What would happen if the mainland model had to be at some point discarted by LL?

[Cio Koba]

What would happen if the mainland model had to be at some point discarted by LL? Could they change it into something like a big city?

That would work for me at least. I would change my little 512 plot in the middle of nowhere for one near a big city (malls, clubs etc) or for even a for a flat in a tall building.  Private sims just the same ,being what their owner wants.

[Eloise Baily]

I'd still be a country girl. 

I guess there's nothing to stop areas being huddled together. In some places they are. Me, I like it all distant moocows and crickets. Horses for courses I suppose.

I thought SIM owners could do that already if they wanted to?

[Ceera Murakami]

SL would have to be rebuilt from zero to support a dense urban model instead of a sprawled, very flat, suburban one. They could never change what it is now into something that would support an urban model properly.

Every design decision ever made in the creation of the SL virtual world has been based on the assumption that people will largely remain on the ground, in single-story or small multi-story dwellings. Their minds were firmly locked in small town suburbia. No one at LL even tried to make it work right for a skyscraper, or a commercial hotel, or any other dense urban scene.

None of the access controls, media controls, or other parcel level or sim level abilities give you any way at all to vertically subdivide a parcel. What you establish for on the ground is equally true at 4096 Meters, and on up to infinity, except for ban lines being tied to the terrain's surface (50 M above the surface generally, higher only if explicitly banned by name, and that still only to the old build limit.)

To support a dense urban setting - where one activity could be going on in a street-level cafe, while something else takes place in a thrid floor apartment over the cafe, and yet another activity takes place in the basements and sewers below the cafe - would take an increase in server resources of at least 10 x to 100x what they have now, to get enough prims and a dense enough avatar count to be worth bothering with trying to reproduce a dense setting.

Access controls and parcel media would need vertical stratiification. The number of avatars that you can have in a sim would have to increase dramatically without causing impossible lag levels. 40 avatars isn't anywhere near enough. I can count more people than that in my suburban grocery store on a slow day. You can fit more people than that on one city bus, for Pete's sake! 

Would it be cool to be able to do it? Sure. But trying to do it with the current SL simulator code is like trying to win the Indy 500 on a tricycle.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Why do some people want LL to taylor SL to their own personal liking?  Second Life is built in such a way that you (the user) can taylor SL for yourself.  You could purchase or rent a private sim (or even a mainland sim for that matter) and build it anyway you want (within the legal bounds set forth by the United States laws.  You can't build a gambling world or a bigoted world, for instance).  You could also search for an existing sim that is more to your liking.  Why would you even think Linden Lab would change that?  Lazy?  Selfish?  Intolerant?  Why?

[Perrie Juran]

the first place i rented in SL was in an apartment building.

while it was humorous at first, it got tiresome after a while hearing (that is, using local chat) my neighbors copulate.  constantly hearing, "yes daddy, do me daddy, daddy your so good,' got old fast.

[Tiffy Vella]

How about mainland sims being just the same, being what their owners want, too?

Many of us have invested in mainland, and spent time accumulating and consolidating it. We have created what we already want in many cases, and it's not always urban. My personal taste is garden. I know not everybody wants the same, and they have the freedom to follow their vision.

It's much harder to create the environment you want if you only have a 512, and I sympathise with you if you are stuck in the middle of lots of abandoned land. That can be very isolating. If you want a more urban setting, perhaps you could move to be close to others. Or rent a flat in a highrise building, as there are already options for you to do this. Or, find friends with the same ideals, buy 512s together, and begin a city community. (Like my friends have done with our gardeny area)

Maybe you could start a jira asking that the Lab create a more urban Linden Homes community? That could work too. I'm sure that others share your idea, and they might support it. At the very least, you could meet some like minded potential neighbours.

I think there's room for a bit of everything in SL. It's nicest that way.

 

 

[Amethyst Jetaime]

I can't think of any reason that the mainland model would ever to be discarded. Its not like they will ever run out of land.  Use all you want, they'll just make more lol.

While there are uban sims and environments and people that enjoy them, the overwheming majorority  wants more space than a city can offer.  Also, as pointed out earlier a true densely populated city it is not very feasible with SL as it is now.

