UaNeill@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
>I'm not sure anything but a brute force method of checking every cell
>would work. Is it possible that someone would own just a few cells at
>(50, 50) or something like that?
Indeed, that's possible.
>How else would you find that but
>checking every cell? You could query x from 0 to max, y from 0 to
>max, find nothing, declare you own the whole block, and get sued for
>random birdsong intrusion, [...]
Yes, there's no doubt that you'd have to check every cell of the
"parcel" of owned land, but that doesn't mean you have check every
cell in the whole "sim", which is to say the (0-255,-0-255) range.
You've just highlighted the least optimal layout for us, that is
someone who owns an entire "sim". ("Scare" quotes because they're the
terms used in SL.)
But the converse would be the guy who owns just a little bit of land
putting in my device. We only need, at worst, to check every cell of
his wee parcel and some adjacent ones, not the whole sim. Most people
don't own a sim, or even a quarter of one; a typical parcel is 1024
(32x32 or variations thereof), and a sim is 64K (255x255).
> if there are SL lawsuits. I'm sure there
>are.
No, if you've got a grievance, you either deal with it yourself or
take it to the real-life courts (which has happened). That's not to
say there aren't people who log in and pretend to be lawyers - I'm
sure there must be, somewhere.
>What's the problem with a brute force method? Is there a cost
>associated with the query? 2^16 is a pretty small number of things to
>ask a y/n question of, unless you're paying for each one or something.
The costs associated with the query are, firstly, the inconvenience of
waiting for the thing to do thousands of queries; and, secondly, the
overhead this places on the processing power available to the sim.
Each 16K sim runs on one Linux box near San Francisco; they have
thousands of such boxen tightly networked, which together make up the
Second Life "grid". The cpu/memory/network/disk seek/etc work that
your script does can, and sometimes does, impact "your" box's
performance, which makes life miserable for others.
OK, I've just run a test that simply tests the whole sim, with an
accurate timer called "counting seconds in my head". Each 255 'row'
of cells takes about one second, so it would take about four minutes
to test the whole sim. That's a bit long for this application, not to
mention for me developing the damned thing, with repeated re-runs.
--
John Hatpin
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