Prims, Servers, and Lindens

with all this discussion of prim hogs, prim banking, prim ho's, etc., we seem to be coming to a head. why, just a couple of days ago, the object usage in Stillman was at 100%!!! ack. i've only lived there since september, but its never been *anywhere* near that high since then.

but i digress....since some seem to agree that the prim issue is a game limitation, im eagerly awaiting for an answer from the lindens: why the 10,000/sim limit? what is the holdup?

Thats an easy one to answer, even for a non-Linden.

All the SL locations are run on seperate computer hardware. Obviously there is only so much RAM, CPU and disk space available and so there have to be limits on resources to keep things from crashing and burning.

I'm sure the 10,000 limit isn't exact. Maybe they could handle 10,782 or 11,823. It's a number I am sure they took plenty of time to come up with to give the best performance.

As they refine their software and as computer hardware gets faster and faster I'm sure we will see those limits climb.

But unfortunatly this isn't something they imposed just for the fun of it.. there just isn't an easy way to crank the numbers up without spending a lot of money and raising rates.

So we are stuck with having to limit usage via taxes or land ownership in Olive. Both have their problems.. the first lets someone hog all the resources if they have the money. The second isn't flexable, so someone can run out of prim usage and if they have a legit need for them, there isn't much anyone can do.

I still prefer the second method.

--
Drathor the Dragon

I think the limit is imposed by the Havok engine, and theres nothing they can do about it, aside from switching to a newer version, which they will soon. I think they're waiting for the Havok guys to implement some features that are missing and needed for SL or something. Someone posted about it a while ago.

The Lindens have said that when they port to the Havok 2.0 physics engine (scheduled for SL v 1.2), they will probably raise the prim limit to 15,000 per sim.

I dont know exactly how this works, but why don't they change the policy to only allow trial members to build in the sandboxes. I could be wrong, but I think a trial member can buy land and drop a cabin or whatever on it, then quit after the week, and the land and prims stay for 30 days? I have seen sooo many builds all over owned by people I have never seen sign of, and don't even come up on the 'People' listing. I think more and more people are flocking into SL at a higher rate than a few months ago (from what I gather), and I don't think the infrastructure keeps up with it. This is speculation tho. Also, I dont really understand why say, Lime is not publicly available. It's a nice mature sim, but it all says owned by Gov Linden and no edit. In fact I see a lot of land owned by so-and-so Linden and I dont know why. There seems to be this shortage of mature sims. And, I don't understand why u have to be 18 to play, but the ratio of sims where u can 'legally' curse or wind up naked seems 'reversed' with the PG. I guess i don't understand bringing online 6 computers for just vehicles either. When me and Corwin saw those 6 new sims coming to life we were pretty excited that sims would thin out comfortably. To me the M sims shortage is more an issue then where can I ride my hoverboard. I hope this didnt sound like a gripe, just the thoughts of a newb. I love the game. But I bet if a vote were opened here by Lindens on 'what should these 3, 6, etc sims be for?', new M sims would take it.

- Taylor

The "We will die without M sims" group is not quite so large as you think, I just think the other side feels no reason to say anything on the issue.

Hmmm... The 30/60-day timeout on inactive accounts was to tempt people that leave to come back, since all their stuff will still be here. The effectiveness of that policy is something only LL knows, but I can't imagine it's that high. People will probably either leave for good, or come back after a few months.

Perhaps when a player becomes inactive because their trial ended or they closed their account, all their in-world objects should be bundled up into single entries in their inventory, one per area (house here, forgotten motorcycle there) and all their land released.

If they come back, all they've lost is their land. They've got all the money from their builds and land, they haven't lost anything to taxes, and they just need to buy new land and drop their stuff back out of their inventory.

It cleans up the servers while still letting lapsed accounts keep what they made.

Wouldn't the Havok engine only come into play if all the objects were marked physical? If the problem is the physical/havok prims then why not limit those and leave my static walls alone!

I'm thinking the limitation is not a determined number really but one they just picked as a rough guess as to what would be a good count to keep poly loading/texture loading/unloading down when you fly around. Keeping the prim count down for a geographical area helps to spread out the load/builds so that you do not have too much on the screen at one time.

EH... when I asked about it I was told the servers themselves could more than likely support an indeffinate number of prims, the problem would be lag onthe user end to load objects, locations, textures, sounds, etc.

Anywho, just what I was told

There are several "things" that the a simulator does that take longer to accomplish as the number of objects increases.

These "things" include the stepping of the physics engine; Havok 1 scales linearly with the number of objects in the engine. We expect Havok 2 to scale close to log(N) or better for most it's initial collision culling, depending on the object distribution, so moving to Havok 2 _might_ allow us to increase the max object count, however the other "things" will also come into play.

Some of the other "things" are:

(1) streaming the objects to the client

(2) finding objects on the server

Also, the client FPS is affected by the number of objects in view, which is related (on average) to the total number of objects on the sim.

Hence, in an effort to limit the "lag" of the SL experience there is an prim cap. Of course, we would like to be able to increase the prim cap, however it is unlikely that we would re-evaluate what that number should be until we have a technology shift that will allow us to get more objects for less lag (i.e. sometime after Havok 2 and only then after some optimization passes on the rendering engine).

There is a lot of stuff that was apparently dropped by trials out there. Hell, Poppop Money's strip club is still rezzed up in DaBoom and he got the boot in July. If it could be arranged that trials can only build in the newb building areas and sandboxes that might work out very well. They would be able to attend classes and build a house and all. I personally don't think waiting until they make a financial commitment to second life is too onerous, and waiting a few days to get a feel for the different areas and some practice under your belt is really a good thing on the whole.

thanks for the technical response andrew. now that we're clear on the technical limitations, maybe there is some other way of optimizing?

i've been reading alot of good suggestions on how to manage 'abandoned' prims in sl.. maybe with a combination of one/more of those ideas along with better prim usage on our part, we can offset some of the high object usage % we see in alot of the sims.

I know exactly how to solve the problem of high object usage. Give me the Linden Power of Deletion. I'll cruise around SL and delete everything that I don't like.

Ex-newb's log cabin? Gone.

Pile of badly-textured cubes? Gone.

Ugly outdoor theatre in Natoma? Gone. Doh!