Theory on the Void sims.

I'm thinking the ability to 'fill in' oceans cheaper - if they don't have to support the resources that most sims would - high prims, building, permanent residence.. it seems like a better way to add physical space at a cut cost.

so sims for boating and flying, etc. not for dwelling (ie: land sales). is this what you mean?

Yes. People have been asking for water sims. The biggest argument against them has been people who lived there and owned the land would end up raising it, or if they couldn't raise it, just building over the water anyway. So people said "Don't let people own it then. It'll require less processor speed and space to run an 'empty' sim, so you can do it cheaper, say four sims for one server." And LL listened.

I would more say sims for 'travel' - there are many places in Second Life that are now only seperated by one or two 'un-simmed' grid spaces. It makes sense that you should fly/drive/swim/walk from one to the other without having to teleport to a far away telehub and backtrack.

But it is inefficient to put one or two sims there for the sole purpose of travel (the way they are now) - a computer per grid space with little return - and perhaps undesirable to have sims there as they exist now (build/sell/dwell/terraform). I can see the concept of 'void sims' working for that. I think it's a good idea and deserves two thumbs up.

Siggy.

I agree with Siggy, the idea is a great one, why waste resources on stuff you don't need?

I'm excited to see this idea thats been around for awhile finaly being worked on and implemented.

After I looked at this post I saw the new sims and checked the sim cpu.. after, I left the alt-1 info tab open returning to main sims... and noticed CPU at about 0.5... I know at least the sim of Lozi was at 1.0 not that long ago. And I'm quite sure most others where as well. However it now seems that most sims are in this state including some busy ones.

"excellent"

Another thought on this concept too - while I was pondering it on the tree of woe... well in reality I was editing a story on the vice presidential debate, but the state of mind is more or less the same..

At first I couldn't see much value in the idea of a void (or macro sim) as player property... Prims in player spaces are usually more dense - tightly packed.. But could you imagine a sim with 4 times the surface area in the hands of someone like say Kharmon Fate, or Higbee Protagonist... a vast natural park, or wilderness...

Yep, the more I think about it the more I like this idea and hope it works out.

On the flipside... Micro Sim... packing the resources of an entire sim into a smaller area.

Wouldn't packing it down raise other problems? I know that currently sims communicate with the 4 adjacent sims. Would a 'Micro Sim' change the amount/way data is sent? And the data the client needed to get from things in view... would a 'micro sim' have and adverse effect on that?

Just throwing some thoughts out there...

Siggy.

I'm just glad they waited to do this little experiment until AFTER Club Elite moved out of Federal. Having a lag-heap like that adjacent to Seacliff would not have been fun.

Though it's still probably going to be a little sad, Seacliff losing it's amazingly good FPS rates (client-side) because a couple of holes might be filled in.

Hrm. Maybe I should contact my Elven friends and tell them what's up, so they can petition LL NOT to put up void sims near Seacliff, if they'd rather not have them.

Yep. I wonder about that myself. Rumors abound that connect the 0.50 figure with a hyperthreading CPU. Of course, it could well be that they are using one server for every two regions now. I dont really care. If they can safely simulate more than one region for every computer they buy, land tier fees will probably be made cheaper, which is essential for SL to grow.