adding more prim capacity to land!

Are you kidding me? You're here a month and you're going to tell someone who is here over two years they don't know how SL works?



...

No, that's a terrible analogy. I'm a programmer, I write computer programs all day long. I have a lot of experience writing distributed systems and dealing with multi-tasking. When you add a second processor, you must, by definition add a second "thread of execution". This is extremely difficult in any case, but in SL's case, the platform is designed to cooperate with NINE other computers (the surrounding sims), plus the client computer. This is an amazing piece of engineering. Your suggestions to change the architecture are non-starters. Don't make suggestions to change the architecture, that's idiotic.

You can suggest they add more computer power, but that costs money. Everything costs money. Changes you suggest would cost LL ludicrous amounts of money. It doesn't seem like it ought to, but it would.


EXACTLY. The same is true in SL. You can buy any size container available. Just like soup.

The "land" is the container. Get over it.

Buster

What Phillip was saying is that data about the world is not stored on the client. The sim server tells the client "there is a 1/2 meter cube at <x,y,z>, oriented <x,y,z,r>, with texture x on side A, y on side B, etc. etc. etc. The sim server finds out about the cube from the asset server. The server tells the client all of the details about the cube. Then the client draws the cube on the screen.

Prim serving is only a fraction of the server's job anyway. Its busy running LSL scripts, calcuating physics, calcualting listeners and sensors, timers, and all sorts of messaging.

Having a second CPU on the server side sending details about prims to the client computer isn't going to work. Having a faster computer on the server side would, but there is still a limit to how much information can be sent to the client in a given amount of time. And faster computers cost more, so somebody's going to have to pay for that.

Buster

I think I may be able to shed some light onto the inner workings of SL using pizza as an example.

Step into Phil's Pizza Emporium with me....


As you can clearly see the pizza (SL) starts off as raw dough. The dough is the land. Everything else in SL (the pizza) has to sit on this dough (the grid). Here we see LL creating a new continent (a bunch of pizzas). Notice that Philip is slinging sauce onto each of these pizzas (sims), the sauce will represent scripts. If the sauce is applied too heavy, the pizza will lag (droop). If the sauce is not prepared right it will also ruin the pie. Too much oregano (open listens), and the pizza will suck.



This pie clearly demonstrates how SL is divided into sims (pieces of pizza). Notice the grooves between the slices. These rifts are sim borders. Toppings are frequently lost in these borders where sims adjoin one another. We shall consider the pepperoni as avatars. Notice that they sit on top of the sauce and the land.

The cheese is the asset server. LL takes the cheese and grates it into tiny pieces and distributes it randomly across the grid. It is gooey and delicious. Pizza needs cheese. Cheese is the lifeblood of SL. Notice the burnt edges.

Also notice that this pie is divided into 8 slices (sims). If this pie were to be sliced into 16 slices, you would not have twice as much pizza (resources). This is a common misconception. There are two ways to get more pizza. The first would be to get a larger pie, as shown below:


This method isnt very practical, but you get alot more pizza per slice.

The other way would be to order multiple sims as shown below:


Here we see 13 servers, stacked horizontally. Presently LL does not offer this option, but as we can clearly see from this picture, it has been tried.

Let's discuss the toppings:

We see there can be a lot more to the pizza (SL) than just the topppings (resources) that we have mentioned. The picture above clearly demonstrates the dynamics involved with maintaning the grid. Sausages are physics, too many and the grid (pizza) will grind to a halt (your intestines). Mushrooms are textures. Olives are bling prims, the grid can stand them, but who in the hell orders them on their pizza.

The above photo also demonstrates the ugly side of SL, anchovies. These should be abuse reported whenever you see these on a pizza. They are just gross. Anchovies represent griefers.

Now that we have seen the basic ingredients of the pizza, lets talk about the delivery (bandwidth)....


Regardless of how good uncle Phil makes a pizza (SL), if the delivery guy (your isp) screws it up, you are left with a cold pizza (lag). It really sucks when your pizza guy delivers to the neighbors and they pay for it and eat it. One can only hope they ordered anchovies(griefers) in those instances. Remember to tip the pizza guy, or else he will spit in your pizza (SL).

Before anyone complains that the pizza analogy isn't true to SL, I too realize that sims (slices of pizza) are not pie shaped. So the pizza below is truer to form to the SL grid:

It is a sicilian pizza. Square and thick. Pretty damn tasty as well. It's clearly visible that this pizza has all the same characteristics of the grid. SL is a sicilian pizza.

If you have any further questions, feel free to ask. Clearly I have a deep understanding of the inner workings of a pizza joint (SL).

Damn, and i thought He only knew about sheep!! Masterpiece, Schwans!

Two sheep eating a sim....

Schwanson, that was easily the best presented SL forums post ever. My congratulations.

Thank you. I figured it was a good way to put my technical expertise to use.
It is also proof positive that I should post while drinking tequila more often.

I really hope Phil sees this. Kudos Schwan, that was hilarious!

Best remark in the whole thread. Summarizes a troublesome issue in six words.

btw, I've had the delivery guy deliver a cold pizza, and then claim that the pizza-people didn't cook it enough....