Openspaces being sold as regular sims

I own land, I get shafted very hard by VAT. If you're in Europe, bear that in mind.

The same way you do in any other sim. If you are the one renting land to them, you hold them to the contract you set up. If they won't play be the rules, they can play somewhere else. When renting a small part of an openspace sim from someone else, pay close attention to what the covenant says about what happens when people abuse scripts in the sim.


An openspace sim has the same prims and script capability of a 16,384 parcel. As long as you stick to the basic guideline of "Would I want to have 1/4 of a sim where 3 other people were doing the same thing?" in mind, you should be fine unless someone else goes nuts on theirs.


The day I believe filling sims with 100% markup is possible is the day I order a lot more sims.


So all island owners should buy their own servers, set up their own hosting, staff a support team, maintain constant connections to the asset servers and every other sim on the grid, all with higher reliability and lower cost than what LL is providing? If you think things are bad the way LL runs them now, what do you really think it would be like with everyone running their own sim and trying to connect them together? Not to mention all the trouble it would cause with the asset servers and content theft. That would be a sledgehammer to the knee of content creation, but a great benefit to all the ripoff artists dying to get people onto a sim they fully control.

Your other comments were good, but it really could be a very simple matter to administer a server running a couple of sims. Some other points:

If land price is based on the cost of hardware and the tier cost is based on bandwidth and server maintenance, why hasn't land become tenfold cheaper since Second Life was launched? (Spoiler: profit)

Why would a well written server be hard to maintain? There are countless examples of cluster deployments working well in the gaming industry and the web. Transaction security isn't a problem and content theft would be no worse than it already is.

The big picture here is the arbitrary restrictions on second life as it stands make no sense. Why are islands and parcels limited in physical dimensions? Why aren't the primitive controls taking better advantage of procedural modeling options? Why can't you subgroup objects? Why can't SL scripting conform to ECMA standards and support an intelligent and established DOM?

That leaves us with the biggest question: how does Linden think it's going to populate SL with high quality content if it continues to charge creators a premium to provide it?

The main answer is the Second Life economy and a large amount of outside investment relies on this arbitrary space restriction. I think it's a huge mistake and they need to start looking for ways to compensate existing landowners while removing the inexplicable restrictions from what could otherwise be an infinite amount of space.

I am very interested in alternatives that work how I've described. I've had a look at alternative grids but haven't found one where you can simple patch a server into the grid yet. Does something like this exist?

I wish I had seen the name.

Are you saying you were out shopping parcels and this person approached you while shopping? Were you on her land, or did she approach you on someone else's land?

If she was poaching, I'd definitely suspect anything she said. Legitimate businesspeople don't need to harvest other peoples' customers.

EDIT: Also, 4 openspace sims < 1 full sim. There is processor and other overhead related to maintaining 4 openspaces on a single core (16 on a single server) that makes the sum of the parts less than the whole. Additionally, openspaces are allotted less memory than full sims, which MAY play into the poorer script performance.

_A_ server running a _couple_ of sims would be easy. Tens of thousands of sims, not so much. If they were all completely standalone, the problems are simple. The problems that keep coming up are the interactions among sims and the interactions between sims and the various backbone servers that handle everything from transactions to inventories to search.

The cost of hardware comes down, and the cost of buying a sim just came down dramatically. It isn't tenfold cheaper because LL's costs aren't tenfold cheaper. How much has LL headcount increased since SL was launched? Do people expect to get paid more or less than they did 5 years ago? Do aging servers require more or less maintenance than new ones?

There are NOT countless examples of server systems that are doing what SL is doing. There is only one, and SL is it. Any other game environment that you could try to compare it to doesn't have the burden of user created content. You can do amazingly streamlined things when you can prerender all your graphics in advance. In SL, everything has to be rendered on the fly, because everything can (and often does) change on the fly. If the asset server was easy to do, it would be fixed by now. And content theft is nothing right now compared to what it would be with open source servers connecting to the grid. All I would need to do is get the most expensive transferable items available in SL, rez them in my sim, make a backup, then sell them off and restore the backup. Or, since I can control the sim code, I can get copies of every script that runs on my sim, no matter what the permissions are. Currently, the big content theft issue is textures. With your plan, it will be everything.


An infinite amount of space requires an infinite amount of computing power. It ain't gonna happen. You have to set up limits so that the physics can be reasonable coded and so that everything will fit together. Subgrouping objects would be nice, but look at all the problems we still have with inventory losses without adding an extra layer of complexity.


The same way they've been doing it for 5 years, and then some. Prices are lower now than they have been, lowering the barrier to entry for a lot of people. Tier prices will still be the majority of your land costs in the long run, but if what you want to try doesn't work out, you don't have to keep the land. I think we'll see a larger percentage of people buying sims this fall than we ever have.


No.

A couple of comments off the top of my head.

Because manpower for around-the-clock response, support and development has not gotten any cheaper. So the premise is wrong.


