Low Prim Sims

Just curious whether anyone has bought one of these 'four sims in one' low prim bundles.

I'm thinking of getting one, and wondered what the performance is like compared to regular sims. If you could reply with your thoughts, and the name of the region so that I can come and check it out compared to my normal performance, that would be much appreciated.

Lewis

Lewis go look at Hollywood it has 4 low prims attached and you need a regular sim to attach them to.

We've got a few which we use as empty aesthetic regions for the Azure Islands. Basically the important details are:

- They are easier to crash or slow down.
- When they crash, they generally take down the other three voids on the same CPU. (Meaning they will crash spontaneously if someone else crashes one of the other three)
- You are not guarunteed to have all your void sims on a single CPU (they will be shared with others)

- Building isnt too bad, prim limits are now 1875 per sim; just avoid using physics.
- Scripting performance is bad, scripts run on average around twenty times slower in void sims (last tested in 1.. However performance is better than it was pre-1.7.
- Avatars are a mixed bag. If the sim is empty, they can sustain 10-20 avatars, however it will begin to lag as you approach the maximum.

My own view is - they are nice for scenery, but I wouldnt use one for any major projects.

We have a couple of them which we use as residential land - always clearly pointing out the limitations to prospective buyers. Prim allowance is low - that is the major characteristic, script performance is low (but its high enough to have regattas in Hollywood and on OTHERLAND) and avatar capacity might be lower too. We have not tested that in detail. So far we had not a single crash.

We like them. They allow us to design a much more natural landscape on The OTHERLAND Archipelago in a cost effective way, with large, nearly empty regions of water and some open land, too.

Customers are thrilled. They are a solution which did not exist before, for all those wanting a large area but not needing the prims.

It is important to note, though, that Linden Lab only sells them in bundles of 4 (technical necessity) and insists on connecting them to classic sims. So buying a single High Area sim from Linden Lab is not possible.

Had a quick fly-round, and performance seems reasonable, although naturally they are mostly empty.

I don't have that many scripts running on what I have now - and what I have in mind is essentially the content of my 4096 parcel but set out amongst a 'small town' with road network, with a couple of parks and a lake.

I guess it's hard to really know until the region itself is 'under load' though.

Lewis

A friend of mine who deals in land is looking at investing in a set and 'renting them out' individually. Whilst I generally do not agree with the principle of rental due to the lack of security of permanence - something that has been mentioned in the forum in respect to one land baron several times recently - I would be prepared to enter into such an agreement with this person because he is a friend and I trust him.

I'm not sure that there really is a 'technical necessity' to sell them in bundles of 4; it's probably more down to convenience for Linden Labs - which is a shame, because I think more people would be interested in individual units, and not everyone has the money to spend on a pack of four all in one. But, as always, convenience and money is more important than the needs of the customer.

Lewis

I think there is actually. The four all run on a single server (I think), that's why they come in lots of 4. That's why they're cheaper individually than regular sims.

I seem to recall somewhere that there was no guarantee that all four sims would be hosted on the same server - so presumably this isn't a technical issue.

Each region is treated separately - its own name, its own prim amounts, its own traffic etc etc, so it's clearly handled separately by the map database.

I stand to be corrected, of course, but the only reason I can think of for selling in blocks of "four on one" is to stop an individual buying one and lagging the hell out of the other 3 by putting a massive casino/club that's open 24/7 and full of people.

However, that could surely be dealt with by some form of 'throttling' of processor power to balance out what each the 4 sims can pull from the server.

There hasn't been a lot of information forthcoming from Linden Labs on the whole issue, as far as I can see; which does seem surprising as surely all opportunities to make money would be promoted?

Or does it boil down again to the simple truth that Linden Labs are only really interested in dealing with 'big players' and not the individual, casual player like myself?

Lewis

I don't know much about this stuff, so I may not have been right, it's just what I was told. This part I quoted seems to suggest they are somehow dependant on each other in a way normal sims aren't. This is actually a solid reason why they should come in groups of four.

