Darklife

[Mark Busch]

On a post on my blog I explain about lag, and I also give the following advice to prevent lag in darklife when many people are playing (http://markbusch.wordpress.com/2007/06/18/laggin-in-istaria)

Please DO NOT do the following:

-Using gestures that repeat attack or other backpack commands over and over again. Once again: the battles are ‘turn based’! All monsters and all players can do a move every 4 seconds (unless it’s a potion). When you give a command it will be remembered and only executed when ‘you’re on turn’! So when your 4 seconds of waiting is over, the backpack instantly executes the command it remembered. And in the case of attacking, it will automatically do a new attack-command. What happens if you give the same command over and over between your turn? It ignores them! The backpack understood you the first time you said attack! But this ignoring takes time, your command has to be compared to a list of commands to determine what you want. This means you are keeping your command script very very busy, and then, WHEN your turn finally comes and the command script is asked “what is his/hers next move’, the command script is actually SLOWED down in answering that question, meaning you attack will be DELAYED! So again what happens when you spam commands: You’ll attack SLOWER, and you’ll also be lagging the SIM too! Please don’t do that!

-Bumping & jumping: Every move you make causes the phsyics engine in SL to calculate more stuff. If you are bored please don’t start bumping and jumping around! Standing still causes less lag

-Using your own scripts: most people probably don’t know how their scripts for AO’s or other items operate. If a N00B made your scripts (or someone not caring about performance), it might be VERY ineffectient and laggy, causing darklife scripts to slow down. If you haven’t written or read (and understood) the code from your scripts, please don’t use them! You might be lagging the whole game, just to have a little bling bling on your golden watch!

-Do not repeatedly click on anything. This is always useless: you can click 100 times on a monster in 2 seconds, but this will give the exact same result as shouting 100 attack commands: it will lag the game, and slow your backpack down, making it harder for you to kill monsters!
If you plan to not play DarkLife for a longer while, but you still want to chat with the players, please take of your backpack and gear. Ofcourse I did my best to make the backpack efficient and all, but it’s still a complex system for SL, so the less backpacks on, the better!

Thank you for understanding!