It's the year 2022 and ............

[Paul Hexem]

4 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

I'd like my landlord to fix the banging pipes and actual pot hole in the corridor outside my apartment, but so long as the pipes still work and no one steals the road cone it's not happening.

LL can be compared to a crappy slumlord?

Yeah, that's accurate. 

[Drayke Newall]

3 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

 aws as said by oz LL pays more.    right out of the horses mouth.

Of course it does, because LL are running the servers ALL THE TIME as a regular dedicated server. Why can you not understand this. You have a real world example of how it can be done but, I take it your response will be "that's opensim it is dramatically different to Second Life". The fact is, it is not. Just that LL aren't doing it right or as they originally stated they were going to.

AWS is EXPENSIVE for dedicated servers. It always has been and I am not arguing that it isn't. That is why any person using AWS tries to limit the amount of always on dedicated servers. LL however are not doing that and so it is costing them far more.

Kitely has been using AWS since 2009ish (keep in mind their profit margin is also dramatically less than Linden Lab's). That is 12 YEARS prior to SL introducing it. Here is an old article from 2011 about the costs associated with AWS and how Kitely manages to make their servers so cheap. Now yes, the article is old but even if costs have increased by a lot (or reduced), the costs and cost savings are still valid as Kitely still offer far cheaper servers. They have increased in price since 2011 but $15 for a region is still far cheaper than LL charging $229 per month for every server.

From the old 2011 article I linked earlier here are a few figures for you and others on Kitely's server management:

• Hosted on Amazon EC2
• No set-up fee (LL still charge $350 despite it literally being automated now).
• High traffic dedicated server of approx. 20 avatars on the region at all times (i.e. running non stop - with more avatars costing even more) would cost Kitely $2,976/MONTH
• Regions that aren't accessed at all over a month will cost just $0.10/MONTH to keep (off-loaded) up ready to spool up to a regular server when accessed
• low pop or no pop servers are off-loaded and then if they become active with even just 1 user they are loaded back to a regular server then off loaded if they have no activity again for a period of time.
• there is a slight delay as they are reloaded back up when a person teleports to them
• the reason Kitely now offer multi-region servers like 4 regions for $20 is to solve the issue they had where an adjoining region would not be loaded.

Now lets hypothetically use those old figures for SL, to work out how LL could pass on cost savings to the user like they said they were planning:

• LL have 27343 servers at the moment according to gridsurvey. That means that always on is costing them using the above figure a total of ($2976/month) $81,372,768/MONTH. This is the current hypothetical price LL are paying using 2011 figures above as they still have all regions as regular dedicated servers.
• Now lets say hypothetically 1/2 of the regions at any given time have no activity on them and LL off-load them until they are needed. That means 13672 servers would cost LL a total of($0.10/month as above) $1,367.20/MONTH
• That leaves LL paying $40,687,872/MONTH for the remaining always on regions if they use a hybrid AWS hosting like Kitely does.
• Due to having to pay HALF what they would pay for always on Linden Lab can then pass on those savings by reducing tier just like Kitely does.

This is how Kitely reduce the tier costs so, please explain again why LL are saying they cant lower tier again?

:EDIT:

This is also the system Ebbe originally announced LL were going to use but still haven't.

As to Solar's laugh emoji. You must be an insanely fast reader Solar with abnormal comprehension. As you made that laugh emoji just 45 seconds after I posted my message. So basically, you had to click the thread and read both my response and the source I posted in under 45 seconds. I say BS.

Edited February 8, 2022 by Drayke Newall

[bigmoe Whitfield]

aight I've said my peace.  later peeps.  I bring up what Oz said. I have said nothing about opensim. dont care about opensim.   so I'm out.

[Maryanne Solo]

I read the entire post Drake.
Thank you for posting all that info. 😮

[Drayke Newall]

1 hour ago, Maryanne Solo said:

I read the entire post Drake.
Thank you for posting all that info. 😮

No probs. I think it is important that actual figures are shown where a real case scenario exists to compare with SL as many dont know the cost of AWS. If I search for them again I could possibly even find the quotes (if they still exist) from the CEO of Kitely talking about the cost savings and how he recommended Second Life to run on the same system years ago to reduce land fees.

