A serious (but likely unpopular) question

Can anyone say Grokster V MGM....

New poll going up. Look for it. Vote. Be heard.

There seems to be 1 fundamental differece between objects on your parcel and objects in your inventory. A single region can only support 15000 prims and 50 people. Objects on a parcel are being rendered constantly and take up a portion of the regions ram thus it's expensive to have objects remain on the parcel. On the other hand, objects in your inventory are stored on a hard drive somewhere, hard disk space is becomeing increasingly cheaper and cheaper as hardware manufacturing goes on. I doubt LL will EVER charge for inventory. I'm sure the most active players inventory couldn't take up more than a gig, and that can fit on a thumb drive.

The limit on prims per region is deliberate and may be manipulated for precisely the reasons you're mentioning.

The limit on inventory and storage are as well, only there is an additional matter of memory footprint for the items when in the world, and for cost of maintenance when not.

Just because a cost is not immediately apparent doesn't mean it is non-existant. The issue isn't drive space. It is database space. There is a huge difference between the two and the cost of maintenance on the latter is much higher.

It's not stupid - it's managing a resource in a responsible and fair way. Prior to you joining SL, we used to have the following charges/taxes:

1. $10L per prim cost to rez an object
   
   
2. weekly tax calculated on the # of prims that were inworld
   
   
3. surcharge on lighted objects (by volume - the larger the prim, the higher the cost)
   
4. surcharge on prims - the higher up a prim resided (Z axis) the higher the surcharge
   
   
5. Point-to-Point TP fee
   

So, as you can see, we had a lot of additional charges and they did away with them. This is just another change and we'll all survivie it just fine. One thing to remember about SL: nothing is written in stone - if it doesn't work well, they will change it.

I understad about the maintenance on the databases but database formating shouldn't take up much at all, after all databases are stored on harddrives. The only reason I would agree with you on the difference between database storage vs hard disk storage is if they were yousing an inefficient database with an extreme amount of formatting overhead. Such an example would be ms access or sql. I would presume that LL would use either sybase, oracle, or mysql max.

Databases are very maintenance intensive things, both code and space wise. Add to this that you're not just storing data with databases, you're storing everything from procs to crons to logs to temp tables to logs for it all.

On top of this, you're running realtime transaction processing and on-the-fly updates along with threading for everything from chat to keeping up with new objects coming into the world, textures, photographs, the entire teleportation and landmark system, the entire search system, etc. etc. etc.

We're not just talking about files on a disk. We're talking about data that both changes rapidly and must be maintained repeatedly over the course of any given day.

Trust me when I say that maintaining a large database or farm is much more expensive than merely keeping things on a drive.

Most businesses figure out what their cost of business IS, then from there, figure out how much per customer they need to receive in order to keep it running AND make enough of a profit to support improvements and growth. If/when those projections are shot down by any number of possible factors (e.g.: Inventory assest are MASSIVELY over projection, affecting cost on all levels), then something has to be done to mitigate the variance.

I don't think it should be based on land ownership as this will force people down a certain land usage route. For some people it makes more sense to rent than to buy. I choose to rent on someone else's private island (and in 10s of spots world wide) rather than own a 512 or whatever somewhere.

My business depends upon the flexibility I get from rental and having a reasonably sized inventory. The tier for the land is still being paid whether I pay it to a middle man in L$ or to LL directly in US$.

LL shouldn't decide that one way of working is to be favoured over the other.

Honestly I would be willing to delete 90% of my inventory rather than pay extra fees. By the same token I wouldn't buy anything new without also deleting part of that 10% that was left.

Our inventories are our history in SL, each one prevokes an experiment, a experience, an accomplishment or just a good belly laugh. Those that dont we can do without.

When we start talking aobut culling inventories then we also cull buying and selling of goods. Moreso we talk about content. Without content in SL it's no more than a chat room, and we have the forums for that

Cat

/i would agree to pay for an bigger inventory over a given limit IF we get sane ways to manage inventories.
I use mostly the sort tool to get what i want, all items i really need use and want to keep are scatteret over about 40 or 50 folders.
Why?
Lets say i want to move item A from folder C wich is an subfolder to folder B wich is an subfolder in another tree.
As it is thats a very frustrating experience without lagg, absolute annoying and frustrating with lagg, with ONE item.

