Room for a "Sim Lite"?

Is there room for a "Sim Lite" - in other words a sort of a lower cost private void sim?

Would people who buy private sims be interested in a land product that:

Had the same m2 "room" as a sim
But only 1/6th the prims
Limited to 12 people on the sim at once
Priced at 1/4 the intial price and 1/4 sim monthly tier of a regular sim

Could be used a bit like a void on the mainland to create more "spacious" picturesque, or maybe more vehicle friendly environments or join or space standard sim builds into less crowded environments.

People might also buy a single one as quiet homestead toy or a more affordable starter to private sim owning.

This idea is bought to you by "I may be crazy but at least I'm trying" Incorporated...

Quick calculations show me that whilst it is probably still outside of the financial outlay that I would be able to make on my own in a month, it is certainly a concept that I would give some serious consideration in perhaps trying with a friend or two.

Many sims are majorly overcrowded, and having it 'spread out' would give rise to road networks and suchlike, something I have always been in favour of. Presumably these 'lite regions' could be piggybacked several to a server like the 'void' sims, thus reducing LL's outlay, and potentially increasing the opportunity for mid size projects to have that dream of private space that the current prices put beyond their reach.

I can think of perhaps a dozen different uses straight off the top of my head, with many more if I put some time into it. Many of my builds do not need the prim space, just the sq m of land to put them on without them appearing too crowded - and that's what I can't afford.

Good suggestion. I hope someone at LL is listening.

Lewis

I also agree.

Currently as I see it, sims are treated as the *top level* product in the line of land products LL has to offer. Like, you can get 512m, 1024m, 2048m, etc etc etc, aaaall the way up to a sim.

But I think sims should be treated like a separate product line, with many different flavors / prices. The model you guys are talking about could greatly improve the options we all have of actually enjoying the spaciousness of a SIM, understanding we will have several varieties of configurations.

Excellent idea... I have almost half a region, split into 4 plots over a couple of sims. I have a couple of largish builds in a couple of the largest plots and I am still only half way through the prims I have to play with.

I'd quite happily sacrifice some of the prims if it meant I could spread out a bit further.

EDIT - also the 12 person limit wouldn't affect me because I doubt I get that number of visitors in a week, let alone at the same time...

LL is either offering or going to offer void sims in 4-packs for the price of a regular sim. Get together with 4 of your friends and you each get a budget sim for the price of a shared one.

Very good idea.
I would buy one.

I missed that... do you have a link?

What are the restrictions on void sims, incidentally? (Apart from them not having any land in them of course.)

From my understanding, "void" sims run no differently then regular sims and could support islands and terraforming as usuall.

The primary difference has to do with the fact that they are packed more densly onto the servers.

For example, my understanding is that normally there is 1 sim per CPU, where void sims are 2 or more per CPU. This significantly reduces the processing power for a "void" sim. It is not half, but less then half -- because other resources in the same server are also being shared between more sims.

For example, it was pointed out in Second Life Answers that the Arcadia sims are on a Class 4 server:

http://secondlife.com/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=SimClasses

There are 4 sims on a class 4 server, which uses Opteron 270s (dual core) -- probably two processors, for a total of 4 cpu cores -- thus 4 sims.

If that server was used for voids, there would likely be 8 voids on the same hardware.

Actually...
That 1250 prims per region limit is interesting, because it implies that the "per sim" overhead is a lot higher than I assumed.

Ya, the 2 to 1 or 4 to 1, I think is often confused by the fact that I think when Linden Labs started using dual-core CPU's they started putting 4 sims per physical CPU, with each sim tied to each of the cpu cores (which depending on the OS, will actually show up as seperate CPUs.)

At least some Linux distributions, installed on a machine with two Opteron 270 dual-core CPUs , will see 4 CPUs rather then 2. Each sim is then likely tasked to one of the four CPUs seen by the the OS.

I think the 1250 prim limit is yet another arbitrary number that linden lab has choosen. In this case, I believe it's used to deter people from purchasing these sims as "low cost" alternatives to full sims, building them out, and then complaining about performance issues.

By keeping the prim count super low, it helps re-enforce the fact that these sims will not perform like normal sims.

But I too am looking forward to making these more commonly available. Used properly they would allow for some very large projects -- for example creating a Pirates of the Caribbean type game where you needed vast tracts of ocean, with a few "full" sims providing the islands.

Hollywood and it's four sims are a prime example of how these should be used, but events there need to be planned such that they never have a large number of ships in ALL of those four sims at once. If you were to put a 10ms script load in one of the sims (from say, a dozen sail boats), and then replicated that to the other 3 (48 sail boats total) -- I think it would significantly lag all 4.

From what I've observed in SL, much of it's scalability is based on over-subscribing the servers -- and making the assumption that all the sims on a single server won't all be under heavy load at the same time.

When I asked last week about void sims was quoted the regular price of $1250 for setup. Argent where can I find the info you are speaking of? Would like to read it and be able to check it out.

Apparently the 4:1 sim has a hard-limit of about 1.25 ms of script execution... I can't wait for Mono !

I can't imagine why they would expect anyone to pay US$1250 for a void sim. I can't imagine THAT they would. Are you sure that wasn't the price for four, as noted in this link?

I went back over the note and I was totally wrong

It's been though of, and it doesn't run very well. You would need to buy 4 of them for 1250 and pay 195 per month for the 4 together. You can put a couple things in it but as soon as you have any type of 'perm' builds around and more then 5 avatars... it turns to slime. If you ahve NOTHING in the sim... you can have 5 avatars riding around on jetskis, but that is IT!