See above. You don't just set up a server and walk away.


So, if everybody can just request anything from the asset server, content theft would not be worse??


SL has to support arbitrary creation by hobbyists. Demanding that people use Maya to build their home would have killed the whole idea before it got in the air.


Not sure why ECMA and DOM are particularly relevant choices here. But you may have missed that scripts are currently being migrated to Mono, which eventually will open up for several well-known languages being available.


The ones who can afford 5 bucks for a subscription (which is not even needed), but not 5000 for Maya, a full IDE or similar programs.


There is actually work ongoing with allowing external (trusted) servers to hook into the grid. IBM is already running some, though details on how much they actually connect to is sparse.
The problem here is to allow interaction between (untrusted) servers without destroying the whole economy which is built up in SL.

Many of your ideas are good for "the next Internet", where everybody can hook up their own servers, like web servers, and upload whatever they want from whatever program they have. But that is really not what SL is. Something like, say, Croquet will probably support your demands a lot better.

That's some very expensive manpower in that case. Considering how grid computing is normally administered I find it hard to believe Linden has a tech sitting next to each rack. All I'm saying is that you're paying a premium for low end service.

My main issue however is with the setup cost. I think it has hamstrung SL's growth.



I never even implied that. All servers require maintenance - what I'm saying is: why can't I do it myself?



How is that different pulling a texture or geometry from client side memory? The answer of course is to allow users to choose whose asset server they use. It's no different from publishing content on the web, especially now the client source has been opened. The convention could be to pay to use Linden's servers or work out some other deal with your sim owner.



Procedural modeling support isn't exactly hard. Nor did I mention Maya. It's simply that the existing procedural modeling controls are sometimes a little too simplified. An advanced mode would be ideal. Texturing each face inside of your hollowed primitive and greater control over taper, shear and hollow proportions would be a nice start.



I hadn't heard about Mono being taken on, but it's an excellent start. Mono started out as a .NET clone. C# is very similar to ECMA compliant languages and supports a DOM structure such as namespaces.



Yeah, I was surprised by how expensive SLTK is, but it's more understandable when you consider the price of sims and rental. That's why I think the procedural modeling should be extended.



That's kickass. There's a lot of posturing and talk about cloud computing and making use of unused cycles in large clusters. SL would be an excellent beneficiary of this concept.

And yes, the economy needs to be destroyed to be reborn as a simulation with more potential. It just seems deadlocked as it is.



My worry is that SL will gain too much strength and prevent more open concepts from flourishing.

Just chalk it up as greed,to many wannabe land barons think there going to be the next Trump in here.

least u looked before u paid to what I am shure was a alot of $L for a sink hole

Reb

They can't destroy the SL economy due to the fact it would be affecting real money values and content

One of the odd things about lindens being converted to 'real world' money

Plus there is the content creator's rights to consider

Land markets they can control by adding mainland sims and tweaking tier payment costs.

LL doesn't need one next to each rack. They've got staff at each location. A handful of people can manage thousands of sims. You're not going to be able to match the economies of scale unless you're someone like Anshe.

In case you missed it, LL just dropped the setup cost by 40%, and they were growing at a pretty good pace before that.


It's not just textures and geometry it's everything. You would be able to steal every script in SL. We're talking about millions of real world dollars of content. It doesn't matter whose asset server you used, if the script is on your server, you'll have access to it.


The current modeling is simplified, and it STILL pushes the system both server side and client side to the breaking point way too often. The more complicated you make it, the more often it will break down. The graphical advancements that LL has already made are already often criticized for driving the client side computing requirements too high for many people's computers.


Right. It'll become so popular that nobody will log in anymore.

They do have more sluggish script performance, even when entirely/mostly empty but it depends on the kind of script as to whether you'd notice or so.

So far the only thing I personally noticed that's really not suitable for an openspace is an animated sculpty linkset. I'm sure there's more (physics could be a problem too), but that's the one I noticed instantly.

Well thought-out arguments and no one calling each other names. There is hope for the Internet yet...

I'll use that as a springboard...
The discussion largely hinges on the question whether SL should be/has the potential to be "The Next Internet".
Which I firmly *do not* believe in.
SL is deeply entrenched in a "games world", with a 3rd person avatar in a simulated physical world. That is really not how I want my cyberspace to work.
It is immensely fun for gaming and socializing (and by extension for making a business out of such activities), but it *absolutely sucks* for information gathering - which includes even such things as simply shopping, since you need to find the wares. It imposes a lot of arbitrary "meatspace" limitations, and you tank around in a hard-to-control-avatar, falling back on "last gen" web searches to even find things inworld.
I can easily see it having its place as something on offer in "The Next Internet", like you now put a game in a games console, or walk into a bar to deliberately join and experience that limited world/environment, but as the core infrastructure... No, I do not think a descendant/extension of SL is where we should look for that.