Two inventory windows and more ways to sort items, like show only full perm items, copyable items/date/no copy and so on, have one window list them without folders so i can generate a lit of item a in all it different forms and looks, dumb it into one folder and sort out easily what i really need to keep and trash the rest.

As it is i simply dont bother to sort my inventory for the simple reason that the time needed to do so is not resonable and i dont see the point doing by hand stuff the computer i sit in front of can do in fractions of a second.

Easy way, download the inventory structure and list to the client, the client runs the sorting and stuff, you can work with multiple windows and so on, changes are send back to the servers storing and managing the inventory only as soon you press a key.

So i want to clean up my muck i open the inventory managment tool, wich loads down my inventory as it is into an big nice window where i have listet like with normal filesysthems name, type, date of creation, permits, like any normal computer filesysthem, i can open additional inventory windows to swap stuff between them and so on, as soon i am done i upload my new inventory structure.

Lock the inventory over this time or allow upload if there was no alternation of the inventory in the meantime beside maybe an special folder for incoming items (wich owul dbe helpfull to see whats new in the "mailbox" instead hunting the stuff from several folders.

all the tools mentioned are already there on every computer able to run SL, the OS has them, the word processing programs have them and so on, so you could even use plain txt file systhems to download upload structures.

I bet your load of items to keep track on in the servers would drop dramatically if people would have the same ways to manage there inventory as they have to manahge there filesysthems or mp3 files, wich are sortet neatly on my computer btw for the simple reason that i have an way to do so effective and fast.

Its for my opinion a question of the UI and not of beeing a packrat so many people have bloated inventories, alone getting them sized down to have faster search would help, i have "only" 6.7k items and it starts to take time when i change sims to generate the list, i would happily chop down the size but that takes even way more time only to check i delete all but one copies of the same item and keep the one i really want to keep.

i would most likly have no problem to limit myself as content creator to 2 or 3 k items given the tools to do so in a sane annount of time instead dragging stuff arround

other point would be the possibility to drag an item from the ground into an specific folder instead take it and move it then into the folder i want to have it, maybe make a texbox pop up where i enter the folders tree or a box showing only the folder tree and i select the destinantion folder, whatever, but please with cherry on top, do something, give us the tools to clean up self.

Should the solution be simpy to tax inventories i shut down my sim and leave, i will NOT pay Linden Labs for problems they could at least try to solve otherwise by giving us rather basic and simple tools they dont have to really develop even self.

If your car carage doesent bothers to repair there tools and has extra costs you would for shure not shrug your shoulders and pay.

Pay for uploading stuff, ok, pay for land ok, but i draw the line at paying for a problem wich is at least for an part Linden Labs fault and not solved otherwise.

Good customer service is to avoid unecessary costs and price your customers not for "features" wich are none in the end and result of your own shortcomings.

I would have a ton of ideas how to design a UI wich allows one to sort and clean an inventory in fractions of the time you need now, and the ammount of time to programm such a tool would be for someone used to write code for a living a few days at max.

I'm already paying a huge sum for my island sim. I would hope that that would be taken into consideration considering how large the fee is for an island sim. If I were charged above that I would sell my sim and tier down to basic.

how about a "auto deleat" of anything called "object" in inventory after a certain timeframe.. I bet they make up a rake of space...

Hi.. yes it is 5 in the morning.. and yes i am going to ramble on about this.

a Few comments.. lets assume LL does not fix the inventory tool.. and lets assume they give us say a 7K limit on items..

* blank look*...now arguably i dont NEED the 35K items in my inventory..any more than i neeeeed the 4 new outfits i bought. But i think to FORCE people to have to think about what they buy because they are approaching their INVENTORY limit is just wrong.

What is to Stop me from Making 5 alts and spreading my inventory over them .. LL loses money.. 1 paid account 4 free one..(talking Monthly land fees not account creation) or take it to a more ridiculous level.. on every one of my credit cards.. i make 5 accounts..the each have 7k items.. soooooo 5 cc 25 accounts..7k inventory.. loooks like i have my own item bank..

My Suggestion is to fix the tool problem..forget aabout the few nut case like myself with huge inventories.. and FORGET charging for prims.. unless of course you want to raise the Land/prim thingy.

Hardware is cheap as is storage..dont get lazy ..FIX the problem dont bandaid the Code..

Dont be a Microsoft..Windows did not get better.. if just got BIGGER.


