[Opensim-users] Sensors are not detecting NPC avatars on git r/17830

[dz]

>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Justin Clark-Casey <jjustincc at googlemail.com>
> To: opensim-users at lists.berlios.de
> Cc:
> Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:57:15 +0000
> Subject: Re: [Opensim-users] Sensors are not detecting NPC avatars on git
> r/17830
> ...
>
> One reason for doing this is because the sensor limit is 16 and one
> doesn't want the return to be overwhelmed by NPCs. It means that sensor
> using scripts not designed with NPCs in mind (both in the past and the
> future) won't work with NPCs without alteration.  It strikes me that
> sometimes this is a disadvantage (e.g. a light that should come on when it
> detects any presence) but for other items an advantage (e.g. non-NPC aware
> radars that wouldn't be designed to pick them up anyway).
>
> So one option is to change the default so that AGENT will pick up NPCs.
>  However, this is a problem with the 16 avatar sensor limit.  Even if this
> is turned up, it might then cause script problems (e.g. ones designed to
> work with only 16 avatars).
>
> Another slightly messy option is to provide something like an
> OS_NPC_SHOW_AS_AGENT option to osNpcCreate() that will show such NPCs as
> agents.  I'm favouring this option right now.
>
> Either way, what is missing at the moment is a way to actually tell if a
> particular agent is an NPC.  One possibility is to make llGetOwnerKey()
> return an owned NPC's owner.  For an unowned NPC, this would need to return
> UUID.Zero - I'm not sure if there's a problem disambiguating between an
> unowned NPC and a situation where no entity with the ID is found.
>
> I'm interested if people have any thoughts about this.
>
>
Justin,

IMO    The best answer is to treat NPC's as an agent.

To me it makes no sense to artificially inflate the complexity of future
scripting of simple objects meant to react to a "presence".
Using your example of the light...  How un-natural would it seem to walk
into a room, have the light come on, and then find 6 NPC avatars already
there??

Since there is a config variable that allows you to reset the # of sensor
detections, the scripts that are hard-coded to enforce the limit of 16
agents are already "wrong" and shouldn't be considered as the correct
design template to support ...  I'm guessing there are considerably more
"agent information" functions involved than just the filtering of sensor
returns, so this doesn't seem like the one that would be the determining
factor.

I would suggest that SecondLife already suffers from the inability to
discern between agent types, and that devoting the effort to a "rational
design" that gives grid operators/scripters a simple way to identify
HGUsers/LocalUsers/Bots/NPC's  and react to them differently is worth the
effort.

Just my $0.02
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