Openspaces being sold as regular sims

Thanks Kitty.

While I understand that OpenSpaces sims were created with the intention of just using them as open waterways or a buffer-zone of sparse forest land, that restriction was developed before Class 5 servers existed. While OpenSpaces on a Class 4 server were somewhat marginal performers, the Class 5 servers handle them quite well, in my experience.

Again, I have developed quite a few of them, building complex 1000-prim builds on them and landscaping the entire area. Most people can't tell at all when they have moved from the sim owner's full-prim sim into one of the adjacent OpenSpaces areas.

Yes, an OpenSpaces sim should not be used for *heavy use*, such as a mall or club. But I still say they can be ideal as residential properties. I really wish LL would open their eyes and realize that the typical residential land owner isn't setting up a frat house with 40 script-heavy blingtards living there 24 x 7. It's a rare day when I have more than 8 people on my quarter sim of land. Normal is 1 to 4 at a time. It's my home, not a mall food court. If I was on an OpenSpaces sim, it would still be a rare day when I had more than 8 people visiting the sim at once. So what do I care if the sim doesn't perform as well as a full sim when 40 heavily scripted people pop in at once? It's not gonna happen!

Incorrect info. You must own a full island. You can buy them individually instead of a 4 pack but a full island must be owned.

I also think but am not sure that you can only get 4 per island you own. for example you could not own 1 full sim and 16 openspaces

Agreed. Second Life seems like a strike-while-it's-hot move to make a premium off of basic hosting services.



Ed Zachary! However I see any real replacement for SL being able to interconnect with a variety of grids. If someone woke up tomorrow and developed my dream 3D sandbox client, it would allow you to walk from one individually owned sim or server cluster straight into Second Life.

Efforts to build a compatible open source server are a good start, but any real standard protocol has to grow out of that, not simply copy the behaviour of existing servers.



The key is interconnection. In this magical dream internet Linden is one of the biggest players offering the most widely used client, a major currency option, high speed asset servers and the largest gathering of residential and lifestyle content available. They can easily fuck all this up by keeping the gates closed and turning all forbidden kingdom on us.

That ends my fantasy of surrounding a shack in the middle of a sim with miles and miles of desert. You'd need eight of them for that.

Yeah, that's really exciting. I've only gotten my feet wet in Second Life scripting so far, but I can already see a large script would be a pain to manage.

can someone point me to the faq which explains the openspace sims?
there's a lot of unrelated posts here and I'd just like to get tot hte facts myself.

The KB is your friend *ducks quickly *

Information about Openspaces (Void Regions)
https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=4235

heheh blingtards

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; ))

nothing is ever easy, BUT thanks!

That is not correct. You can add as many OpenSpaces sims as you desire, once you own one normal sim. For example, you'd need 8 of them to completely encircle your full-prim sim.

That brings up another issue that could be improved. Why are tier fees based on arbitrary virtual dimensions instead of purchasing a 15th allocation in the sim's task scheduler? There is a LOT that could be improved about the land ownership business model.

I see it more like an established service, a social venue much like WoW is an established service for a more gaming-oriented "grid", and not so much a "milk it for the last year before it's overrun by the *true* grid". But that's just my take on the future.


If you haven't already, you really should check out the work of the Architecture Working Group: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Architecture_Working_Group

Because the average user does not have an idea what a task scheduler is, let alone what impact it has on anything they see. It would *certainly* not be an "improvement" to mire SL's largely social user base in tech talk about threading strategies. I think you really need to take a step back and look at what the service LL has build actually *is*, and what it provides for which target audience. You are not buying clock cycles for your raiding guild in WoW either. People buy a tropical island to build their dream house. They do not buy processing power to be allowed to upload a polygon mesh.

The FAQ states you need one private island per 4 sims. It would be better if that restriction didn't exist, so hopefully the FAQ is wrong.

Task scheduling certainly isn't the realm of the end user and I never suggested it was. It's simply good asset management and the basic premise of ownership and services rendered should be based around it. Clearly it's the resource bearing the most weight.

If a user were restricted to usage proportional with their land allocation in relation to the rest of the sim then they could be guaranteed that the server performance would never drop below a certain level. Task scheduling has always been a controversial topic in OS development and will continue to be forever.

None of this should be presented to the user other than in a management interface that allows them to see their current resource usage versus their maximum while the sim is under load.

