"Why don't you have a private island?"

Yeah, those would be cool too. If the prim limit is an issue of server power, they should give people the option of buying a Deluxe private island with a quad Opteron board and several gigs of RAM for some extra upfront instead of whatever hardware they get now. Ian said they buy all AMDs anyway! Tyan makes a sweet board like this, if I recall. Can have four Opterons and up to like 30 gigs of memory. Unless they're already using those. In which case better go with the Cray idea.

I think all land should be a form of private island. It should be possible for evey land owner in SL to move, carve/divide/rejoin to reshape, hide/unhide, and fully terraform their land.

Sure it would. What's the difference between the mainland and Dreamland? Well, Dreamland's smaller, but if you could rent land at 1/4 the price on "Dreamland Rural" from Anshe wouldn't you consider that as a direct competition for mainland real estate? Sure, you couldn't build a bigger house... but your neighbors would be twice as far away so you'd get more landscaping and more privacy.

Not direct, no, because of the prim limitations. If I own 4096m on the mainland, I'm not going to want to lose 3/4 my prims by going to a 4096 at Dreamland. The incentive to move is the extra space to spread those prims out. Thus I need 16K at Dreamland, I just have more room. That means the person is sucking up the same percentage of the sim, which means the same number of people per sim, which means the same number of sims as Dreamland has now to support it's customer base.

Whoa, whoa, don't get all metaverse visionary on us.

That would be cool, though. Instead of buying land parcels, you'd just tier up and then stretch your land and shape it however you wanted. When you tier down, you get like 24 hours to reshape your land into the new lower tier limit or the outer edges go poof.

If they did I would definately have opted for that. I spent a fortnight procrastinating about getting a sim or an island. In the end the landscaping options are what I wanted.

please see proposal 907 it's very related to your wish.

Ya know, for 'prims and land' an offline 3D modeling program suffices.




What took me by surprise with my first sim: prims and land = nothing, of themselves.

Sure, I turned a mathematically flat wasteland into the 19th century island of Caledon - even tossed a 'village' of houses on it so people could kind of see what I was going for. But it still felt strangely hard-edged and voidish in those first 24 hours.

But when suddenly everyone began to come in, change things, get to know each other, and MAKE it a village, with people, commerce, friends, visitors, happenings... it all changed for me.

Suddenly, I 'got it'. Why we are all here.


I've got maybe 100 prims left in my own name, in my own sim. Doesn't matter. I'm happy.

I stopped by Caledon the other night to have a look. I was impressed, it's very well done and very appealing. I'm not surprised it filled up fast.

You're right in that prims and land aren't much by themselves. It's fun to spend hours tinkering and building with them, but if it's just you a 3D modeling program is superior for construction, but there's other bonuses for prims and land. One is the ability to make them actually 'functional' with scripts. The other, of course, is the fact other people can enjoy them with you. Not sure if I'm going to say this right, but while people do make Second Life a second life, they in of themselves are equally not a world without the prims and land. That's called IRC.

Dude, you could always come put your stuff back out at the SL Botanical Gardens that I accidentally returned oh-so-many-moons-ago....

I had to vote 'no' because my financial circumstances don't allow me that kind of expenditure on anything essential, let alone a game. But I did put my remaining vote towards the principle.

However, I would be interested if something similar was available for 'less than whole regions'. I have a 2500 sqm plot at the moment, with a Church building on it (although converted for other uses) which is, sadly, up to the edges because of my geographical location.

I would love to have a bigger plot of land, but don't necessarily need more prims as I am getting very good at prim conservation and efficient building.

I'm assuming that because of the "twice the land, no more prims", the actual ground space of the sim would increase on the map but still be contained on one computer, because it's not actually much more load in the same spot if the prim and people limits were to remain the same per region.

It's a great idea... and if it were available in parts of a region, I would be very very tempted to move to one. Yes, that's what I'd do.

Lewis

IMO, your average mainland sim is pretty much lacking in immersiveness as it is (far more so than the average island, at least those I've seen), so I see no particular benefit in preserving the status quo.

Aside from that, I'm perfectly fine with those characteristics except for the "can't fly or walk to" aspect. Mostly "fly to", as I've no great wish to walk from Acontia (western side of north continent) to Caledon (western edge of world). On the other hand, I have been tempted to hop into my Ornithopter or Airship, and cruise on over... So I do think that reaching the islands from the mainland should be possible (at the island owner's discretion). Someone needs to invent the concept of "virtual, on-the-fly void sims".

But need for that ability is largely a function of how much space is on said islands ... enough islands glommed together would begin to obviate the need to be anywhere else on a regular basis for many people.

At any rate, I don't feel like islands are not a place in the world. The IP address comparison is disingenuous: They feel more like seperate websites.

Secondlife.com is not the same place as wikipedia.com, but it is still a place, and it still feels like it is part of the internet. So does my personal website (a much smaller cluster of private islands, relatively isolated). So are the myriad geocities sites all jumbled together into one alleged community, ala parcels on the mainland ... a particularly apt analogy, I think, given that the heyday of the geocities site is long past. I think the mainland's days are numbered in SL, too ... and for similar reasons: too many constraints, too much chaos and ugliness, growing ability to find better solutions.