Edit: just re-read Adam's post, so I wuz wrong.

Given the above the only reason I can see for the restrictions is to make sure the owners are people who will understand the limitations on the sims instead of just someone who said wow i can get a sim for $50? Then complains to LL alot when it performs like a void sim.

I don't see a reason they can't be sold individually and unattached by right now at the introduction point the buying restrictions are probably good while the general population gets used this kind of sim. Once they can open it up to individual unattached purchase without people buying them without understanding what they are getting I think they can and should do so.

I have a set of void sim around area 51 : Trantor, Solaria, Terminus, Gaia. (yup, Asimov )

- 1 is used for residential (a single house on an island in the middle of the sim). No problems reported.
- 1 is unused (just water), sometime i use it as a lightweight sandbox.
- 1 is used to provide free house for the french newbie homeless. (in partnership with a french club&mall and a french SL School and all resident and a few non-resident of area 51)

- the last one is used by the "SL Ecosystem" group. Sponsored by FFRC and "Vertigo Pro Gamer" casino. lot of script used by autonomous artificial-lifeform. Some are physical (most food are physical "seed". It use heavily sensor, timer, llRez and some kind of IPC. Got a few crash (the ALife are still in development, got some errors that could crash any sim). Once i had the sim shutdown for many hours, had to call the grid-monkey to restart it "manually". The script perf isn't that bad. While the sim crashed, the 3 other sim were still up and running. Some kind of script will more likely slow down the sim to hell while some "heavy" other script will not slowdown the sim. Can't tell why nor can't tell what kind of script.

Anyway, thoses "void sim" are cool and i like them.



No, they aren't. Most (every?) "Realtor" understand the limitation, but not enough residents.
Maybe later, LL could sell "unattached" void-sim, but not now. (please note that i don't have any financial interest to this kind of restriction as i mostly use them for non-profit projects)

Agreed. I think the day will come they can and should sell void sims(and maybe a wider range of options) but right now to most people a sim is a sim is a sim and there is no difference.

Perhaps then some proper advertising of these 'low prim sims', together with a comparative table showing the features and how they compare, is all it needs to help people understand?

After all, most people understand the concept of more land = more prims, which is laid out in a nice little table, so it shouldn't be hard to list full sim 65536 sq m, 15000 prims, $1250 setup cost $195 per month tier / lite sim 65536 sq m, 1870 prims and whatever price it happens to be for one, with the disclaimer that lite sims are not recommended for intensive use, surely?

Lewis

My experience says no its not that simple. When dealing with a large population of people never assume something "simple" will turn out simple.



Yes and and void sims blow that concept out of the water. Which is exactly what a friend of mine ran into. She encountered 1/4 of a void sim for rent for the same monthly cost as she she was paying for her little mainland plot. More land more prims right? Wrong. Took some explaining what she was actually looking at after which she decided to stay put.

So it wasn't advertised properly? That's the fault of the person selling it I guess for not making it clear if that was the case.

If you go to one of these 'sim lite' regions, such as those surrounding the Hollywood sim, and go to the About Land > Objects tab, I've noticed there is an extra line there: Region Object Bonus Factor: 8.00

I'm not sure quite what that means, but it clearly says prim usage: x out of 1875 rather than the usual 15,000; presumably when sliced up it shows the reduced prims that the parcel holds?

Lewis

You can set the bonus to anything, the sim limit won't change.

I actually haven't got a clue what that 'bonus' thing means, I thought it was a way of limiting the prims on a region and could be adjusted should LL up the limits in the future.

I just guessed it was connected with the 'lite' sims because it doesn't appear on regular regions.

Lewis

The Bonus is a way to change the balance of prims between parcels on a sim. It will never change the number of prims the whole sim can handle.

