Blake Sea Code of Conduct (pre-publication)

Why not, Des? It seems to me that a naval battle, or Pirates vs. The Royal Navy, or jetski races, are every bit as valid as "events" as a sailing regatta.

Sure, sailboat races are fun. But they are not the only fun to be had on the water, and as I understand it, the Blake Sea and its environs were intended for all forms of water sports.

A slightly edited transcript of the Town Hall meeting has been posted at SLSailing.COM

You are correct Lindal. I have been talking with various pirate and other naval groups about battles in the Blake Sea. We are looking into how best to integrate the needs of those communities into the "sailing first" (i.e. sailboat racing and cruising) enviroment of the Blake Sea. Much talk yet to do between the USS owners, the sailing community, LL, and the groups themselves.

First, I'm not saying that regattas are abuse. I'm suggesting that the level of impact of most of the stuff that Linden Labs referred to as "abuse" and subsequently banned on OpenSpaces was not any worse than regattas. And if that kind of activity, spread over the grid, was causing problems... then so were boat races.

Using OpenSpaces? Remember, Linden Lab did a bunch of experiments too, they didn't just slam OpenSpaces in, they made a graduated introduction, and the effects they were talking about didn't show up on their radar until they had many thousands of these sims in production.

1. To show the kind of effect I'm talking about you need to load up several OpenSpaces on the same sim, so that you've got more than one sim *on the same CPU* using more than its share of CPU time. Regular sims, or just one OpenSpace on a server, won't have much effect on the performance of other sims running on other CPUs on the same server. To test the effect of OpenSpaces treading on each other's CPU you need to be able to hit all CPUs on the server... you can't even perform that test with regular sims.

2. Sims are 32 bit processes running on servers with 4GB of RAM, meaning a normal server gets about 800MB of VM before it's using "more than its share", but OpenSpaces only get 200MB per instance. Half a dozen OpenSpaces that are using "just a bit more" virtual memory than normal can start a whole server swapping, but you can't reproduce that by loading down a single sim.

Scripts, as I wrote in my JIRA, are not likely to be a problem from CPU usage bacause they're already heavily throttled.

Memory is another issue, but even then you need to be pretty script-heavy to be a problem.

Mono scripts can have a HUGE RAM shadow, though. With 16k per script you can have 3000 scripts on an OpenSpace and only be using 48M of RAM. That's probably small enough that it won't be a problem, but I would still worry. With 64k maximum per script you're looking at up to 96M of RAM, and that's about half the RAM available to the OpenSpace.

But that's a LOT of scripts, most people even using all 3750 prims wouldn't have had that many scripts on an OpenSpace, and most Mono scripts are going to be a lot smaller than that. I would discount scripts as being a significant issue.

I'm completely okay with letting MarkTwain and everyone else sort it out first.

Having some modest experience with what it takes to run an estate and sort out these things, I'm not going to push. The USS is an incredible setup and I am amazed they have managed to do as much as they have.

If anything, they may be biting off more than they can chew, but I don't want to be a naysayer either. Step 1, believe in oneself, step 2, believe in others.

Given the current situation in certain areas of the world (horn of africa and such), adding pirates to blake sea would surely add to the realism :/

Argent, You seem to know a lot more about the technical side of this than I do (hehe... almost everyone does).

The twenty avatar limit in a Homestead Sim has had an effect on how we plan large regattas ESPECIALLY for those boats that support multiple avatars as crew. The avatar limit is one of the reasons that there needs to be some ability to keep observers at a distance from the race itself. There are some full sims in the Blake Sea that are designed so that they can be used as observation locations (probably the BEST example of this is Blake Sea - Haggerty).

LOL Lance!

Let's not give folks the idea though of holding us for ransom!

Yes, using openspaces.

Everything you have written matches my understanding, as well as the conclusion.

For purposes of forum brevity I didn't get into all the permutations of testing, and discussing such matters in extreme detail might brush upon topics considered 'exploits' by the sufficiently dimwitted. And as such that's something not to be discussed in public at all.

So I am loathe to say much in fine detail here, and instead refer to Babbage's extremely professional presentations (which say more than I could possibly say) or take it to email if desired.

But perhaps there's not much more to discuss, until script limits are implemented serverside. At which point Babbage can and probably will explain what he did.

* * * * *

What I do know, is that openspaces deemed too abusive for the grid overall were thought to 'balance out' at 125 USD/month ~ ostensibly 1/3 of a server.