Regarding the OP:



It is possible to make sims involve less/no additional cash outlay by letting people run them on their own hardware, as a dispersed grid, but I know that point is not imminent.


Ultimately, I'm in favor of the private server and the discontiguous world model, the latter mostly because it is the most practical way to increase the control people have over sims (Linden Labs can't be a limiting factor if people own their own servers and the code is OSS) without simultaneously increasing the problems they have by being forced to live next to annoying neighbors. Forced cohesion into one ginormous landscape would merely produce results like the mainland, only on a larger scale (due to dealing with full sims instead of small parcels).

I see private islands as a transition step to that point.

(The other solution I've seen is the ability to detach your land from wherever it is and hook it up next to someone else's of your mutual choosing, which would presumably not be somebody you dislike. Like a more extreme version of the "portals" proposal mentioned above.)

As for me, I simply can't afford a sim under the current model, period. I can barely squeeze in my current parcel. More physical space would make them more tempting, but it's still impossible.

Yeah, that's basically the idea. Just more ground space, which I don't think is much more work for the server, and no more work for the client than rendering 4 sims of land, except that it's only querying one server instead of 4, and there's 1/4 of the prims to render.

As a quick note though, technically it's "4x the land, no more prims", 512x512m is 4x the area of 256x256m, so for a given amount of prims you'd need 4 times the land, but the tier on it would remain the same.

yep, that's the general idea. When I wrote the proposal I specifically said that it was not my suggestion to change the mainland. Not because it wouldn't be nice, but because I wanted to get the idea in the door without worrying about some of the higher level issues. If we can get islands configured this way, it's much more likely that at a later date a second LL continent could make use of it, and/or an attempt could be made to integrate this type of sim into the grid. A sort of one step at a time approach. In the mean time I figured people not interested in whole sims could rent from people putting sub continents together. I'm a pretty big fan of renting too .

All good points, especially this. I find most islands are MORE immersive than the mainland. Indeed, this is probably one of their major appeals currently. People can create and immerse themselves in a world entirely of their own choosing without worrying about someone throwing something completely clashing up next door. In the case of Boardman, it has the benefit of being nestled in among a few older well established sims that don't change much. 99% of the grid isn't like that, so you might wake up tomorrow and find a giant 80m penis next to your 'immersive' build. Kind of jolts you right out of it. At the very least, everything around you is more likely than not to clash with your build at least in style.

I was one of those who had to vote "Mainland Forever". To keep it in context to the vote being about the Proposition, my view on that is that it isn't the land space. I've seen some incredible builds on a 4k plot as I have a 10k. To me, it isn't the size of the land, but all to do with prim limits.

I am tiered to a full sim, and most of our parcels are in Miller, Iris, and Fourmile, and over 10km land in each, a good third of all of that just prim land. So for me, no, land mass is nothing without the prim limits to actually work it.

The reasons that, even though I'm tiered for a full sim, and haven't gone for our own personal island is many-fold. For one, like a previous poster mentioned about islands just being an IP address, they're too cut off. I actually LIKE to meet my neighbors and the thought of people wandering into our parcels, which we wouldn't have with a totally cut off island.

We also like the idea of having our personal homes and retreats far, far away from our ingame businesses and ventures.

Islands may be nice for some, but for our group, we'd much rather stay on the mainland and not be isolated or cut off from friends, neighbors, and passers-by, especially in Miller where we enjoy sitting on our porches and watching people in their boats sail by, or go flying and sailing ourselves and not be fenced in doing it like we would be on an island.

Yep, sounds like the idea is probably not for you. Which is fine and to be expected . Youre point of view needs to be noted and LL should definately be working on increasing prim limits (which I believe they are). Also in the proposal, and pointed out here just for clarification, was the note that these would not replace normal regions, but they would be an option. I think you understood that but for future thread viewers I just want to make it clear that these too standpoints are not antagonistic.

That last sentence actually seems like it might benifit from these quad area regions. It allows you to have your home farther from your neighbors without buying a lot more land or an entire sim. Not horrendously far, people walking by to visit is still very much going to happen. Just a little breathing room.

Just to avoid some potential confusion that could happen when read some of earlier post here: The prims per sqm allocation in Dreamland is same as on mainland, not less. In fact, if compute cost per prim, then you even get more prims in Dreamland for same money

I like the idea of the extra large sims in Prop 404. Wouldn't make me want to buy a private sim though. They're too expensive.

HP

I'd love to have a private sim to build on and to mold and shape as I desire. However, I can't justify either that much of an upfront cost, nor the large monthly tier. I've been very tempted many times, but come to my senses when I think about what it would take to break even with it.

*shrug*

If I could afford an extra 200.00 a month (and right now I couldn't afford 2.00), then I certainly wouldn't be spending it on a game.

because im far too busy playing battlefield 2 and trying to earn my medals damnit, when i want to govern my own nation of mini-nabob's I will, I think I'll form a miniture china...yes......

While I have never owned an island, I have lived on islands, and I prefer the mainland. My reasoning, like others is I want to be able to move from location to location using in game means. Teleporting is nice, but I think it eliminates too much of the role play aspects that I love.

Nobody was suggesting this that I can think of, Dreamland is just one of the most well-known island rental chains and we were using it as an example of being a more attractive to customers than the mainland if all your plots suddenly quadrupled in size for the same price, but retained the same prim limit.