Ultra low lag AOs now in Opensim!
Anyone who is familiar with Second Life will have felt the same feeling at least once during their metalife.. “Why don’t they do this? It’s so easy, and would improve things massively!”
One instance where a small amount of work has the possibility to make a big change to user experiences, is improving Animation Overrides (AO’s). These are user created scripts which automatically replace the default animations as avatars move around.
Traditionally – due to limitations within second life – these scripts have needed to run checks constantly; often several times a second. Needless to say, they are often the cause of a lot of lag and general load on the simulator.
Melanie – one of the core developers of Opensim – has taken the torch, raising the bar by providing a script event which actually notifies the script when an animation state changes. Not only is this a big step towards reducing lag within the metaverse, but it also benefits end users directly by providing faster and more seamless animation state changes.
Melanie said “I looked at implementing it [before, but] despaired and did easier things. [A change to the code yesterday] made it possible to actually do it”.