[Marigold Devin]

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Cio Koba wrote:

What would happen if the mainland model had to be at some point discarted by LL? Could they change it into something like a big city?

That would work for me at least. I would change my little 512 plot in the middle of nowhere for one near a big city (malls, clubs etc) or for even a for a flat in a tall building.  Private sims just the same ,being what their owner wants.

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The mainland is what it is meant to be; a hotch potch of whatever the residents turn it into.

There are already places as you describe, in private sims, and also Bay City sims are already set out tidily into green spaces, canals, shops, residential areas.

The ultimate in residential areas, of course, are the Linden Homes sims.

Something for everyone.



[Marigold Devin]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

the first place i rented in SL was in an apartment building.

while it was humorous at first, it got tiresome after a while hearing (that is, using local chat) my neighbors copulate.  constantly hearing, "yes daddy, do me daddy, daddy your so good,' got old fast.

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My first home in SL was also a rented apartment in a block on a privately-owned sim.  The neighbours were rarely in, and when a new girl moved into the apartment below mine, I found her to be quiet, but unfortunately her clitoris was fond of chatting out loud, even with no one else in the room !!!



[Jennifer Boyle]

Couldn't a substantial part of it be possible by putting more server power into some sims and calling them urban.  I have long thought that one of the things that makes SL much less enjoyable than it could be is its emptiness.  It also is not possible to even have a moderate-sized party on the mainland, since you can only have 39 guests, and that's only if you own a whole sim or none of your neighbors are in.  Even then, you'll have bad lag.  I understand that vertical stratification of various things would be difficult to impossible, but I would not think it would be hard to enable a sim to comfortably accommodate more avatars and prims, which would go a long way toward supporting more realistic urban population densities.  I have read that four regular sims run on a server.  If they put a single sim on a server, couldn't it have four times as many avatars and prims with the same performance.  Obviously, it would cost more, but why couldn't it be available to those who want it?  

Related but not exactly on topic:  Many if not most sims are empty at any given time.  Why can't most of their servers' resources be dynamically made available to the ones that are busy to improve overall performance?

[Jennifer Boyle]

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Peggy Paperdoll wrote:

...  You could purchase or rent a private sim (or even a mainland sim for that matter) and build it anyway you want (within the legal bounds set forth by the United States laws.  You can't build a gambling world or a bigoted world, for instance)....  

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Except that you can't build one that can support enough avatars to even remotely resemble an urban setting, even on an island with a capacity of 100.  And if you have 100 avatars on an island performance will be terrible.

I guess it's, "Your world, your imagination," unless your imagination includes dense populations and real crowds.

 

[Peggy Paperdoll]

And playing to relatively small portion of the resident population is going to gain enough support to justify all the resources necessary to allow a couple hundred avatars on the same sim?  It probably is possible........but for free?  Would you be willing to pay for all that added resources (not to mention the additional work load on grid maintenance.....more code, more manpower, etc).  In all probability you would not.......you would expect to be free (or, at least, without any additional cost to you).  And how many sims should LL allot to this less that overly popular idea?  If they do one then they have to do more when people jump up a scream favoritism.

 

It's not practical, it's not a very popular idea, it won't work.  How many estate owners have jumped onto this fantastic idea?  If it were that popular (or even remotely popular) you'd have dozens of private estates catering to that niche.  If there is no return no one is going to do it.  But this is a derail.  It's not that it can't be done (I'm sure it can be), it's that there's customer base to support it unless LL reduces the mainland to only allow urban invironments......and that would be the end of SL as we all know it (maybe the end of SL period).

 

It is your world.........make it what you can make it for yourself.  No one said it would be easy.

[Bree Giffen]

I would love to live in an urban environment BUT having a large gathering of avatars in one place, socializing or going about their business in their homes would be a huge target for griefers. You can leave a welcome area if it gets griefed but it's harder if you are actually living there. Also, our viewers always load every single prim and texture nearby and with a certain population density there will be just a huge amount of data to download.

I think being able to create a huge crowd virtually and making it with lots of quality is something that newer virtual worlds need to tackle. I would go to such a place.

