Server 1.38 - bigger than viewer 2.0?

LL has just announced the beta of Server version 1.38, scheduled for roll-out in April. Now, why is this great news?

One of the new features of server 1.38 is llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast(). It will allow a script in a root prim to control other prims in the link set, without a 0.2 second sleep as the previously available llSetLinkPrimitiveParams imposed.

The great upside of this is that for objects with moving parts (for instance, the Drama Dolls), it will reduce the need for having a script in each prim to do animations. As you can see on the illustration above, its quite a few scripts:-) /me hurts in the head just remembering all that coding.... Fewer scripts means less memory usage, and less memory usage means less load on the server, leading to less lag:-)

In the Drama Queen set, there are 25 scripts that could probably have been replaced with code in the root prim script using this function. That's 1.6 Mb of memory at rez time - not to mention all the work on creating and maintaining all those really small bits of code and the interface between them.

There are a few other nifty bug fixes too, although not revolutionary. What I really like about the 1.38 announcement is the attitude it shows: LL seems determined to fix server side stuff and script functionality to make SL work smoother. So it's not all bells and whistles and big spaceships GUI's, but grinding nuts and bolts too.

And while viewer 2.0 is highly controversial, I have yet to see big protests against the 1.38 features.

We are heading for a more flexible script environment where there will be limitations on script resources on a per parcel / per avatar basis, but where one will also have better control on these resources. It will also be possible to allocate far more resources to some scripts, which may be real helpful.

So, while Server 2.0 is still a long way into the future, its nice to get at least some attention on the server side problems too.