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When will we see Larger SIMS?


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I am in SL since 2007 , I am tired of having to roam only in a 256 m wide sim , when will we get a Decent Terrain upgrade with proper tools and Large size ?

For large size I mean at least a 4km by 4km region with proper landscaping and texturing tools like any modern game engine has.

 

 

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16 minutes ago, Naiman Broome said:

Interesting, how big those cam be? And what is stopping SL to implement them ?

I know of one that's 1792m square, which is the equivalent of 49 sims in area. There are probably larger ones than that. I have no technical knowledge of the issues such large sims may have.

Edited by KjartanEno
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This is a lot easier for LL to do now that they are in the cloud. I've seen it discussed here several times that sizes besides 256x256 would be possible and welcomed. You also have a benefit of having smaller ones too. It would make it easier to expand, instead of managing a 256x256 sim you could get a 128x128 and when you need more prims just pay for more and have your sim expanded instead of paying for a full size sim and trying to sublet it. But I think this is one of their lower priority issues. Seeing LL's latest blog posts they are concerned with improving performance and getting new users to stay in SL. More people in SL means more income for LL (and merchants) which means more growth. But it's a lot easier for LL to do this now they are in the cloud and not tied to fixed hardware with fixed specs. I think it will come but it's not going to be a huge priority for them. They have stuff to fix and I'd rather see them fix it as much as I would love my own 128x256 private sim I could expand as my business grows.

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The issue of larger region dimensions has arisen many times over the years and as @Flea Yatsenkosays now that SL is in the cloud the practical aspects are less obstructive.  However I can see one stumbling block.  Given LL's current Tier rates for SL land, even a 512x512sqm region would attract a fiendishly high tier and larger sizes boggle my wallet's imagination.  Maybe others could bear the high costs but I doubt if they are numerous enough to warrant the effort on LL's part to make it work, given their already long list of broken services which are demanding their attention.

Currently there are fewer Lindens to go round as it is and spreading them ever more thinly among the work in progress seems unwise.

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SL "in the cloud" means LL made the regions run on other servers far far away (so they could put their own servers into the woodchipper). They did not change the architecture to make regions magically scale.

Extended regions in SL would have a counter primary use case, while it would be great to have large open spaces for activities and epic builds, that's not what the vast majority will be used for.

A mega region means more parcels and more rental clients all running with the same processing resources as a regular region.

If mega regions were priced similar to regular regions (because they would essentially be regular regions, just bigger), big land barons would immediately consolidate and LL's land income would crash.

This possibility alone dooms this entire proposal and pretty much guarantees that if LL ever did release mega regions, they would come with enough strings to make them practically useless.

Edited by Coffee Pancake
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11 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

SL "in the cloud" means LL made the regions run on other servers far far away (so they could put their own servers into the woodchipper). They did not change the architecture to make regions magically scale.

Extended regions in SL would have a counter primary use case, while it would be great to have large open spaces for activities and epic builds, that's not what the vast majority will be used for.

A mega region means more parcels and more rental clients all running with the same processing resources as a regular region.

If mega regions were priced similar to regular regions (because they would essentially be regular regions, just bigger), big land barons would immediately consolidate and LL's land income would crash.

This possibility alone dooms this entire proposal and pretty much guarantees that if LL ever did release mega regions, they would come with enough strings to make them practically useless.

I don't understand what would be the problem with land barons?

 

They just need to :

 

1 Increase the sim size from 256 m to 4kms at least

2 allow better distance render view

3 introduce better land editing tools with more control on textures , materials and resolution .

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2 minutes ago, Naiman Broome said:

I don't understand what would be the problem with land barons?

SL's region architecture does not scale up, even in the cloud. So a mega region (any size) would just be the regular region we have now, but with more land.

A mega region the size of 4 regular regions can not have the processing resources of 4 regular regions, that's not how SL works.

So, LL can supply mega regions in two possible ways (and this works out the same no matter how you scale it .. 4x is an example)

  1. Mega region 4x the size and 4x the price (with only 1x the power). This is bad for consumers.
  2. Mega region 4x the size and 1x the price (with only 1x the power). This is bad for LL.

Option 1 is dead on arrival, no one will want to pay 4x the price with 1x the resources when they could get 4 regular regions for the same price.