Many people just argue "but LL said x,y,z" and dont realise that LL are a business that want to earn money for their other ventures. It would be different if SL was public and we could see where there expenditures go and what costs they have, but seeing as they are a private company and stopped that long ago we can only compare apples with apples and with what evidence we have.

In this case we have an identical platform (as far as region system's go) using AWS with lower land fees successfully for 12 years and another platform using the same or near similar region hosting for 2 years charging vastly more. To me when I see that, it is a case of one of those platforms (kitely or SL) is lying. Considering both are still available I lean to the larger company pretending that cost saving cant be there.

Now sure there are other factors to consider like SL having a larger population and more regions needing to be regular servers than not. But there is no way that all 23k+ regions have a person on them all the time. There is also mainland to consider with that needing to be on regular servers but LL are also paying for vast tracks of mainland to stay abandoned instead of putting them up for sale through their land auction system.

It should be if someone abandons land it is automatically added to the land auction so that LL are always getting the hosting fee or cull mainland in size so that it feels less 'empty'.

That said my figures were hypothetical as I calculated it based on each region being on its own server, which it isn't. In reality as well as with Kitely, there are usually 3 of 4 regions per server in Second Life. So the actually dollar amount in all cases is less but the cost savings with such a system are still there just with lower dollar amounts. The hosting prices though come from the article I linked so they were correct in 2011.

Edited February 8, 2022 by Drayke Newall

[Istelathis]

@Drayke NewallIt would be interesting to find the percentage of active members in Kitely that own property. I have been wondering if part of the reason why SL property is expensive is due to there being fewer land owners to begin with, and if they are covering the costs for everyone else that is not paying LL directly.

I know that in a couple of hours, I can fill a significant portion of my cache with 2gb of data just exploring SL - and I imagine there are quite a few of us out there.  When you factor in not just the costs of the servers, but the developers, support staff, moles, etc I don't think we could ever get close to the rate Kitely has.  I think a lot of what we enjoy may be paid for by the land owners.  Still, I find it crazy how much a region costs here, I wonder how low we could reasonably go without having SL suffer as a result, or without requiring everyone to have a membership.

I would love to get a region for $20 a month in SL though   as the such will not argue against lowering the prices unless it had a negative impact on SL. 

Edited February 8, 2022 by Istelathis

[Finite]

54 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

@Drayke NewallIt would be interesting to find the percentage of active members in Kitely that own property. I have been wondering if part of the reason why SL property is expensive is due to there being fewer land owners to begin with, and if they are covering the costs for everyone else that is not paying LL directly.

I know that in a couple of hours, I can fill a significant portion of my cache with 2gb of data just exploring SL - and I imagine there are quite a few of us out there.  When you factor in not just the costs of the servers, but the developers, support staff, moles, etc I don't think we could ever get close to the rate Kitely has.  I think a lot of what we enjoy may be paid for by the land owners.  Still, I find it crazy how much a region costs here, I wonder how low we could reasonably go without having SL suffer as a result, or without requiring everyone to have a membership.

I would love to get a region for $20 a month in SL though   as the such will not argue against lowering the prices unless it had a negative impact on SL. 

 

 I tried owning a sim. The cost is similar to a car payment let alone the amount of time and effort required to build and manage the thing. I had it for a little over 6 months and never managed to finish it. I put some roads down and had a functioning subway system which I thought was pretty cool but other than that I could just never find the time to finish it. I tried renting some space off as well to offset some of the costs. But that didn't really pan out either. I just don't think a lot of people are at that point in their lives where they can or are willing to pay such a fee and put the required time and effort into it for what's essentially a virtual luxury. At least I am not.

