512 by 512 or 1024 by 1024 sims possible?

It seems like the x,y,z dimensions of a sim might be arbitrary. Is it possible within the Havok engine to have servers on a larger scale than we currently have? These servers would still have just 15K prims, but they would have 4 times or 16 times the area.

Two uses I'm thinking about:

1. Vehicle sims, where the distance between sim borders would be greatly increased.
2. Residential SIMs where the basic plot was still 117 prims, but the area you are building on is 4 or 16 times the size. Bigger yards make better neighbors.

heh, I proposed this quite a while ago. didn't get that much support on the voting page.

http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=404

well, you just got one more vote

heh, sadly I have no idea how to sell a proposal like some people can. And the way the voting page works, proposition 404 will never get seen by most people who go take a look at the voting page.

When I wrote the proposal I was trying to think of technical difficulties it might cause. Floating point precision shouldn't be a problem with dimensions of 512 instead of 256. I suppose placement on the grid might be tricky, but not impossible. having it be a disconnected land mass would be fine.

Heh, maybe this thread will get it noticed some more.

I've been told that it originated as a border problem. Sims can only support one connection per "side" and none at top or bottom. Basically every sim on a grid has to be the same size in order for the grid to function properly. And thus it was hard coded.

When they finally publish a wrapped release and let us build our own grids, we'll likely just have to add 256x256 sims to it for more space. All Hail the old Microsoft mindset of "why would you want to do it any other way?"

so if it's a matter of one sim connection per side, make a disconnected continent off to the side. If it becomes popular enough at some point in the future put a dev group together to change the hard coding .

Anyway, while the info is appreciated, vote on the idea if you think it's a good one and should it get enough support they might just decide to work on it regaurdless of the difficulties. All changes provide challenges. The question is, is the change worth overcoming them.

I'd rather have 30,000 prims per 256x256 sim than a 512x512 sim with 15,000 prims.

There's at least one sim that's not the same size as the rest... the space sim.

space sim? where? can you drop a bookmark on me?

They already have and can do that. Some of the zoned land experiments involved shopping or city sims where the land had twice the prim limit. If you buy an island you may be able to get them to do the same thing for you if you're willing to live with the possible performance hit.

I don't think thats the way it works.. Doubling the size of the sim wouldn't take up so many resources.. Doubling the prims DEFINATLY would..

Didn't they do that in the city sims by reducing the amount of land for sale, and making it protected linden land, so the sim still maintained around the same prim limit?

I think they did make a lot of land protected linden land, but it wasn't how they raised the prim limit. It was how they prevented the raised prim limit from causing a resource problem.

Are you referring to the space server? If I understand correctly the space server is not sim-like in its functionality.



Correct, if you look in the Objects tab of the About Land window in the city sims you will see Simulator Object Bonus Factor: 2.00. This is how the Burning Life parcels are allotted extra prims as well.

Not me, I need the space to spread landscaping views and reasonable texture loads. I'd gladly settle for a 512x512 with 15k prims. I'd be easier on a machine than running a quad of 256s with all those borders.

precisely, though I think you could still run a quad of these proposed large area sims on the current server hardware without seeing many or any performance issues.

I'm talking about where you get when you boost yourself up into the hundreds-of-thousands or millions of meters range. Lateral movement seems to toss you across many sims in a short time, as if you're in one big "space sim" that covers all the rest, where each square meter covers a whole sim.

oh... I'd say that's a floating point precision problem. At that elevation the Z component looses precision. If you also are jumping sideways by a couple hundred meters I'd say that the X and Y components are also loosing precision though that should be a bug, since they don't need to change their precision as I understand it. Heh, the ease of switching sims is probably do to not having to load much way up there and the fact that you're not in a vehicle and can't see any landmarks to show a drop or gain in altitude or any stuttering.

btw, feel free to mention this proposition to people you know . Word of mouth can't hurt.

Well actually it can, but in this case, because you are all obviously of sound mind (in agreement), I believe it could have a positive outcome.

^ That's a joke, I'm not only not in my right mind, I lost it.

woot, up to 73! lol wish it told me who voted. I'm very curious. Figure that means it only needs about 400 more votes before it gets noticed by a dev team .

It would be much easier to just shrink the avatar. Simply reducing the size of the avatar and camera hight could turn 512m2 lots into rolling estates. Why LL settled on the relatively huge avatar doesn't really make much sense to me.

it would have been easier to shrink the avatar before sl was populated at all. Now that it's populated, shrinking the avatar would require shrinking everything avatars interact with . So after the fact, scaling the region, rather than scaling everything else is easier. heh, and ya, the avatars are huge, but avatar size isn't the only thing that makes regions seems small. it's also the speed you travel at and view distances. Personally my avatar is my real world size, but it doesn't stop me from feeling a little constricted now and then.