Sim leasing for RL or SL money?

Based on a prior thread about LL giving rights to the owners. Has LL ever considered leasing entire sims to people for real money or in game money at all? I know they did something for that island sim but I was wondering if they ever have plans to do private sim leases for people who'd like that kind of thing. The map sure looks large enough.

Perhaps in the future, but I doubt it now.

Buying a Sim with Linden Dollars costs, well, alot of money. My math is kinda fuzzy, but it's over a couple hundred thousand dollars at least.

LF

A while back it was mentioned that it would be possible to lease a sim, but at the moment nothing's been said about it. I think they're still working on a system to get it up and running correctly so when people want their sim, they'll have it incredibly fast rather than having to wait a day or somthing

That's my guess anyway.

gee. a whole day. i'd wait a day for a sim. i might even wait two whole days for a whole sim.

But would you pay the hundreds of dollars it will most likely cost? I'm talking real-life money here too. Remember that LL has to constantly pay for upkeep of the servers.

oh no i wouldn't. the only way i would own a sim is if i could host it on my own server with broadband connection and dedicated ip. that would only cost a few thousand dollars a year and people would probably have to cast to it as a detached landblock. i would also expect to have to pay the normal L$s to own and maintain the land. i can't afford that in second life right now, much less first.

that would be fun though. i'm just dreaming here.

Broadband isn't enough. A single person entering the sim will saturate your upstream bandwidth; just imagine what would happen when 30 people show up for an event!

You'd want to colocate it in a data center somewhere, probably about $100 a month for the hosting plus whatever LL cared to charge for the privillege.

More than likely you'd pay THEM to colocate it, particularly if you expect to let avatars from the mainland come in under their SL accounts. I don't think they will let other people jack into their main grid unless they have total and exclusive control over the machine your sim is running on.

I've read SOMEWHERE on secondlife.com that they tried putting servers in diffrent geographical locations, and it didn't work well. The server need to have like direct gigabit connections to eachother to make it work.
So IF you can ever lease a whole SIM it can't be on some other server.
And I don't expect they will ever give anyone the server software to put on your own server...

I'd just be happy with a simulator that essentially makes the cordova sandbox appear in the SL window. Just enough space to build something, test scripts with syntax error reporting, etc..

I really would appreciate it if this could happen. The in-game world would benefit considerably, I think. We can't all get to broadband connections, especially when commuting by train and other BORING real-life activities.

I realize the security implications of what I'm requesting, therefore I'd be happy to have the binary contain my RL name encoded somehow for tracking -- I wouldn't give it out, nor would I try to use it as some reverse-engineering scheme. Seriously, I would sign whatever NDA and fedex it back to Linden labs just to be able to experiment independently.

I've always been a big proponent of this suggestion, but have recently come to the conclusion that it will simply not happen until Second Life has become the next Everquest (without the terribleness).

Well, if I was bored enough, I guess I could capture simulator output and maybe work up something to fool the client into thinking it was connected, but that would probably be more work than I'm willing to do. (Essentially do a looped playback of the tcp stream for the non-changing elements of the environment.)

Its probably not worth the effort to 'simulate' the simulation by technical trickery anyway. Although tempting from a 'no-other-options' standpoint.

Eh, maybe they'll get around to it.

Yeah make it think you are connected. I don't think you'll get much further then that.
The stream to update the whole Second Life world is an unknown, complex and highly compressed one.
If you can figure out how it works by looking at the stream you must be smarter then Einstein
you could get a little further maybe by RE'ing, but I will personally come to your house and kick your *** if you try it

I have to disagree with your idea of needing gigabit ethernet between servers. Unfortunately I cannot find what I used to be able to find on either the Linden Lab or Second Life site about the potential for having a distributed network, but it was once there.

Servers do handoffs, which I imagine doesn't take a whole lot of bandwidth to do. Servers talk to people, which does take a lot of bandwidth, but if it can talk to me in NY from CA, then it can talk to me in NY from Europe.

You have to think, that the most bandwidth going on is between the user and the asset server. And the default user bandwidth is 500kbps.

Even if the user is pulling all that data from the server itself (which is getting it's data from the asset server) then 30 users @ 500kbps is about 15mbps, or, 50% faster than standard ethernet and 15% of fast ethernet.

If you were to double that (say that bandwidth is equal for what the sim pulls from the asset server and sends to the user, you'd have 30mbps. Say double that, since we have power users who probably try and pull down 1mbps, that's 60. Still not saturating fast ethernet.

Remember, these sims are pizza box 1U Pentium 4 servers that cost about $1000. At that price point GigE is more of an option than a standard.

Granted, I'm sure if Linden Labs were to offer sim leasing (which has been mentioned), they would probably offer a hosting service, as it would reduce their support costs and increase their customer satisfaction at the same time.