I had actually accepted the technical explanation, until suddenly it evaporated in the warm summer sun during the 95/mo fire sale. "WTF?" is the only acronym that comes to mind at that point.

Don't forget that the cost of the servers and even support is not a straight mapping to the price of the product. It establishes a baseline (charge less than this and you lose money), but LL's marginal costs of adding another sim or server don't have to be all that close to the price they charge for it.

The impression I got is that they were getting closer than they thought to the actual costs (including support and shared costs of resources like the asset servers) at $75, but that doesn't mean they can't make a nice profit at $95.

Why is the Caledon Navy barred from Blake Sea?

Pricing is always a mess because of the #1 monster in the room: the presumed cost of the engineering development required to keep the product relevant.

I think it was a disastrous pricing mistake.

I've heard of "sticker shock," but going from 50 USD/month (which I had) to 95 USD/month was more of a "sticker tasering."

And yes, I passed my savings on, on those 50/month regions.

It's not barred from the Blake Sea.

Just that the regions aren't set for 'combat' activities both technically and by covenant I think ~ you can only sail through.

$50/month? I thought OpenSpaces were $75/month before the price increase.

Gosh...I might "only sail through", then. Oops, weapons malfunction! Sorry for that round below the waterline, Commodore! Care to heave to and let my crew board and make repairs for you?

Nov 2006 they went up in price. I had class 5's at 50 USD/mo and others at 75 USD/mo (purchased later).

There was nothing special done to get class 5 openspaces at 50 USD/month. I simply paid attention and asked about this option when apparently a lot of other people didn't bother to educate themselves about such things.

Savings were passed on. Tier was $L 19500 a month or roughly 75 USD. And in two cases for a couple of longstanding residents, it still is. It's written into the covenant.

Yah, I can see that, but the old limits only worked when you had a small number (hundreds) of these sims. Once they opened up the floodgates with the original OpenSpace pricing... and then increasing the OpenSpace prim limits to 3750... they ran into scaling problems. At that point I don't think they could have rolled everyone else back to limits that worked with thousands of Openspaces or Homesteads and left your sims at 40 avatars.

I think if they'd stuck with he original OpenSpace prim limits they would have had much more manageable growth.

Blake Sea Rezz Zones
by MarkTwain White on September 4, 2009 · 0 comments

in Blake Sea News

At the recent Blake Sea Townhall meeting the issue of Blake Sea rezz zones was discussed. It was felt by nearly everyone that opening the Blake Sea to full rezz would be a great thing. Once we got around to discussing the idea after the townhall meeting there was a general feeling that a completely open Blake Sea would be problematic, not only for greifing reasons, but sandboxing, etc. However it was clearly recognized that the current patchwork of rezz zones was not very user friendly. The compromise that been come up with (which will require more work by LL than simply opening it all up) is to create a checkerboard of regularly spaced rezz zones throughout the Blake Sea. An easy to memorize pattern of zones that will be easy to find and never more than a sim away.

Beginning this weekend the Lindens will begin to convert the Blake Sea rezz areas to a checkerboard of 52m x 52m squares in the northeast corner of each of the 44 Blake Sea sims. It should be a straightforward thing for users to remember that they can rezz in the NE corner of each sim. This also will be a boost for long distance races that traverse the Blake Sea over the current patchwork of rezz areas. If your boat crashes in the Blake Sea there is a convenient place to rerezz close by. The larger rezz areas behind each of the startlines in the Blake Sea will be retained as well.

What Blondin Linden has me to do is start a Forum thread to monitor this change. Over the next week or so these changes will take place. Please add any comments you wish to the SL Sailing Forum version of this post,

So it seems that sea battles in the Blake Sea have been done away with again by the more better and know it all people. Really seems a shame that only one type of sailing can take place in Blake Sea and is controled by only a hand full of people. The intent of the Blake Sea by LL was that it would be open to all types of sailing.

Holy necro spamming!

One post was fine. Bringing back the dead to copy and paste your spam makes you look like a dork and cripples your message. In other words, what ever you wanted to say will now be ignored as the ramblings of an ignorant spammer at best. Others will take the opposing view as a way to oppose the spamming.

My personal view ...

I can only hope you get the mental help you need soon!!!!

OK.
No skin off my nose.

And good luck with your campaign.

I haz tried to help that person, I really did tryz. Oh well, campaigns poorly thought out are doomed to fail.

/me stomps mud from feet and walks away.