LowTrafficIsland

The votes and comments in this thread produced the kernel of this idea:So here's another poll asking if you'd be interested in purchasing such a proposed estate.

It has been said that this would only serve a small niche market of people with special needs. My answer was "so?" LL can only make money by offering a few niche markets some specialty sims with uncommon settings. It's not like they have to radically alter the grid or somehow threaten the rest of the wora'uld just to run eight sims on a dual processor, dual core system and set them to contain fewer prims and/or fewer concurrent avs.

I think. Lindens feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

It seems extremely narrow minded to say "I don't need that so nobody can have it."

A lot of people paying the full whack on sims might consider a scaleback if this Idea were brought in.. just LOOK at the amount of sims just sitting there empty all the time..

*edit* I probably should say "half the time"

It would be nice. I wonder how much of a redesign it would take for LL to adapt their server code so you could run as many sims as you want on one server or use as many servers as you want to host one sim. LL could then base pricing on that scale. This way there is a stronger correlation between the resources customers use and the tier that they pay. The first situation would be great for sandbox and (content) development servers that have very few occupants and the latter siutation would be good for being able to hosting even larger events. Well... Up to the point that the client starts choking.

Isn't this just a minor spin on void sims like the ones around Hollywood or Area 51?

if the savings was signifacant yes. But I would not pay $500 and still pay that kind of tier for one.

Maybe like $250 purchase and half tier....maybe....

I don't know. What do the void sims cost in setup and tier? How many of them are operated per server, per core?

Do the voids only come in blocks of four? Do they impose hard limitations on number of prims, avs, or any other resource support.

Are they available for anyone to purchase?

I was considering an arrangement a year ago in which four sims would be hosted on a server as a sort of private vehicle park, with lower limits on objects. At the time I was informed that the code is in fact ready for this type of setup, but after we tried out the void sims with vehicles it quickly became apparent you take a significant performance hit hosting just 2 sims on a server, let alone 4.

I would love to hear if any progress has been made since then. I think it is inevitable that more and more people with wildly varying performance needs will want their own full-control environments.

They come in blocks of four, four sims per core, and the four-sim pack costs the same as one full sim. Search through the forums or ask the people who run Hollywood or Area 51 the details.

All this is a bit short-termist anyway, because in due course LL will have to turn its statically tiled grid into a dynamic one for reasons of event scalability, which means that the concept of low-activity sim will disappear entirely. All CPU resources will simply contribute to the general processing pool, and minimally active locations will simply consume minimal CPU resources.

And of course land acreage will be decoupled from activity costs as well, since non-active acreage is almost free in principle, because in a dynamic world implementation it consumes only storage. And the cost of storage is almost zero, and dropping.

Inevitably, this will mean collosal changes to the status quo, so my recommendation is not to invest significantly in virtual land at all. We're in a transitional stage, and it's just not going to work like this in the not too distant future.