[Istelathis]

8 minutes ago, Finite said:

I just don't think a lot of people are at that point in their lives where they can or are willing to pay such a fee

I know I'm not, the most I've ever managed to own was 4096.  After a few months it was just too expensive to justify as a monthly payment, I really enjoyed having it though and decorating it.  I found I could get away with quite a lot on a 1024 parcel and decided to just stick with what is included for premium membership, although I did have this one beautiful 4096 parcel right on the ocean - I miss that spot, it was perfect because the sim owner next to me let me sail my boat through her waters to get access to the sea.

Edited February 8, 2022 by Istelathis

[Setsuki Takeda]

A chunk of it could be helped by some makers (and modders) realizing that higher numbers is not better. A 512 texture is all you need, throwing a 2048 in there just lags on rendering, and doesn't really look any better.

 

Then there are unused scripts running in so many things that either were not deleted despite the NC often telling them to do so for reduced lag, or can't be because some makers sell nomod/nocopy stuff like a full-price item can get away with 100 L$ gacha permissions and your item could never be adjusted if you pulled the scripts from it.

[Drayke Newall]

3 hours ago, Istelathis said:

@Drayke NewallIt would be interesting to find the percentage of active members in Kitely that own property. I have been wondering if part of the reason why SL property is expensive is due to there being fewer land owners to begin with, and if they are covering the costs for everyone else that is not paying LL directly.

I know that in a couple of hours, I can fill a significant portion of my cache with 2gb of data just exploring SL - and I imagine there are quite a few of us out there.  Still, I find it crazy how much a region costs here.  When you factor in not just the costs of the servers, but the developers, support staff, moles, etc I don't think we could ever get close to the rate Kitely has.  I think a lot of what we enjoy may be paid for by the land owners.

I would love to get a region for $20 a month in SL though   as the such would never argue against lowering the prices.

Fun fact. Roughly 20% of mainland (not including belli as this was a stat from 2017 that never changed year on year) is abandoned land. This equates to just over 1600 full regions not earning LL money. To put it another way that is over $3,360,000/year of potential income to LL lost due to them not processing abandoned land for sale quick enough if at all. This loss is probably even more now that Belli has plenty of houses still for sale. They are still paying those hosting fees though with Amazon despite loosing all that money...

Not to mention all that sea being lost revenue. Maybe you are correct and LL are compensating for such things. Goes to show how bad a business model mainland is.

Edited February 8, 2022 by Drayke Newall

[Setsuki Takeda]

1 minute ago, Drayke Newall said:

Fun fact. Roughly 20% of mainland (not including belli as this was a stat from 2017 that never changed year on year) is abandoned land. This equates to just over 1600 full regions not earning LL money. To put it another way that is over $3,360,000/year of potential income to LL lost due to them not processing abandoned land for sale quick enough if at all. This loss is probably even more now that Belli has plenty of houses still for sale. They are still paying those hosting fees though with Amazon despite loosing all that money...

It's not that, it's tier prices...

I'd expand to half a region, or more, if I wasn't already paying $70 a month to maintain a quarter region.

If they lowered tier people would use more land, though they'd need to find a balance, lower it too much and they'd lose money instead.

[Drayke Newall]

37 minutes ago, NanashiNyx said:

It's not that, it's tier prices...

I'd expand to half a region, or more, if I wasn't already paying $70 a month to maintain a quarter region.

If they lowered tier people would use more land, though they'd need to find a balance, lower it too much and they'd lose money instead.

The part you quoted had nothing to do with lowering tier of mainland. I was simply saying that LL not instantly reselling abandoned land is costing them millions per year in lost tier.

Talking about actual land tier.

LL earn about $50million/year dollars in tier at the moment across all forms of land. Whilst yes offering tier too low they could loose money but if done right that isn't necessarily the case.

The actual size of land isn't the issue. What costs LL is the resources used on the land and the avatars on the land (AKA bandwidth and server processing). This is why homesteads are cheaper as they offer less prims and less avatars than a full region.

A quick and easy way for LL to earn more is simply to remove the requirement of owning a full region to buy a homestead. The homestead is already priced to allow for LL running costs as well as profit therefore offering that land not tied to a full region has no downsides for LL due to everything being on AWS now. The restriction was in place due to space requirements and maintenance in their physical data centre.

