Scrims

Three times this month someone has turned round to me and said "I thought you were a girl". I don't know what to make of this!

Scrims, a word fashioned by someone on the scripters mailing list could very well be something you need to pay attention to as Linden Lab address the issue of how resources are shared on a sim. The basic concept = The more you pay, the more you get.

The plan, which is very much in its infancy so there's no need to go running to the hills, is to limit the script resources available on a parcel basis in a similar fashion to how objects are restricted by prim limits.

Well if you pay more tier, you get more resources, it sounds fair enough in theory, but there are some big but's on this. The stable door has been open for quite a while on this issue and the horse has very much bolted, so this issue needs to be handled very very carefully.

What worries me about the scripters list is that scripters talk like, well, scripters. However sometimes you need to think like your average resident, the person who buys the scripted object, takes it home and finds it won't rez because it takes them over their resource limit. How do you explain to them that they can't use that object? With prims it's easy, clearly labelled, people can work that out, but with scripts, it's not quite that straight forward.

The issues are of course well documented, that 16M parcel using a shed load of resources on a sim leaving the vast majority of the rest of the sim struggling for fair usage. It's not as if this issue doesn't need to be addressed, but it needs to be addressed with residents, not just scripters, in mind.

In terms of scripters, education, education, education. Coerce, encourage and advertise less intensive scripts. Make it good practice in every single tutorial to try and use scripts that are less resource hungry.

There are scripts around that are resource hungry for a few seconds and then go pretty idle, how are these going to be handled in the brave new world? Will they work at all if the land owner doesn't own enough land?

Malls and clubs could feel the effects from this more than most places. I know clubs in particular are seen as public enemy number one by some residents but that doesn't mean that we should ride roughshod over their concerns.

Residents themselves are going to need to be able to identify which scripted objects will work on their land and how many resources said object will use. That's going to be no easy feat because residents want shiny objects that function. They don't want to have to consider too many options but it looks as if they're going to have to.

The issue isn't just about parcel size either, avatars themselves will have limits. Following on from the "The more you pay, the more you get" philosophy behind this project, would this mean premium accounts get more resources for their avatars?

There was something else in the survey that to me, will be a more popular move for Linden Lab to make. That was regarding building a system whereby transactions and delivery of items are verified. I think this will make users happier than restricting resources by parcel size and introducing C#. This is something that all residents will understand.

The issue of script resources needs to be handled delicately, and it needs to be handled with the bigger picture of the world as we know it now being taken into account. That means taking onboard not just the views of scripters, but of people from all walks of Second Life, because otherwise there's going to be whole lot of complaining going on when this policy is implemented.