Hmmmm... scalable sims?

In Robin's Filling "the void" thread, she asks that we see how these sims operate with different numbers of AV's in each of the sims.

I'm wondering if LL is testing some sort of new "scalable" sim, where server resources can be focused on where the AV's are.

It has been my opinion that one of the limiting "features" of SL is its total inability to handle more than 25 or 30 AV's in a sim without introducing problematic lag. It always seems to me to be quite silly to have server resources sitting idly unused in an empty sim, while another has difficulty keeping up.

If this is an attempt to test-drive "scalable" sims, where the shared server resources can be directed to where the AV's are, without regard to the location of the land, then I say "bravo".

- Ace

On a different note, I've often found myself wanting scalable Sims in the other direction.

One of the reasons people want more land is because houses have to be built so large in order to allow for camera angles to see yourself in there. Anything lower than a 6m ceiling feels cramped, for example.

What would happen if there were certain Sims that shrank your AV by half in each dimension? Effectively, they would be 512m x 512m instead of 256m x 256m. I'd be quite happy if the smallest resolution in those sims were 2mm instead of 1mm. And you could fit so much more in!

Or am I just being silly, and it would be exactly the same as 4 sims clumped together?

That's an interesting take, Lisse, which is not unlike the Lilliputians. How about a building that would therefore only be accessible to the mini?

You also have me blurting out a word: MICROSIM!

Which literally brings a new meaning to "scalability". I have already seen some microdetailed works of art and furni in SL, and I guess it'd only be a matter of time before the Incredible Voyage thing is done.

Furthermore, I know also that avatars, on average, are approx. a foot taller than they would be in "the real world". Casval was recently detailing to me how if the default 50 on the height slider was shorter, in the long-term -- which I agree -- we'd get proportions closer to the real world and not so out of wack. Of course, avatars on average are approx. a foot taller than they should be, so anyone trying to use their real height comes off as shorter than they really are.

Camera angles are another thing and first-person viewing , like we do for real, does help to a degree. But seeing ourselves outside of our bodies can be a puzzling thing indeed.

Correct: Ryan is the one who posted the announcement, not Robin.

Also, I can see sims dedicated for avatars only being VERY usefull for things like Town Halls.

Scalable in the sense of size would be interisting to see. On average the average male height for avatars is about 7 feet tall, average for females I would guess is around 6.

I certainly didn't mean scalable in terms of how big a prim is measured in meters or anything like that. If you think about it, that kind of scale means squat when its all just bits on a sim that get displayed on our 1024x768 monitors all the same way no matter how you measure it. (Kudos to those of you that have monitors with more display resolution than 1024x76.

What I mean is this...

As it stands now, SL measures land with some metric, decides how many prims can reside on that land, and then dedicates one and exactly one server (read CPU and associated h/w) to serving all AV's who happen to be hovering over that land at the moment.

But this really sucks when a whole bunch of AV's all decide to be hovering over the same little chunk of land at the same time, because as SL is currently designed, that means that there is only a single server calculating all the updates for that area of land, and sending those updates to all the AV's at the same time.

What ends up happening is that you can get a sim that has some Event going on, and it comes crawling to its knees because its calculating its chunk of land and sending updates like crazy to all the AV's. In the meantime, we might have completely different part of the grid that has a single AV doing next to nothing, yet he/she still has the same single server resource servicing his single "newview" look into the SL world.

But in reality, SL has lots of computing power (how many sims today?) with lots of networking connectivity, and "should" be able to dedicate those sim-processing and network-processing resources to where they are needed at the moment.

So instead of deciding where to dedicate those resources on the basis of where the AV's happen to be at the moment, those resources are dedicated on a rather ad-hoc, "where is the client now and where is he/she within our grid", basis.

That's what I mean by a "scalable" architecture. It can only scale to lots of folks being wherever they want to be when "server" resources can be scaled to where the AV's are now.

When lots of folks go to a hot-spot, it would be nice if more computing and networking resources could scale to that point, giving everyone a nicer "newview" into this SL world.

And that's what I would hope is happening with these new "void" sims.

- Ace

I believe that topic has been discussed largely in the past, you could probably find alot of interisting threads about it.

I don't have much to add because I don't remember much from them.

Ace, I think you will find that in large gatherings, the major limiting factor is client FPS. I dont know what graphics card you have, but the vast majority of people buy the cheaper ones
In fact, client FPS are so important that LL keeps statistics on the global average and raises the prim limit when it starts hitting 15-20.
Waay back in the day when Avalon first opened, we were able to cram 81 people into that sim!

Ahhh yes Ace, I concur... some sort of dynamic allocation... the juice goes where it's needed!

bingo!

THAT's what I mean by scalable.

- Ace