Lately on the sionChicken adverts I’ve been interested to see a new business forming around the latest version of chickens. Created by Steve Crowley, the business is called sionChicken Notification Network. The first product out of sCNN is the sionChicken Egg Detector and Retriever. The non-copyable version of this product has just this weekend gone on sale to the public.
This product will send out a drone to collect Version 11 sionEggs laid by a mating pair of sionChickens, and bring it back to a collection chamber for you. For those with larger farms of chickens, I would imagine this would be a godsend, stopping the need to constantly retrieve and package up eggs from all the coops.
This is especially important given the recent news that Lindens have returned chickens to their owners (and thus killed the chickens) when on the Mainland with communications informing the chicken owners that the number of chickens kept had been producing performance problems. Each egg allowed to go unattended will hatch, and each chicken hatched is 9 prims of scripted behaviour.
This Mainland news was written up in a sensationalist fashion on the Shopping Cart Disco blog, where it was presumed that sionChickens cause lag and that the creator was somehow lying. But I wanted to correct a few assumptions being made on that post, from information gleaned from both being a dedicated sionChicken owner and from several sionChicken groups inworld who discussed this issue specifically.
The scripting limits applied on the mainland by a few Lindens appear to have been enforced on only a few Mainland only sionChicken farmers. These issues appear to have happened to chicken keepers who either hadn’t bothered to update to the lagless V11 version recently released (updates via a proggenator egg capsule or chicken transport box, both of which cost a little money and can only be used on one chicken or egg at a time), or for those who kept over 100 chickens together on the one piece of land. Both older version 11 sionChickens and keeping too many chickens together could cause lag, as would other large quantities of scripted objects on land. As Estate owners of the mainland, Lindens have the right to return performance reducing scripted objects, just as any other estate owner has on private islands. Unfortunately, sionChickens and eggs are scripted to be killed (or reduced back to an ‘object’) when returned to inventory, and for those few who were affected by this return, the exercise may well have been quite costly.
General feeling is that on a large parcel, chickens can be kept up to the forty or fifty mark without causing any undue performance issues. As a hobbyist, I know the chicken limits on my own piece of estate island land, and must make hefty choices on reducing population numbers from time to time, to reduce any impact I may have. But I also make the same decisions on other scripted objects such as the ultimate dogs or cats I have out, which again can cause problems when pushing against too many prims, as per the instructions which come with them.
So, as there obviously exist large sionChicken farms out there containing numerous chickens as a business, the sionChicken Egg Detector and Retriever may well be a good option.
The sionChicken Egg Detector and Retriever can currently be seen working in the middle of the SCNN store. It is expected to go on sale for L$1500 for a non-copyable version. But Steve is currently holding a competition to choose the texture for the actual collection point. You can vote for your favourite and may win a copyable version, allowing retrieval over larger distances.
There are six different collection point textures to vote for, from the futuristic to a couple of cutesy ones. The photos of these egg stores also show the globe drone in front (that’s what I’m presuming it to be). The working Retriever in-store shows the setup with quite a few eggs from the surrounding coops having been delivered. These are stopped from hatching by the one sionEgg Radi-O-Static tool. You therefore make something of a saving not having to have one of these Radi-O-Statics placed every 10 meters along each coop.
Steve Crowley also has produced the simple egg notifier for version 11 eggs. This simply notifies you via chat or IM when an egg has been laid, but also gives you the SLurl to the coordinates which is clickable for a teleport to the egg. Great for those who have multiple farms across SIMs.
The store is currently selling some 2nd Gen Ancient Eggs and displaying an ancient chick glowing in a coop. This was my first sighting of an ancient, and I doubt my own hobby chickens are ever going to produce one of those sought after eggs.
sionChicken Notification Network also has a group to join for update news, but unfortunately as I’ve got too many groups vying for my attention, I couldn’t join personally.
Landmark : sionChicken Notification Network
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