Send in the Clones .. Rant off

How about a tax on people that bump old threads?

>pokes Annah.. gmorning!!!

Good morning.

After reading a good 75% of this thread and realising most (bar a few) are saying more or less the same thing, i'd like to have my 2 peneth(or cents).

It occurs to me that the inventory system is a mess. My inventory is overflowing and i wish it wasnt. Deleting is a huge task because i dont know what half my items are.

Am i right in saying that SL can not be used unless you have Broadband? and am i not right in thinking that a full client copy of SL to download is about 17meg - 18meg?

So if this is true then im estimating that 99% (if not 100%) of the things you see in SL is downloaded to the client from the servers, which downloaded from other clients while ingame. It seems that having a client side inventory system would be the ultimate solution. The data could be checked in the servers database as to the inventories info,,, objects names and file size but nothing else. This surely will be enough to stop people from corrupting them and causing any undesirable effects. The inventory then sits on client side and is deleted and edited directly on client side while ingame. and when any item is rezzed or used in SL then the broadband effeciency sends the info straight through the server to all other clients in the vecinity. This meens a HUGE amount of space on the servers freed up and then all of this bu****it tax can be forgotten, cos me, and i now a lot of others would move onto the next game.

I know what most of you are going to be thinking, thats more uploading downloading for the clients and servers and that equals more lag, but if you also think about it, clients and servers are doing all this uploading and downloading already, just in an ineffecient way.

But for most content creators, this would be perfect. I don't have two dozen near exect copies of a shirt made by someone else (ok, maybe a few ), but I do have many variants of the same object that I am creating. ~2m x ~5m wall with ledge, ~2m x ~5m wall with attached flower bed, ~2m x ~5m wall plain, ~4m x ~5m wall with ledge, ~4m x ~5m wall with attached flower bed, ~4m x ~5m wall plain, ~2m x ~5m wall pierced with multi-prim window, etc, etc, etc...

I guess it really depends who are the biggest inventory users.

Ooh, thread necromancy is a black art, indeed.

Donning my tinfoil hat, I speculate that SLv1.7 was intentionally designed to discourage inventory use. As evidence I note:

1. object you create in-game do not always persist
   
2. objects you "take" from game do not always make it to your inventory
   
3. objects spontaneously disappear from inventory
   
4. using (i.e. rezzing) inventory slows the asset feeds for all users on the grid
   
5. letting people look at content reduces their performance
   
6. one of the Lindens has a quote from Ghandi in her forum signature
   

Therefore, they have already implemented an inventory austerity program hidden behind what they cleverly call "bugs".

It reminds me of a university computer system that was being converted from <older OS from a company that no longer exists> to a <newer old OS from same company that was mostly compatible with older OS>. Had they just said "we turn off U on this day and therefore you should be running on V by that time" you'd have a large number of researchers saying "you can't shut off U, I have many funding $$$$ riding on that machine" and they'd never get the upgrade completed. The IS department did something rather clever: over the space of a year or so, they systematically, slowly degraded the performance of system U by removing hardware and then ultimately slowing the remaining processor down. Thus, you could always use system U, it just got increasingly more "painful" to. By the date of the conversion, no one was voluntarily running on "U" because it was too slow.

Smart.

Idea: Have all the no-mod objects stored in user inventories as instances of one original. I bet this measure alone would save a fair bit.

--Arguments--

- It's still mod to the person who made it, so the instances can't just point to the object that the maker owns.. or what if the maker deletes his? What then?

+ Ok. How about we give 'The Real Copy' to the first person given the no-mod object. Every other instance points to that one.

- He deletes it, or inventory gets wiped.

+ Fine. Have the original copied to some 'master database' the first time it's given no-mod to someone else, and have the recipient's copy and every subsequent copy point to that.

- How about people who are given a mod copy?

+ They get a full object copy, not just an instance. This way, as long as there are at least 2 no-mod copies of this particular object given, this scheme would still result in space savings.

- As long as the 'master database' doesn't fail.

+ Yes.

- How do you know this isn't the way it's done already?

+ ...

- Oh yeah, having everyone's copies as instances also means the object state is not saved upon 'Take'. Does it mean stuff like attachments lose their saved attach point? As a separate issue, it's likely the master database would fill up with all sorts of different versions of objects.

