Which of these three looks like the most effective and efficient method for safe-guarding your oh-so-meticulously dressed pixels from desperate wannabes? *snort*
If you picked C, the Anti-Inspection Shield on the right, you’d be absolutely…WRONG! Yet, some fashionistas (and, in this case, I use that term loosely) will pay upwards of L$500 to protect their signature copybotted personal style.
I’m not going to lecture you about the disservice you are doing to the designers and content creators whose styles you wear and who, more than anything, depend upon old-fashioned word-of-mouth advertising to grow their SL business. We all know that you paid for the clothes on your back, you didn’t sign on to be their personal sales force. Though, I’m sure, more than a few would be very appreciative if you told a few people about your favorite shops and didn’t come off like a pompous ass when someone asks where you found that cute skirt. But, I digress…
What I am going to tell you about is the massive effect you have on everyone you come in contact with, from both a practical and a technical standpoint. First, the practical. Imagine shopping in a relatively small store. Some holier-than-thou primtard struts in wearing a huge, egg-shaped, 255 prim behemoth of an anti-inspection shield and stands right in front of the vendor you wish to purchase from. Two things will happen. First, depending on how small the store is, your camera is going to go all wonky causing a tunnel-vision effect because it can’t “see” around the prim. Secondly, without some serious camming maneuvers, what should be a simple right-click-buy shopping experience becomes an exercise in camera gymnastics as you try to maneuver around the huge shield just to get to the vendor. Who has time for that kind of frustration?
From a technical standpoint, anti-inspection shields cause lag. The image below illustrates Codie’s statistics when I was wearing the shield and when I took it off. We only measured client lag for this test, but look at the change! When I was wearing the shield Codie experienced a 90% drop in performance as measured by FPS. Just to make sure we weren’t losing our minds, we invited Jacek Antonelli, the mastermind behind the Imprudence Viewer project, to visit and confirm our findings. She did. She also told me what hair I was wearing in under 2 seconds, I’ll share her protip for making the inspection shield completely useless in just a bit.
While discussing the reasons the camera goes crazy, my brilliant friend, Caer Balogh, mentioned the bounding box, so we dug a little deeper into that subject. According to Caer, “The bounding box is the first crack the system has at finding collisions and visible stuff, if it sees the bounding box it has to do more work to tell what it needs to draw/bump into.” See the photo below. Look at how the bounding box further expands the size of the shield. “Bear in mind, it’s all like ARC,” she continued, “you may not cause lag with a large bbox, but it may be an indicator that you’re making things work harder.” Caer has a couple of great pictures of shield failures on Flickr in her Anti-Inspection Shield Theatre set.
I’m going to put this request out to sim and store owners: Ban these devices from your businesses. They do cause lag. They do suck resources. And they greatly diminish other residents’ ability to enjoy their experience. We are giving you the proof. Do not tolerate them.
So far, we’ve learned that not only are Anti-Inspection Shields a nuisance, they negatively impact other residents. Now, let’s make them completely ineffective. There are two ways to do this. The first, alt+click on a nearby prim to focus your camera just to the side or above the offending avatar, use your camera controls (From the main menu, choose View > Camera Controls if you don’t have them open already) and maneuver your camera inside the sea of invisiprim layers until you can right click+inspect any prim object the avatar is wearing. With some practice, you can identify every piece attached to their pixels in under a minute. Jacek shared the second method. From the Advanced Menu, choose Rendering and Hide Selected. According to Jacek, “That makes it so any object you select in edit mode is invisble, and you can also click through to stuff behind it. Really useful when building, you can use it to get at inner parts.” Once you’ve turned on the Hide Selected option, open up your build/edit dialogue (ctrl+3), click on the shield to select it, then click again on whatever attachment you want to see. It only takes two clicks to render this monstrosity completely useless.
Moral of the story: Be a good neighbor. Who cares if someone wants to know what you are wearing. Consider it a compliment that someone appreciates your personal style. Don’t waste my time, patience and technical resources to protect your vanity. That’s not attractive, it’s pretty fucking rude.
Special thanks to CodeBastard Redgrave, Caer Balogh and Jacek Antonelli for their input, insight and intelligence. They really helped me to understand this topic better, and I hope you learned a few things as well.
And that great dress I’m wearing on the home page? It’s new from FakE by Dream Resistance and Sabina Takakura, a new design team with a brand new store…check them out, but leave your inspection shield at home, k?
[...] thing, I urge you to read Gabby Panacek’s recent blog about anti-inspection devices, Just Say No. Not wanting to rehash her entire argument, let me just say, anti-inspection device = bad. As a [...]
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[...] cause lag September 18, 2009 Over on Atomic Valley Gabby Panacek has written a piece on Anti inspection shields which illustrates clearly how they cause lag. She states “We only measured client lag for [...]
[...] Panacek wrote an amazing article about it and the lag effects of this *amazing* device: Just Say No! and Jacek Antonelli shows how to bypass the device: Bypass an Anti-Inspect Shield in 3 Easy Steps [...]