25+ identical sims?

Does anyone here know anything about a 5x5 block of identical sims NE of the mainland? They all have names of the form "The L Wordx" where x is a number from 1-25. I think there may even be some more to the south. Each of them is identical, with a ring of shops, a cafe, a club and a few other features, and whenever I look they are all deserted. Build quality is high, with some nice texturing.

But all totally identical! What gives? Is this meant to be some viral ploy that I'm falling for by posting this?

It's probably a commercial venture that is trying to get around the 40 person per sim traffic limit by using duplicate sims. 25 identical sims means up to 1000 users could shop in that mall at the same instant.

I believe that I've read that those are for the Showtime series "The L Word." They are supposedly setting up their own orientation system for people joining through them. As Ceera mentioned, mirroring allows them to double the avatars that can be in the sims.

Well, double zero is zero.

The need the capacity for events, which I think are held on a regular schedule. I've actually been quite a bit because I am studying their orientation stations, which are FANTASTIC and beat the pants of LL's.

The Cafe has seemed very well populated at all times of day when I've dropped by. Plus, the food on offer changes automatically based on the time of day, and I'm totally fascinated by that.

Often, it's the little things

Having multiple sims doesn't really increase the number of AV's does it though?

That is, if you had 10 identical sims each set for 40 AV's with a concert hall, you could go into one of the 10 and hear the same concert (assuming there were some way to get the performers rendered simultaneously in all 10), but you'd still only see 39 other AV's right?

This isn't a way to have 400 AV's simultaneously seeing each other is it?

If it were, that would be extremely cool, essentially the reverse case of the "low prim" sims, "high prim" sims where they would divie up the work and then send rendering info to the client from all of them. Things like collisions would get tricky and I don't see how this would really work unless the current sim crossing technology got a whole lot better.

They have some fairly decent free course offerings on building and scripting skills, as well as newbie orientation groups dealing with the basics to SL consumer smarts. I thought they were offering a lot more active help as a starter area than the actual SL starter areas.

So far, I've been to one course on basic scripting (which, unfortunately, I left after awhile because scripting hurts my brain no matter what way I've tried to learn it) and a fairly good one (although a bit too basic for me) on textures, which explained the reasons for such things as why files should be .png format versus .jpg, image resolution and sizing and seamless tiling. Good stuff to know.

IMO, The L-Word/Showtime is one of the better corporate-sponsored ventures in SL because they're trying to contribute something back to the community other than a "buy this thing we built in-world" strategy. Education on how to do things in SL is a much more practical and valuable commodity to offer than another pair of over-priced, 150-prim athletic shoes.

No. It's only to give everyone who wants to go the chance to explore the area even if the rest of the identical sims are full. Note that island sims can increase the number of avs allowed (I've seen as many as 92 in the same sim once), but it's a dreadful, soul-crushing, lagadaisacal experience.

NBC did the same thing a few months ago. They tossed up a ton of identical sims, and people who wanted to go ice skating there had their choice of X number of NBC sims to visit. SL can't handle triple-digit avatars in one space, so to accomodate triple-digit numbers at events, companies are duplicating sims.

If they could come up with a fix to the whole sim handoff problem, I would think that would go a long way to doing multi-CPU sims that would allow higher AV and prim counts.

Actually, now that I think about it, if the code were organized as a multi-threaded system with shared "sim state" set of objects that could be partially locked so different threads could change non-overlapping parts of the sim state, it could work pretty well on a multi-core system.

I kind of doubt that's how the code is organized though.

The Sims Are indeed sponsored by the Producers of the TV show "The L word" as an attmpt to Attract thier Fan Base into SL. I spent a Few Hours there, and Ran Mostly into "L Word" Fans who didn't really have Clue #1 about SL or what it was about. they were surprised when i explained some, and showed them a Few Avi tricks. The Sims are there primarily to Promote the Show, SL is definately an Afterthought with the Sim Owners.
It's NOT a Bad Idea,, a TV Tie-In, but the Owners of the Sims Should take more of an effort to make thier Sims a more well rounded experience for thier Fans, otherwise, they will simply become Bored with the Various "L Word" trivia games, and Log out again. They are definately NOT using Sl to it's Full Potential in terms of Marketing thier own Product.

Angel.

They should take a page from Pontiac's Motorati and hand out plots of land to local residents who can build lesbian themed attractions.

~Smiling at the thought of Lesbian Themed Attractions~
But Yes, exactly right. The more Varied a Culture they present the More people will Use thier Sims, Both from thier Fan Base AND from the SL resident Base.

Angel.

Same way that Linden Labs allows up to 120 people to be on "Orientation Island" (there's 4.. or were when I joined)