scripts, 4.4mb memory, and ARC=14,445. I’m script fat.

I love the hair and animation. But I won’t be wearing it to a Mesh Upload Group meeting or any events. The heavy script load means I’m restricted in where I can wear it.

Changes Coming to Second Life

If you read my articles on mesh, you know the Lab is changing the policy on how to charge for resource use. The focus is on resource use and charges being more equitably charged to those that use the resources. The idea is to make things more realistic in the sense of consumption and cost. There is a long term plan to impose script limits. I suspect how scripts are limited and charged for will change over time. We are seeing some of that revealed in mesh costs.

This means it will be more important for vendors to help us know what we are getting into script-wise. I would like to have known my new do is script heavy before I bought it.

Help for Vendors

The Lindens are providing more tools for scripters. One of those is the memory limit function that sets a top limit on the memory a script can use. It is, or soon will be possible for a hair like *V* Alisson Hair to place memory limits on all the scripts in the hair. It may not be possible to reduce the number of scripts, but it will be possible to reduce the 4mb of memory used to may be a couple of hundred K. Then such a hair would be wearable in most places.

For now, I just have to be careful where I wear my new hair.

ARC Revisions

As mesh rolls out one of the changes coming is revisions to ARC (Avatar Rendering Cost). Our current ARC is apparently not as realistic as the Lindens would like. ARC was originally created to encourage people to think about their avatar rendering load and learn how to reduce the load/cost. This was to help reduce lag. The creation of ARC Nazis was an unintended consequence.

With the new studies and analysis of Second Life systems to determine how to reduce lag and to best take advantage of mesh, the Lindens have learned more about how the system works. With that new knowledge the ARC tool will be revised some time after 100% Mesh Roll Out. It will be interesting to see how the ARC numbers change.