"mini-sims"

Okay, this is kind of a radical idea:

We have all kinds of problems involving lag and sim limits:

1. network lag from downloading all the textures and geometry,
   
2. rendering lag from then rendering said textures and geometry.
   
3. physics lag from the sim having to calculate collisison interactions between objects.
   

To limit these issues, we have caps on the number of users and objects within a sim. This is a GOOD idea.

What if there was a way to compartmentalize parts of a sim? In effect, creating a new, "mini-sim": You'd keep them on the same hardware, but aside from letting agents and objects pass between them, disallow communications between the area enclosed as a "mini-sim" and the outside. This would allow us to build a house, designate the space INSIDE the outer shell as a seperate space.

Yes, this is effectively turning off the "seamless" networking system that makes SL so great, but the advantages are numerous:

1. Light wouldn't spill through walls.
   
2. Texture and geometry (and audio!) loading would be limited to the enclosed space.
   
3. With less to render, our framerates would increase.
   
4. Memory usage would decrease vastly. Rendering everything within a 256m radius is a lot more work than rendering the contents of an apartment.
   
5. We would have truly private space.
   
6. Sim limits would effectively be increased greatly.
   

The downside to this is that things like windows would open out into nothing, though in some circumstances, this could be a blessing. Also, it could break up the environment if there were big voids around, so perhaps a mechanism to detect whether or not the space was actually enclosed before allowing it to be declared an "independant" zone might help?

I realize that this is in no way a complete plan, but I think it's a good idea, and one worthy of more discussion.

I think they have something like this in There. Despite that, I think this would be a great idea.

How exactly would people set up a mini-sim?

Turning down the draw distance for your plot acomplishes this nicely. The only problem is you cant go below 64 meters.
How about a land option to not draw anything outside the plot or something?
Or just let us have smaller draw distances than 64.

I kind of like that idea, I kind of like Eggy's idea about setting a new option for the draw distance better.

How do you set draw distance on your property? I can't find it in the About Land and its been bugging me for some time now.

Oz, that's in the preferences.

It tells your client how far in the sim to render, and it pretty much directly affects your performance on low end hardware (such as what I'm running one).

HTH!

I liked an idea in a previous thread about a new type of bounding box object.

When inside it, it would ignore anything on the outside. No textures, no object and position updates, and no rendering.

It would be used for basements and windowless rooms to allow fast response time.

Because SL is so dynamic, you can't have pre-built bounding trees to reduce triangles drawn.. so a way to do it manually would be a great help.

Or a more ambitious idea is an object can be set perminant. And perhaps once a day at night the server can do precalculations (like Quake and Doom do) and send them to the clients when they connect or walk into a sim. They would need to be taxed/expensive perhaps to keep people from setting EVERYTHING that way, but it could significantly improve things, especially standing next to large buildings or inside them.