How many objects with physics is too much for a sim?

Can anyone recommend a limit to how many objects with physics is considered "a lot" in a sim? I'm concerned that too many physical objects in a sim will degrade the sim's performance; naturally, I'd like to avoid that.

Thanks,
- Gabriel Noodle

Well, limit them as much as possible. Could I enquire as to what your building?

From what I've heard it varies from sim to sim and you'd have to do testing with your own sim. It'll depend what your using them for, whether its a private island sim or on the mainland, whether you own all of it. What else is on the island.

The problem with physics objects, I believe, is collisions, and it has to cauculate whats going to happen when it colides with another object.

Let us know

Unless I'm mistaken, it also depends on how many avatars are there as well. Since we can no longer phantom, you have to account for every person on the sim.

Yup, afaik that'll have an effect too..

one

I've had many physics enable objects going at once, sometimes over a dozen things bouncing around and tumbling. But not for any length of time, just some fun fireworks or a quick gag.

I think if it is something that will be active for long periods of time then you should def. keep the numbers to a minimum. You could also use LSL to monitor the sim performance and shut off your physics fun if the performance starts to dip.

Thanks to everyone for responding.

Zapoteth, to answer your question about what I'm building: something very similar to Surina Skallagrimson's fish (http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/06/evolving_nemo.html), except I'm thinking of doing pigeons. Of course, I'd like to have quite a few of them flying around together, but if them all being physical is going to take up a lot of resources, I'll stick to keeping physics off of them. So yeah, I'm leaning toward the no-physics approach for my rock doves. =-)

That sounds great! Usually the non physics aproach is best.. However if they are physics, make them phantom if you can

You might want to look at Jesrad's no-physics vehicle script, it gives a nice smooth motion to the limited extent I've tried it so far and looks like physical movement more or less. It's here on the forum or you can ask her directly (at least it says so in the thread about it, I hope she's OK with me saying that).

The other thing is, the answer to your question is similar to "how long is a ball of string?" It varies depending on the sim, textures, scripts, avies etc.