Option 2 on the other hand opens up huge consolidation gains to land barons. More plots to rent for a fraction of the previous price or huge plots at the current price. A sudden glut in very cheap land will cause a drop in overall region ownership and LL will make less money. LL might be fine trying to sell us a bad product, but they wont be fine undercutting a price source of income. Option 2 is dead before it's ever launched.

 

Draw distance is a client side limitation and nothing to do with the regions or how big they are. Just because a region could have a "4kms" size, doesn't mean you could render it all !

Editing tools, asset creation & manipulations is an entirely separate discussion and has nothing to do with regions.

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2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

SL's region architecture does not scale up, even in the cloud. So a mega region (any size) would just be the regular region we have now, but with more land.

A mega region the size of 4 regular regions can not have the processing resources of 4 regular regions, that's not how SL works.

So, LL can supply mega regions in two possible ways (and this works out the same no matter how you scale it .. 4x is an example)

  1. Mega region 4x the size and 4x the price (with only 1x the power). This is bad for consumers.
  2. Mega region 4x the size and 1x the price (with only 1x the power). This is bad for LL.

Option 1 is dead on arrival, no one will want to pay 4x the price with 1x the resources when they could get 4 regular regions for the same price.

Option 2 on the other hand opens up huge consolidation gains to land barons. More plots to rent for a fraction of the previous price or huge plots at the current price. A sudden glut in very cheap land will cause a drop in overall region ownership and LL will make less money. LL might be fine trying to sell us a bad product, but they wont be fine undercutting a price source of income. Option 2 is dead before it's ever launched.

 

Draw distance is a client side limitation and nothing to do with the regions or how big they are. Just because a region could have a "4kms" size, doesn't mean you could render it all !

Editing tools, asset creation & manipulations is an entirely separate discussion and has nothing to do with regions.

How about, not available for renting?

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1 hour ago, Naiman Broome said:

How about, not available for renting?

 

So you are okay with:

3 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Mega region 4x the size and 4x the price (with only 1x the power). This is bad for consumers.

 

Because LL is definitely not going to do:

3 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Mega region 4x the size and 1x the price (with only 1x the power). This is bad for LL.

even if renting is not allowed

 

Edited by LittleMe Jewell
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From looking around SL and some of the great outside, and from my own experience with builds on an RP island,  on a 256x256 you'll usually run out of prims before you run out of area.

The main advantage I could see for larger regions in SL would be for sailing/racing/flying, where the distances between border-crossings would be increased, BUT, the practical experience of those using variable sized regions in places like Outworldz is that you cannot put regions of differing dimensions adjacent to each other. Therefore, if you did have some 512x512 regions in SL for the above three categories, they would be a different continent, and so would not offer the same interest as driving some of the SL highways or playing GTFO.

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Some of the above issues remind me of why LL stopped offering "Open Space" regions.  They got abused by people using them as residences and stores and clubs and ...  and...  .

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2 minutes ago, Naiman Broome said:

I honestly can't see the problem of Landlords getting more rental space, I think all would take advantage of larger sims and more prims .

What @Coffee Pancake was saying is that there isn't a good option to make that happen, as either the region would be 4x the normal size, but only have the power of a single region. This would be good for builds, but very bad for consumers who rent land off a land baron, who could use that to cut their own costs to increase their profit margins. (Think of it this way, 1 person renting a 512sqm parcel in that region, and puts a breedable farm on it could grind all of that region's scripts to a halt).

The other option just wouldn't sell (Who's going to pay a vastly inflated price for an underpowered, oversized region?)

The sweet spot would have to be somewhere in the middle, with a prospective mega region being 4x the size with 2(+)x the power of a regular region. But who knows if that's even possible with the way things are set up.

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1 minute ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

What @Coffee Pancake was saying is that there isn't a good option to make that happen, as either the region would be 4x the normal size, but only have the power of a single region. This would be good for builds, but very bad for consumers who rent land off a land baron, who could use that to cut their own costs to increase their profit margins. (Think of it this way, 1 person renting a 512sqm parcel in that region, and puts a breedable farm on it could grind all of that region's scripts to a halt).

The other option just wouldn't sell (Who's going to pay a vastly inflated price for an underpowered, oversized region?)

