Ds Line: (5:1000) Options

[Alorah]

Heya. (: I got a suggestion relating to one of my favorite DS lines:

CODE

(5:1000) redraw the screen and show everything that's just changed.

I've found a lot of neat uses for it. I built an X-men dream once and used it in the Danger Room. When the room was activated, items and floors would slide rather smoothly onto the screen. When deactivated, it would transition back to being empty just as smoothly. I used it for weather effects in a dream, and it would begin to smoothly transition to rain or snow. I've used it to quickly move a furre a small distance from point A to point B. I've also seen it used for some pretty neat things. A furre's swift fall down a deep hole, a ride up a short elevator, among some other things. However, it has one huge drawback. A friend attempted to use it to simulate dancing, but this drawback made it impossible.

It causes dreamwide lag while it's redrawing. No exception. Lag varies for people and how much it's used, but it can get pretty impressive. I had someone spam the Danger Room command in that X-men dream before the command was shared-only and the lag made us helpless to stop them. But the Danger Room was not the same without the command, it was worth it despite the lag, and everyone who saw it liked it.

After some talk with a friend, Len Flare, on this, we came up with an idea that could fix or reduce this, after trying to apply filters related to location to the command.

We'd love to see the following lines get added, or otherwise the lag somehow fixed with (5:1000):

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  (5:xxx) redraw the screen for anyone who can see position (X,Y).
   (5:xxx) redraw the screen for anyone within diamond ((X,Y) - (X,Y).
   (5:xxx) redraw the screen for anyone within rectangle (X,Y) - (X,Y).
   (5:xxx) redraw the triggering furre's screen.

Hopefully, that would at least reduce the lag only to the effected areas. The (5:1000) line has been the root of a good number of lovely, unique things and I could see it being used a lot more if the lag was fixed or reduced. It allows a very unique effect in dreams that cannot be accomplished another way.

/salute

[Calib]

I don't know if/when they will be adding more DS (there is a lot of other stuff to do besides making DS) but it would be really nice if they don't add the suggested DS that the current DS was tweaked so that it only redrew the screen if people can see the screen area being redrawn and/or only for the people who can see the redrawing area.

Either way, yes, I support this idea.