Partition Avatar Resource Usage

You say we should get our fair share of prims. They did that.

You say we should get our fair share of script resources. Seems like it might go that way.

Then, we should get our fair share of avatar resources.

You own 1/4 of a sim, you should be able to host 1/4 of the AVs it supports.

Because otherwise, the whole sim is brought ot it's knees by your club. The surrounding land becomes virtually useless. I own 1/4 of James, and on a regular basis, can barely move. There is almost nothing in that sim...other than a club. Which packs in AVs. A disproportionate number of them I'd say.

What's the difference? Resources are resources. Avatars are by far the heaviest, way way worse than prims or scripts.

They are the REAL problem. Not scripts or prims.

Move? Doesn't help. Inevitably, it happens again.

Marvelous idea! I envision a glorious future where you need to receive a pass from a land owner to even enter a sim, and these passes are given in direct proportion to the amount of land owned. Surely we NEED to implement this idea, right Prokofy et al? After all, we don't want any particular person or group of people monopolizing resources, do we?

You know, the odd thing is, I have no idea if you're being sarcastic.

The issue is the fair partition of sim resources, isn't it? Like, you get what you pay for? That is precisely the argument for prims and scripts as far as I know.

I don't see how allowing one land holder to pack the sim to the point that people who want to visit other parcels in that sim are locked out, is fair.

I'd have to say, now that I think about it, that a sim with a visitor-heavy parcel is actually compromising the ability of regular plain old folks to get a little piece of dwell. People stay away from incredibly laggy sims, I hear people work around them all the time.

A 512 plot of land in a normal Sim is 1/128 of the total landmass.

The max amount of people a Sim can normally hold is around 40.

So, as a First Land participant, you will be able to host about 1/4 of your avatar on your land.

LF

This is a good idea, however we have to remember that LL wants to encourage people to attract avatars, and putting a throttle on that would potentially discourage them.

I think if they significantly increased the developer reward and properly rewarded people then they could get away with restricting the amount of people per parcel.

Yes, I suppose it would require some retiering of the lower thresholds. An excellent illustration of an issue with the system.

However, consider the current system. That one parcel could be packed with enough AVs to prevent anybody else from entering the sim.

Please explain the difference, as far as server resources are concerned, between prims, scripts, and avatars. Well, other than that avatars are several orders of magnitude worse than either scripts or prims.

I own 1/4 of a sim, in a sim with almost nothing in it other than a club, and I regularly will log in, barely be able to move, and just log out.

Not to mention the shouting prize scripts. Ugh.

I believe the idea is that LL wants to reward people who attract avatars, whereas they do not necessarily want to reward people who use up prim / script resources.

Well, yes and not.

They apparently want to reward people that can attract the most avatars with the least usage of server resources.

So the less you do insofar as "building, creating anything", and the more you do insofar as just getting people to stand around an empty plot (like what are those events, "No Host Chat?), the better.

Have you ever been in a sim with a busy tringo event? My god they should just get it overwith and give them the whole damn thing. The rest of the sim is useless, it's a ghostown. Same with any sim a big club moves into. I've flown around and see it over and over. Not tringo's fault per say, or clubs.

But it definitely represents the ability to get a lopsided portion of the sim resources. A busy club can essentially take over an entire sim, without owning the land, just by keeping a steady stream of visitors coming. It effects surrounding land prices, other owner's in the sim dwell, the whole bit. The only alternative is to abandon.

My real point is, if it's about sim resources, then make it about sim resources. As a primarily scripter/builder, I would happily concede to cutting up av numbers and keep my scripts.

But SL isn't about Scripts. So then, is the issue...what SL is about? If so, hmm, I missed the LL announcement.

Happened again just last night. Two of the people that have access to my land in James logged in and said they were barely able to move. They don't know much about the game, so they assumed the game is just broken.

I asked them if they happened to see if there were avatars across the street at CCC. They said, "yes, there always are".

Well, then that's why you can't move on our land. Naturally they wondered what the point of owning land there is then.

You know, it actually wasn't me that came up with this. When I brought up a while ago the old issue with prims, and the new one with scripts, one of them mentioned that it seemed avatars were the worst of all. Then I see post after post about sim resources. It just became evident that people are not discussing the entire problem, only their portion of it.

And he was right. You get 20 avs on one parcel, the rest of the sim is useless.

Why is it fair that one land owner can essentially hog the entire resource allocation of a sim? That is exactly what happened with prims and now scripts. When discussing server resources, there is absolutely no difference. Resources are resources.

If they're going to bill us above a threshhold for scripts, then they should bill us above a threshold for avatars. It is the same exact logic.

What if avatar resource usage was throttled by parcel size?

The interest list is the biggest CPU hog on a sim. What if LL allocated priority to interest lists by parcel? Let's say that 10% of the CPU time spent on interest lists is reserved for people "just passing through" and 90% is guaranteed to anyone who stays on someone's land for more than say 30 seconds or a minute. Someone who owns 50% of the land in a sim gets 45% of the interest list processing time for everyone over their parcel (and whatever is not being used by others.) The more people they pack on their plot, the less interest list time is available to each avatar on that person's plot - while the rest of the landholders are not affected.

So, when someone gets a big party going, the simulator will start cutting back on (for example) the frustum (view cone) of everyone at the party. Say your draw distance is 128 and you're on a parcel with a ton of avs on it. The simulator might only send you updates for 50 meters or whatever it takes to guarantee that your interest list (and the lists of those around you) don't make it impossible for people on other parcels to do anything.