Another way LL could increase their profit and potentially bring in more users is to offer a region with say 10 avatars and 3500LI (old homesteads). They could offer these for say $70 whilst probably still making a profit making tier cheaper.

It isn't a case of offering more land is going to break them it is the bandwidth and server processing power that makes LL loose money. This is also why Kitely's pricing takes into consideration, avatar limits, prim limits as well as how much ram a server has despite being able to offer 4 regions for $20.

Edited February 8, 2022 by Drayke Newall

[Chris Corvinus]

2 hours ago, NanashiNyx said:

A chunk of it could be helped by some makers (and modders) realizing that higher numbers is not better. A 512 texture is all you need, throwing a 2048 in there just lags on rendering, and doesn't really look any better.

 

Then there are unused scripts running in so many things that either were not deleted despite the NC often telling them to do so for reduced lag, or can't be because some makers sell nomod/nocopy stuff like a full-price item can get away with 100 L$ gacha permissions and your item could never be adjusted if you pulled the scripts from it.

LL should throw out no-mod altogether. Get rid of it. It serves zero purpose other than to annoy.

[Chris Corvinus]

I would totally move over to Kitely if I could drag my avatar and inventory over with me if I hadn't financially invested so much into SL already. They still dont have the creator power SL has though but hopefully that changes. Those prices are VERY appealing.

[tomm55]

12 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

They have increased in price since 2011 but $15 for a region is still far cheaper than LL charging $229 per month for every server.

...

This is how Kitely reduce the tier costs so, please explain again why LL are saying they cant lower tier again?

I don't completely understand why renting OpenSim region is so much cheaper, but I can imagine that those $229 per month in SL also include some customer support and it has to include also salaries of LL employees, LL's offices rent and other things.

Btw, I tried OpenSim and visited Kitely too few weeks ago and a friend showed me a region consisting of total 64 sims (8x8 sims). I don't remember how much it costed the owner to rent 64 regions but it was waaaaay cheaper than in SL. However, all the places that I visited in OpenSim and Kitely were always almost empty. So, I don't know, but maybe you can't compare that with SL where you can have up to 100 people in one sim, while in OpenSim I was lucky to see 10 people in one place. (Also I have experienced several bugs during my OpenSim visit).

Edited February 8, 2022 by tomm55

[Chris Corvinus]

1 hour ago, tomm55 said:

I don't completely understand why renting OpenSim region is so much cheaper, but I can imagine that those $229 per month in SL also include some customer support and it has to include also salaries of LL employees, LL's offices rent and other things.

Btw, I tried OpenSim and visited Kitely too few weeks ago and a friend showed me a region consisting of total 64 sims (8x8 sims). I don't remember how much it costed the owner to rent 64 regions but it was waaaaay cheaper than in SL. However, all the places that I visited in OpenSim and Kitely were always almost empty. So, I don't know, but maybe you can't compare that with SL where you can have up to 100 people in one sim, while in OpenSim I was lucky to see 10 people in one place. (Also I have experienced several bugs during my OpenSim visit).

Its not just $229/mo as you have to pay the $350 setup fee too. Premium support is offered with a premium subscription. So its $12/mo + $350 + $229/mo.

You can see why Kitely is way more appealing money-wise.

[Nick0678]

17 minutes ago, Chris Nova said:

Its not just $229/mo as you have to pay the $350 setup fee too. Premium support is offered with a premium subscription. So its $12/mo + $350 + $229/mo.

You can see why Kitely is way more appealing money-wise.

+VAT = a fair amount of money, unless someone finds a way to generate it in the game.

(*actually enough to cover summer vacation's cost in some nice Meditereanean island)

 

Edited February 8, 2022 by Nick0678

[animats]

17 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

AWS is EXPENSIVE for dedicated servers. It always has been and I am not arguing that it isn't. That is why any person using AWS tries to limit the amount of always on dedicated servers. LL however are not doing that and so it is costing them far more.