+ Well, hopefully the object state is not too big a deal. Perhaps this extra information could be saved in the instance, if simply enough. As for the master database filling up, that still takes less space than the many *duplicates* of many *versions* of products in everyone's inventories combined. Additionally, you could periodically delete those objects which are no longer instanced in anyone's (or anything's) inventory. They technically no longer exist in world anyway.

- Wait, what about leaving the instance in a sim? Surely it needs to retain state while it's rezzed.

+ Surely, but that's kept in the object's memory space, no? Rezzing it would still create a real full object in the sim with normal properties. It's just the inventory entry which is the instance.

- Oh yeah. I'm confusing myself. Oh well, I'm certain someone else on this thread can think of more arguments against this.

+ I'm sure they could.

--

One of the appeals of SL to us "casual" non content creator (yet) inhabitants was/is the non limited inventory. Coming from other games where you had only a certain amount of inventory space if you were a crafter this caused serious problems.

This is not saying that I don't need to cull items from my inventory. I do try to do this on a regular basis, but I can say that it would severely limit my buying if I am forced to delete items which are no transfer in order to buy something new. I also have many items that I share with new players to help ease their transition into this new world. I know I certainly don't need them, but they are nice things to give someone just starting out who has nothing.

One of the things I did learn on this last inventory culling spree is the fact that you can store things on notecards. Anything that is copyable can be stored on a notecard. I put all my pictures (and it's probably one of my biggest money sinks) on notecards grouped by subject matter.

I shouldn't say I'm not a content creator as I have created things for me, just haven't sold anything yet. I can guarantee my little house and all it's various pieces have a fond spot in my inventory. I could probably delete it but like someone else said. It's also pieces of your life here in SL, fond memories kept. How do you decide that that cool widget you got when you first started is now junk and should be deleted? Some items I have are no longer available as the creator isn't even in world anymore.

Anyway enough rambling. I would love to have my inventory available to me offline, what would the stress to the servers be if we did that and then uploaded it when we wanted it? Would be we subject to an upload charge for inventory that is rightfully ours already ? How exactly would that work.. Inquiring minds, ok ok sleep addled minds want to know.

*hugs*

Ash

Why not just have all objects stored on client side that arnt being used in the SL world, only the used objects in the SL world are stored on the servers, vuala!!!! and these objects being used in the SL world are paid for because they must be on paid for land...another Vuala!!!

I'm afraid that secure client-side object storage could be fairly troublesome to implement. As Andrew Linden explained earlier in this thread, anything that is stored on your hard disk can be viewed and modified. This means that some people are bound to try and steal/duplicate/modify source code, textures, etc.

Granted, these things are usually encoded in some possibly unknown manner and maybe even encrypted but I wouldn't want to underestimate the reverse-engineering abilities of hackers/crackers out there. Also, it is possible to falsify filesizes and even checksums, unless these were calculated for each and every client to server upload. Sacrifice processing power for storage space? They are both limiting factors. Which is cheaper?

As a side point - what happens if *your* HD crashes? What if you want to access SL from a different computer?

Ok, so what if someone hacks the code and steals ideas? Isnt SL copyrighted for protection? also if hackers did want to steal then they could hack SLs servers if they wanted to anyhow. Hackers or theives, how ever you want to call such people will always find a way to get what they really want anyhow, through many different meens or at least try. So coming up with "we dont want to place a client side inventory because of theft" isnt really a new problem that SL already faces.

And if you need to have the items accessed on another computer then you place the items your wanting to be used in an object inventory box and place it on your land for access anywhere.

If your hard drvie crashes then either make sure u have an object inventory box in world with your most precious items in at all times, but for me ive never had a HDD crash before. Nor have i heard of any friends having such a thing happen to them. so if it does happen then its like winning the lottery (other than u feel unhappy instead of happy) and very very very unlucky.

And what if the same happens with the servers HDD.. what if they crash, it wont be just one person crying it will be the whole of the SL population.

Because client-side storage is open to the easiest type of hacking. Every MMOG that has ever tried to store valuable data on the client has run into hacks designed to duplicate items.

I have not ever seen a hack-proof method of client-side storage of assests that have a real value in-game.

That's not to say you can't come up with one, but like viruses, the hackers will always be playing a gaime of one-upsmanship with LL. I don't think that is a battle ANY maker of a virtual world has ever come out on top of.