In theory, it would be a pretty good system. If your club-holding neighbor is throwing a party while no other parcels are occupied in the sim, they get 100% of the interest list processing time. If you log in and stand on your parcel, the club patrons will experience a drop in (effective) draw distance, but you will still be able to use your land. In fact, their degraded draw distances might not even matter. Say everyone has their draw distance at 96 meters and the club is only 40x40 meters. A patron might not even notice they were being throttled until they left the parcel and suddenly started getting updates.

Another possibility would be to have a way to limit a person's interest list to a single parcel. Let's say someone teleports you to a club on a parcel with that flag set. The simulator will send you everything within your draw distance - once. After that, it will only update you with what goes on within the parcel. In this way, you won't be looking at an empty void when you leave the club, but while you're in the club, stuff that doesn't concern you (i.e. stuff outside the parcel) would not be sent to your client. You'd get a very tasty jump in FPS and the simulator wouldn't have to waste time sending you crap you don't care about.

That would have to be an option for the client to turn on, though. And it could work in parallel with the throttling solution I have outlined above.

It's not fair, and LL needs to grapple with this. HOW they do it isn't so important as THAT they do it.

Otherwise, the mainland will essentially be pretty pointless, and most people will stampede to Ansheland or Nexusland. It will be a total crap shoot as to what kind of land you will get and whether it will be usable or not.

For a long time, LL could just count on people never drawing back and thinking conceptually about these things. They sure didn't themselves. They and oldbies could just sit back and watch while new people came into the game, bought land, got a club or a mall next to them and got uglied out or lagged out, then ran to new territories in the "land rush" that Philip loves to talk about so ecstatically.

The "land rush" -- driven by laggy clubs and ugly malls -- makes people keep coming to the auction or keep coming to the marked-up in-world smaller parcels in new lands.

Then it was lather, rinse, repeat as THAT new sim got crapped up.

So LL seemed content to leave it that way. Most people just felt like it was their little problem, solved by their little land rush.

But after awhile, people began to compare notes and say, hey, WTF is going on here?? Why doesn't LL zone? Why don't they discipline griefers better? Why don't they ration resources better? Why don't they put all the clubs only on certain servers so they don't ruin residential areas? etc.

Indeed, you wonder why the Lindens, who are so reluctant to zone, couldn't at least do this much: create about a dozen new servers, really powerful, maybe with double prims or faster FPS or more scripting capacity (this is where they get to test out this increased capacity they say they're going to do) and auction them for more money, specifically for clubs. They can even call the sims Club This or Club That. They could sell quarters or eights of sims on these club sims. That would siphon off some of the club activity.

Whatever they do, they have to start thinking about *how people live in the world* and not about *how they goof around on sandboxes and free 4096s.*

I have to agree with Tcoz here. The logic is that LL has put limits on builders/scripters so they don't use all the resources in a SIM on their property. The same should go for people hosting events, since there are other people who own land there.

The problem is, as some have pointed out, that goes against what LL is wanting to accomplish. I agree with that, but still agree with Tcoz that the system is certainly not fair, especially for the people who can't use their land while someone who may not even own 1/2 of what Tcoz does, uses up all the AV resources.

Huns brings up a great idea on how to make that happen, although, I have to believe that the code to accomplish such a task is probably going to be a major undertaking. We all know that LL would like to do X, Y, and Z, but as they have said, it's a major undertaking and therefore, not on the forseeable radar.

One other way to fix a problem of this type is start to utilize a system of allowing/disallowing certain things in certain areas. A residential SIM should be just that, as residential SIM. Where people can own homes, but not stores or clubs. A business SIM would be for people that want to build stores or clubs. The real problem of implementing something like this, at this point in time, would be retro-grading the current SIMs and forcing people to move after saying this is a Residential or Business SIM. One good thing about this would be, you could design servers to meet a higher amount of volume when in a Business SIM and therefore charge different costs accordingly. Perhaps a Business SIM could be made to handle upwards of 60 people without showing degradation, but, for that boost, you charge people more to own that land, or even, split the tier system into Residential Tiers and Business Tiers. This way, you don't have to build a beefy server just for residential sims and the people that don't want to have a store/club can still own a home and pay a fee that reflects the lesser server it takes to house residential SIMs on.

Interesting debate Tcoz, while I don't think LL will ever write up code to allocate AV resources, I do believe by asking the question, we can come up with a way to make it happen without a re-write and make more people happy in SL land.



Thanks!

This makes sense, assuming the other limitations make sense! (tho I didnt say that they did)

Providing its technically feasable - this is the best suggestion I've heard yet.

whining again? why dont you leave and let others enjoy the game?

Kyrah, why do you say in response to Prokofy's post that he is 'whining again'. He is not whining, he is agreeing that something needs to be done about this situation. Your post was certainly not as constructive as his and before you tell me it's none of my business, Prokofy is a friend of mine and although I don't agree with all of his posts, there is no need for rudeness.

I rent land on an island from Hiro Queso and we can do pretty much what we like except no malls, clubs or events, which effectively means the island will never be so full of people that none of us can move for lag. Even if someone had a private party, it would be an irregular occasion and easy to live with. We can build a store, just not a mall.

It works really well and I am happier there than I have ever been owning my own land and not knowing what my neighbours were going to be building next door.

Alexa

LOL This is about the third thread here today that you've asked me to leave, or hoped that I'd leave, apparently assuming that if you just publicize your wish, it will be done. Yet another example of the entitlement-happy generation!

If you can only solve your problems by making other people leave the game, you're *really* in trouble.

I have no intention of leaving, and will go on speaking out as I see fit.