Yes. The consensus is that for 24/7 servers, AWS costs about twice what colocation costs. (Colocation means you own your servers but rent space in someone else's data center building.) AWS is most useful for variable loads. Before the AWS transition, Oz Linden was saying it would reduce costs. After the AWS transition, he said it had increased costs. I won't speculate on why the move was done.

[Istelathis]

5 hours ago, tomm55 said:

However, all the places that I visited in OpenSim and Kitely were always almost empty.

Usually you will have to wait for events to occur to see areas more populated, I rarely see people while just exploring the hypergrid - I did own some land in Kitely for a time and noticed when the events occurred some regions would be more populated.  The grids of opensim are so decentralized and the people that are online are spread all over the place I imagine a lot of time spent for people is mostly in their own regions with the occasional gathering.  I think for the more socially adept, it would be easier to find groups to be part of and arrange to be part of social circles and find yourself around more people.

I'm unsure how to gauge how many active users are online at a time, according to Hypergrid Business there were 37,301 reported as of January 17th, if I read it correctly and they can not track everyone.  I'm not sure if that was daily active users or if that was the total of accumulative users over a period of time.

One of the many things I love about Second Life is that it feels more alive, I like seeing little green dots everywhere I go.  When travelling through the hypergrid in OpenSim, when I see those green dots more often than not they are NPCs.  Even though I am a relatively quiet person that sticks to myself, it still feels nice to be around people.  Another thing I like, is the ease of access to the world, and the large spans of regions of which I can explore relatively seamlessly.  There are always things going on here, and it does not take very much effort to find them.  I think it is easier to blend in with a crowd, which feels a lot more comfortable for me than what I would find in OS.

Edited February 8, 2022 by Istelathis

[LittleMe Jewell]

18 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

AWS is EXPENSIVE for dedicated servers. It always has been and I am not arguing that it isn't. That is why any person using AWS tries to limit the amount of always on dedicated servers. LL however are not doing that and so it is costing them far more.

I thought that someone had said that they were working on a way to not have all the servers on all the time.  My understanding is that based on how SL functions, trying to do that brings up all sorts of things they have to first figure out how to deal with.

[animats]

On 2/6/2022 at 4:42 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

UE5 & nanite are very impressive allowing developers an almost unlimited polygon budget for real time rendered content .. it is very good for very specific use cases and comes with a laundry list of technical considerations. It is not a magic one size fits all band-aid that can be applied to all content under all circumstances.

If you want to understand Nanite, go watch this SIGGRAPH video. If you're into rendering theory, it's fascinating. If you have no idea how computer graphics really works, you'll just get frustrated watching this. So go watch the UE5 Matrix demo instead.

Nanite is very clever, but relies on content having quite a bit of repetition. A key idea of Nanite is that a mesh can have submeshes which are replicated. You can model a chain link fence in Nanite and see every bend in every wire, plus the little bumps on the wires from the galvanizing. But there are only a few different parts. Miles of fencing will not result in a huge mesh file, because of that heavy replication. The replication happens at multiple scales - one wire bend, one vertical fence wire piece, one fence panel with post... That's how they get super detail without super file size. Great for terrain, roads, dirt, sidewalks, and repetitive buildings.

Not so great for SL content. SL has little repetition. That's forced by the many-creator model - you mostly use your own parts, or pay others for theirs. Game development uses big, common asset libraries. I was looking at a walkthrough of the Cyberpunk 2077 world a while back. The same items keep showing up. The same railing and the same trash bags show up in quite different areas and contexts. Now look at New Babbage in SL. Every railing is different.

SL has no LI penalty for having 10 different chairs instead of 10 copies of the same chair. SL content has maybe 10x the number of unique meshes as game content. This slows both rendering and downloading.