Yep! It's mine mine ALL MINE! I do use the entire sim rather then say, plunkin' a house down in the middle and leaving the rest as 'wilderness'. About half of it is water, which helps a lot to keep it from appearing barren.

As far as keeping neighbors from running intensive or badly written scripts, I think I'd have to rely on my landlord, and I wouldn't suggest 'sharing' an Openspace with others that you don't know lest you run into a situation where you're continually arguing over who's scripts are bogging down the sim.

The complexity here is that it's basically good ol' timesharing. And we hear a lot about the risks of that: Those three other OpenSpaces getting busy and slowing performance on "our" OpenSpace. But timesharing works the other way too: when there's nobody on those other three sims, our particular OpenSpace should get a lot more than 1/4 of the CPU for its 1/4 of the prims. And touring the grid, most sims are sitting essentially idle most of the time.

Caveat: I don't know the details of limits on each OpenSpace sim's demands on CPU and memory. But they must not be using very heavy virtualization or even restrictive quotas because that would obviate any risk of those other three OpenSpaces competing for "our" resources.

As for script performance... well, Mono is weeks away. I wouldn't be too worried about poor LSL2 performance unless I knew I'd be stuck with scripts that wouldn't be compiled for Mono, or if I needed hot script performance right away.

But while on the subject of Mono: The LSL language is quirky and clumsy, but in some ways it may be kind of useful that it's not something more familiar. The fresh-to-the-grid C# programmer is going to be very, very surprised by the nature of scripting on the VM, regardless of what the language looks like--both in terms of limitations and features. It's not as if all of a sudden whole libraries of existing C# will run as scripts, for example. The real scripting limits have never been about the language. (None of which is to defend LSL itself. I just fear there are some very unrealistic expectations of what it would mean for Mono to support other languages.)

When talking about programming languages, there's really two parts to it: The basic language constructs, and the libraries we're used to working with to interface to the platform we're trying to actually *do* something with.
Mono can potentially give us the language constructs - I would *so* love better collection classes, like hashmaps or even just arrays - but the libraries we need are still some versions of the llSomething functions, since we still need to access the same environment, namely SL, it's transactions and it's physics engine.
Mono runs a *lot* faster, but you're unlikely to see that in any individual script. Most scripts are not that heavy on actual calculation, but spend most of their time sitting around, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

Really??????? If that's the case I'll buy one right away.

You can buy them individually but you still need to own a full sim first.

Damn... that rules me out then :\

When was this? It was thought that you have to own a island before adding one of these to a existing island. This was just resent.

Yep. This may not be the case forever--there are some hints that it's an open question. But I'd guess any such change wouldn't occur until the pent-up demand for the current OpenSpace offerings subsides, confidence builds for the new Land Store, and maybe some floor is reached for Mainland sim auction prices.

having gone from a small rental to a plot and on top an open space i find em exactly what is needed to be honest

large area to create but will agree they are only ideal for personal spaces really

it's a shame the costs are so high in relation to other platform server rentals for other games etc as they would be more popular if they were more in line with them.

all said though if you are looking for a home land to expand on space wise and only personal homes etc they are ideal

wish i could afford more to make some other stuff i'd like to do

I have several clients that I have developed sims for, who rent OpenSpaces sims from various sim owners. Those clients have all been quite happy with their deals.

OpenSpaces sims work quite well as a single residence. They are also a pretty good deal if only two to three households share one OpenSpaces sim.

You get as much land area as a full sim, but only a quarter sim's prim count. Great for privacy. Especially if the sim is placed so it isn't in direct contact with other sims, which allows you to easily "take it off the map" by disallowing public access.

The default avatar limit is the same as a normal sim - 40 people. Used to be 10, but they bumped that up with the arrival of class 5 servers.

Script performance isn't an issue in a normal residential setting. I would never use an OpenSpaces sim for a busy mall or a club, where tons of scripts routinely might be in use. But unless you go really crazy with scripts at home, you'll be fine. If you plan to have a heavy script load, this option is not for you.

Right now, you still can't buy one of these direct from Linden Lab, unless you already own a full-prim sim. I am hoping they will revise that policy, because buying one of these as a stand-alone could be a great deal for a lot of people. I know I would seriously consider it, if I didn't have to own a full sim first.

I did bring that up with Jack (which is what Ciaran hinted at I think):

I'm not sure if that's something he *has* to say though. If openspaces still had the restriction of needing to be attached to a full sim and couldn't exist as their own separate estate it might sounds more convincing to me but those two changes seems contrary to "providing waterways" and just seems to beg for them to be used as living areas.

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Just a note for anyone looking to get one: the $250 purchase price includes first month's tier, so if the landowner is insisting you need to pay the first month or they "loose money", take it as a big warning sign and move on.

A lot are charging a crazy premium on top of what LL charges (craziest one wanted $750 upfront and $150/month ) so do take the time to look around. I eventually found one for $90/month with nothing upfront ($90 happened to be the cheapest "buy" option I could find as well so it really does pay to look around) and we got to pick the name and placement .