The sweet spot would have to be somewhere in the middle, with a prospective mega region being 4x the size with 2(+)x the power of a regular region. But who knows if that's even possible with the way things are set up.

I do not agree, If Landlords could rend more people the better,.

 

Improving the SL structure can only benefit to SL on the long term and attract more people to the platform.

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Just now, Naiman Broome said:

I do not agree, If Landlords could rend more people the better,.

 

Improving the SL structure can only benefit to SL on the long term and attract more people to the platform.

But as there's no regulation on the pricing of private land rentals (that I know of), there's zero guarantee any savings would actually be passed on to the renters (who are then paying just as much for an inferior product). Not to mention, what I said in my previous post about one bad actor now having the power to crash the equivalent of 4 regions, not just 1.

Bear in mind as well that LL charges fees on region rentals, per region. Having land barons abandon regular regions in favour of mega regions en masse would cause a massive drop in earnings which would need to be made up somehow (Like increasing fees, see the recent changes to the Lindex fees), or increased fees on mega regions (running into the pricing problem again, which would make such regions unpopular).

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On 4/20/2021 at 8:41 AM, Naiman Broome said:

I am in SL since 2007 , I am tired of having to roam only in a 256 m wide sim , when will we get a Decent Terrain upgrade with proper tools and Large size ?

For large size I mean at least a 4km by 4km region with proper landscaping and texturing tools like any modern game engine has.

 

 

I never had a full sim in sl, but...cant they group a few sims together? sim crossing is much smoother that it used to be.

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2 minutes ago, Naiman Broome said:

I do not agree, If Landlords could rend more people the better,.

The number of people renting wont change, the amount of land purchased from LL would drop by a huge factor.

Potentially less income for LL and far greater per region load.

LL wont do it because they care about money.

LL wont do it because it would horribly under perform for our use cases.

2 minutes ago, Naiman Broome said:

Improving the SL structure can only benefit to SL on the long term and attract more people to the platform.

Systemic improvements have little to do with attraction to SL. Tweak the architecture all you like and it wont make any difference. Fix all the bugs and it wont make any difference. No one will ever join SL because technical feature _______ is now somehow improved. Systemic improvements are important, but not in the way you think.

The fact that we are here, with all the bugs and problems demonstrates that lots of people are quite happy to play SL as it stands. The goal must be to attract more people like the current userbase NOT attract new entirely different people.

Trying to attract an entirely different demographic has been the Lab's goal for a decade and is why SL has utterly failed to grow.

👏More👏people👏like👏us👏

Marketing and first impression are what matters now for growth.

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@Adrian Rowley There are a number of groups of regions all adjacent that are used in a number of RP situations and have been so since the earliest days of SL.  One that springs immediately to mind is the Calas Galadhon regions, run by @Tymus Tenk and for Cyber/SF play there is or at least was Insilico.  There are a number of others.  The principal issue for all of them was the enormous cost of running the multi-region creations and getting sufficient renters and visitors to make small contributions via the tipjars (the visitors tipping I mean).

Even with the historic issues with region crossings these conglomerate regions were fairly practical, I believe.

Edited by Aishagain
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The multisim attachments are not the solution but a sort of patchfix, they allow mostly 512 m x 512 m areas, surely nothing spectacularly big or worth paying x4 time the price .

 

What really SL needs is increased land size like for example does in Sansar, a new system of terrain development and management of "prims" .

The landlords cannot take hostage the development of this platform for supposed LL losses in fees, I actually believe the opposite, if LL invested in improvements of the platform graphics on several aspects like first and foremost the land size and land tools,  we would have much more people join SL simply because it would look on pair with more recent games and not lag behind in technology and look because of a stagnant development and upgrade.

 

If the fear is that Landlords could exploit the larger territories and prims then there could be placed a max cap to rentable areas , if you want to rent more then you would pay more , a Sim of 4km size for example could allow the same number of renters of a normal sim with a capped number, if you want to grow the number of residents thenyou need to pay more , otherwise the sim would cost as much as a normal sim .

 

The larger sims would enourmously benefit the garden sims, which are the purely park areas created by some users for most people to enjoy and visit, which would add to the benefit of the appearence and look of Secondlife.

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