Could SL use UE5? Probably not. Nanite requires heavy offline preprocessing. But I suspect that we will see UE6, Metaverse Edition, with better support for dynamic content, in a year or two. Game content goes through much preprocessing and optimization between artist and shipped content. Unreal Engine does all that in the development tools. Some of that could potentially be done in backend servers. Yes, everything can change in a dynamic environment, but in practice. most of it doesn't. That has to be exploited for performance. SL does a bit of this, with Bakes on Mesh, and needs to do more of that in the avatar area.

Here, as I see it, are SL's biggest problems in development:

• They have a big engine with a big problem and a small staff.
• They have a huge legacy code problem in several dimensions. SL's code is all unique to SL. Few libraries are used. They have their own everything - their own vector and matrix math, their own networking, their own data formats. So new hires won't be productive for a year or so while they learn the innards of the system.
• Going to work for Linden Lab can be career death for a good developer. Nothing learned at LL is directly transferable to a new job. They're not getting the buzzwords employers want to see on resumes. They won't have Kubernetes or UE5 or Unity or any of the web stuff. Anyone who can make real progress on LL's code is probably good enough to get a job at Google or Facebook or Amazon, make $350K a year, and have a future.
• SL has a bad reputation for being obsolete, obscene, and full of losers. A worse reputation than the NFT clown car. This makes hiring tough.

More of a people and money problem than a technical problem. Roblox and Unreal have dev budgets 10-100x bigger.

Edited February 8, 2022 by animats

[Paul Hexem]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Yes. The consensus is that for 24/7 servers, AWS costs about twice what colocation costs. (Colocation means you own your servers but rent space in someone else's data center building.) AWS is most useful for variable loads. Before the AWS transition, Oz Linden was saying it would reduce costs. After the AWS transition, he said it had increased costs. I won't speculate on why the move was done.

LL is so committed to screwing up every new technical advancement they make, they're willing to pay extra to do it.

Gotta give them credit for consistency, I guess.

[Istelathis]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Before the AWS transition, Oz Linden was saying it would reduce costs.

Do you, or anyone else know if LL is still working on modifying regions so they will become inactive while they are not in use?  I hope that eventually it does cost them less to run the servers.

[Maryanne Solo]

I would much rather purchase my own server and absorb the costs for my own business in real life.

As a matter of fact when and if I ever reach this level with my business, I will deem myself to be totally successful
in my endeavours.
Ruling ze vorld can be a little bit after that. 
I don't mind. 😸🏁

[Drayke Newall]

6 hours ago, animats said:

Yes. The consensus is that for 24/7 servers, AWS costs about twice what colocation costs. (Colocation means you own your servers but rent space in someone else's data center building.) AWS is most useful for variable loads. Before the AWS transition, Oz Linden was saying it would reduce costs. After the AWS transition, he said it had increased costs. I won't speculate on why the move was done.

As far as I know Oz never said that JUST moving to AWS would reduce cost. It was always stated that moving to AWS would reduce costs ONLY if they use a method similar to Kitely with off-loading non populated servers. This still hasn't taken place.

There were three reasons stated by Ebbe why they were moving to the cloud.

1. Ability to expand indefinitely (scalability) without the need to purchase a new data centre. The physical data centre was a reason why Homesteads where tied to full regions as due to how cheap they were in comparison they were worried too many people would buy a homestead and they would need more server space in their physical data centre. 
2. Was to have the regions similar to Kitely where populated sims were loaded on regular always on servers and when they were not populated they would be off-loaded to inactive servers ready to spool up when a person is present on the sim again (reduce land tier and save LL money overall)
3. To have the asset server data easily accessible across the world in different countries to reduce the download time. (improve performance)

6 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

I thought that someone had said that they were working on a way to not have all the servers on all the time.  My understanding is that based on how SL functions, trying to do that brings up all sorts of things they have to first figure out how to deal with.

The roadmap was that they wanted to get everything on AWS first then they will start to transition the servers to off-loading and the assets onto Cloudfront (servers in different countries and unlimited bandwidth like Kitely).

This hasn't happened and the last thing I heard was for the foreseeable future they were not looking into either due to cost and time.

This whole 'we are not looking into it due to cost at the moment' all happened when Linden Lab was sold.