Viewers are changing rapidly and there is lots of new information and mis-information. For Combat RPG’s some of the information is critical. (Continued from GreenLife Emerald Viewer Review)
Update 12/3/09: This viewer updates rapidly. I have made several posts here about the different features being added to Greenlife Emerald viewer and provided reviews. There is a trail of links you can read through to read them in order. Or you can click on the Archive page and select the Emerald Viewer Reviews to see all the posts that relate.
12/3/09: I’ve added an index to all the Emerald Viewer Reviews. See: Emerald Viewer Review Index
Emerald, to Lag or Not
Most of the new viewers have a thing some call Radar and in Emerald it is labeled Avatar List (Ctrl-Shift-a or via menu Emerald -> Avatar List). In some other places in Emerald it is referred to as radar. In Emerald it is a handy floater listing all the nearby avatars and some handy information. See the image.
Once upon a time the mini-map was called radar, until Linen Lab renamed it for a better new player experience. But that is not the radar usually meant in comabt SIM’s.
Radar in Second Life previously was a script in a prim or HUD that used a SCAN feature in Second Life’s LSL scripting language. SCAN’s are notorious for creating lag. It’s just the way it works in SL. Good programmers avoid it as much as possible. Combat SIM operators simply ban prim/hud based radars or any high lag producers within their games. There are several reasons for the radar ban with lag being the biggest one. Since prim/HUD based radars were the only ones in existence, SIM operators never bothered to specify which types radars were banned or why, they just simply said radar is banned.