We are offering a new type of Mid-Capacity land currently, for example, using the prim bonus. We only sell half of the sim area. The rest is left in is pristine state, landscaped and forrested with some little infrastructure. The prims which are not needed on the protected land are "given" to the parcels we sell. They get more prims this way and are surrounded by beautiful land. Prefect win-win made possible by the Bonus.

Prim Bonus is available on any type of (non-mainland) sim.

The bonus factor appears on all private sims full and void. And even for those that know about the objects tab(not everyone even knows about "About Land" it's not perfectly clear. People often look at that and think a plot has far more prims than it actually does because it shows some huge number available under simulator primative usage they read that line instead of the one below it that says how much this plot supports.

At first I was under the impression that this Bonus feature would be useful. But, if it has no effect on the ACTUAL number of prims that can be placed in a parcel, what's the point?

Plenty of sims have been at half capacity parcel-wise for a while now and plenty of sim owners wish they had a way to set prim limits by avatar.

If the Bonus feature has absolutely no effect on how many prims can be placed either by region or by avater, what's the point?

~Lefty

I would assume the "point" is that you can have a sim divided up between residential spaces and "communal" land (like a 50/50 split, for example), and then you set the bonus factor to 2.0 so that the residents can put double the number of prims in their houses without going over the actual sim limit, since the communal land may have few to none.

Remember that prim limits on any parcel of land are directly tied to the size of the parcel. You can't allocate more or less prims to any particular piece of land except via the bonus.

Well, as far as I have discovered, anyway.

I did not know this; would've never thought this. Slap me upside the head with a fryin pan Ma OMG! Is this really true?

I'll agree with adam here We've have 4:1 for a while on Azure. When they were all on the same CPU we could actually control load, by watching what was spread out over the 4 and being very carefull. Now that they are on different CPUs 'shared' with the others, the performance sucks. We get TD spikes sometimes the regions are just unusable. I did ask LL and they said they all voids are shared in a common pool like the regular sims, however since they share CPUs the load throttling sucks. These voids simply can't even come close to handle the load from a 1:1. Oh and it's not 4 voids == 1 regular. Don't forget that every instance uses a fixed amount of overhead ressources to run.

Lewis, unless all you want is space an very limited building\scripting\avatar count, go with the regular ones.

A 'regular' sim is way, way beyond what I am ever likely to be able to spend on Second Life, and being a non-commercial build it is unlikely that I would ever generate sufficient income to cover the costs, let alone make money on it.

The dream that I have will, I think, only ever be realised through renting one of these low prim sims from a friend.

Second Life desperately needs more non-commercial places and activities. I'm wanting to do my bit, although "on the cheap", and this seems the only way I am ever likely to unless someone gives me a sim to play with, which is most unlikely.

I know Linden Labs have their costs to cover - but I can't help but wonder whether if land was cheaper (or they got rid of the setup costs of whole sims), more people would have more land, or be tempted to go from basic to premium, or upgrade their land if the tiers were more financially attainable by people. There are huge swathes of unused land all over the mainland, perhaps it's time for LL to sell them off really cheap to people who plan non-commercial builds - perhaps stipulating no re-sale or splitting up to stop land barons grabbing a bargain - and use up some of that, rather than keep adding private islands. The mainland is important, and seriously under-promoted.

It would be interesting to have a breakdown of how many avatars own land in each of the tiers between 512 sqm up to a full island, and those who own more than one island. But I doubt if that information will be made known.

Lewis

I agree with you on this stuff. Bascily, I created AzureIslands to try and make SL 'nicer', however you need help an people to do this, that's why we put some community builds here and there, give people various nature settings to build on. I enjoy this kind of work. Even though it's a commercial business, I wouldn't be able to create landscape on this scale on my own. Like you said the costs are huge. Bascily, AzureIslands lets us create some nice stuff for the community with the ability to keep it all IW. Like some stuff we have, probably the biggest bridge in SL, a sunken ship, litterally kilometers of public beach, a 4 sim volcano, probably around 1+ million SQM of public land that people can just spend time on.