As you can see in my last post I'm talking more about the nuts and bolts of the system, not how it's used by the residents. In fact my main supporting argument for all of this is that residents need more freedom and better managed resources with less involvement costs. You haven't seen more epic works like Greenies because it costs a cool thousand and three hundred a month to indulge a fit of creativity.

You also mentioned WoW in one of your other posts. They're the yardstick I would hold Linden to. Blizzard keeps their clusters at the bleeding edge of available hardware. I suspect they spend a hell of a lot more on maintaining a smaller number of clusters than Linden do. Comparing WoW and Second Life is like comparing an F1 racer to an armada of trikes.

Incidentally, I would love to see the ability to cross from WoW to Second Life as your rogue or warlock. Seamlessly, without needing to load different clients or copy a character on a webpage. But that's a long way off and it'll be a different game by then.



There's mention of an open grid on there. I'm going to go check it out now. Thanks!

I have been offered an openspace rental of a quarter sim at L$2200 a week. Is this about the norm?

That's $35US a month, and seems overpriced. By comparison a friend pays $28US a month for a 4096 parcel on a real sim with the same number of prims.

In my view an equivalent prim-count openspaces parcel should cost significantly less.

Well not always easy to work out the monthly fee. I make that closer to $31 if selling Linden dollars, which is what the landlord will be doing. If the landlord is letting everything out they're bringing in $120 a month, which covers their fees but if for whatever reason (and we are nearing the summer slowdown) all plots aren't rented out, the landlord is still covering their fees.

It's a buyers market.

How many REGULAR (15000 prims) regions can run on the same server core and what regions run on the same core can vary, as for Class5 Regions, there are (up to) 4 REGULAR regions on the same core (wich is a quad-core server or so) OR 4 openspace/lowprim (3750 prims) regions instead of each 1 regular region (with even more ports).
If your REGULAR region runs surprisingly slow AND you complain about it with evidence, LL MAY relocate your region to another server that has less load from the other REGULAR regions that (may) run on the same core.

A cpu core can run 4 TIMES as many OPENSPACE regions as it can run regular regions.
Regular regions have 4 times the prim count and 4 times the script and collision calculation speed than openspace/lowprim regions.

if you rent a parcel, watch for the prim count of the parcel AND for the prim count of the region.

I would certainly be concerned with renting an OpenSpaces sim from an individual at cost. I saw where one person was offering the sim for 200 up front and then 75 a month - at a loss of 50 per sim! I just don't see the logic in being a land Ho like that. What happens when several people drop out of the game and you are left holding the bag for all the tier?

I would suggest renting from someone that covers their costs as you may find your beautiful new OpenSpaces sim gone one day because the owner couldn't cover his costs.

All that being said I can tell you that I do see a drop off from a full sim. A recent OS sim we set up had horrible lag with more than half the sim underwater and an empty house sitting on it - so bad you could hardly fly. I have a concern people are selling these for purposes unintended and the buyer will be the one OUT of their investment and legitimate land owners/sellers will be given a black eye.

From FAQs

LL makes it clear they will NOT respond to performance issues - let's hope no one puts a mall on the resources used by YOUR private Island because you are then SOL

Thank you, Valentina. This is the risk that severe undercutting poses. There are some people who rent at ridiculously low rates just to get filled, and I have to wonder about it. These people are the most vulnerable to going away because they incur a lot more work for a lot less reward, and they are the first ones to cut and run if things go badly.

I thought the FAQ indicated that a regular sim occupies its own CPU, which is not unreasonable. I'll have to check again.

In any case Linden probably uses blades as they're much cheaper to purchase and manage. I'd be interested to see the stats of what they're calling a class 5 server.

In this day and age restricting a sim to a particular hardware node is pretty old fashioned. There are many solutions for automatically moving VMs around a cluster to improve performance, but writing your own process management is kind of tricky. I wouldn't fault them for not rolling their own but it still should be attended to.

I beieve a sim has it's own core, not full cpu. The servers use..what, quad core I think? With 4 sims per server, so 1 sim per core.

I was told by a landlord who has sold (rented, really) a lot of Openspace sims that the three neighbor Openspace sims sharing your cpu core are not fixed and that each time you (as the estate manager) restart your sim, a new cpu core will be used for your sim based on which is least busy at the time. Does anyone know if this is true or just a salesman trying to close a sale? If it is you could possibly get away from cpu hogging nightmare neighbors. Anyone know?