[Jennifer Boyle]

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Peggy Paperdoll wrote:

And playing to relatively small portion of the resident population is going to gain enough support to justify all the resources necessary to allow a couple hundred avatars on the same sim?  It probably is possible........but for free?  Would you be willing to pay for all that added resources (not to mention the additional work load on grid maintenance.....more code, more manpower, etc).  In all probability you would not.......you would expect to be free (or, at least, without any additional cost to you).  And how many sims should LL allot to this less that overly popular idea?  If they do one then they have to do more when people jump up a scream favoritism.

 

It's not practical, it's not a very popular idea, it won't work.  How many estate owners have jumped onto this fantastic idea?  If it were that popular (or even remotely popular) you'd have dozens of private estates catering to that niche.  If there is no return no one is going to do it.  But this is a derail.  It's not that it can't be done (I'm sure it can be), it's that there's customer base to support it unless LL reduces the mainland to only allow urban invironments......and that would be the end of SL as we all know it (maybe the end of SL period).

 

It is your world.........make it what you can make it for yourself.  No one said it would be easy.

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Peggy, I don't understand your hostility in this thread, which is so out of character.  I don't advocate reducing the mainland to only urban environments.  I would like to see urban environments, to the extent that they can be reasonably accommodated by existing or easily developed technology, made available to people who are willing to pay enough to defray the costs.  How many sims should LL allot?  One, at first, to see how it was received by their customers.  Later, maybe a lot more and maybe zero, depending on how it worked out.

Nobody can really cater to this niche because LL does not make the infrastructure necessary to do so available.

[161488303349]

it would be doable to make a tower building or city if u stacked sims. say 16..48 meters between each layer. range would probly have to be restricted to 4 layers up and 4 layers down from current layer, to make the mod easier to map from existing sim boundary handoffs. could work quite easy with parcel visibility and banlines to make rooms, as each layer would map to a diff sim 

[Qie Niangao]

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Bree Giffen wrote:

I would love to live in an urban environment BUT having a large gathering of avatars in one place, socializing or going about their business in their homes would be a huge target for griefers.

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Interesting.  As in real life, high avatar density would come with social problems.

 

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Also, our viewers always load every single prim and texture nearby and with a certain population density there will be just a huge amount of data to download.

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Another excellent point.  Suppose LL had infinite computing capacity per sim* so each could hold tens of thousands of avatars.  Suppose they had infinite network capacity on their end, so they could pump all those network updates out onto the Internet unthrottled.  

If that were the case, nobody would dare login because their connection would run at capacity without keeping up, spinning up usage-based ISP bills faster than the National Debt Clock.

It's not just network, of course, but nothing viewer-side would be able to keep up with the demand, for any high-end gaming machine available in the next three decades of Moore's law.  

To be remotely practical with today's machines and networks, and even for modest increases in avatar density, a great deal would have to change about what information the viewer expects to get from the sim.

And who could bear the hysterical ululation of the nosey, denied their sim-wide avatar radar?  

(and that's the least of the ways the SL experience would have to change)

 

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*To address a different point of another poster: With the current architecture, it wouldn't help much to reduce the number of (full) sims per server because they're already one per core, and the sims are effectively single-threaded (almost).

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Again, I have to ask.  Why is it that when someone disagrees or argues another side of a topic someone sees the disgreer as "hostile"?  I'm not being hostile.............I'm disagreeing and stating why I disagree.  That is also known as "arguing"........there's a difference in arguing and fighting.  You're claiming that I'm fighting when I'm arguing.

 

The base of my argument is that someone always wants LL to do something that they personally want LL to do.......regardless or whether or not it's feasible, doable, popular or profitable.  Just do it for me and to hell with everyone else and to hell with your bottomline.  Especially when what they are advocating can already be done to some extent by themselves.......they doint want that, they want done by someone else for them.

 

I know I have the tact of a rattlesnake but I'm harmless......my fangs are dull. 

[Irene Muni]

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Peggy Paperdoll wrote:

The base of my argument is that someone always wants LL to do something that they personally want LL to do.......regardless or whether or not it's feasible, doable, popular or profitable.  Just do it for me and to hell with everyone else and to hell with your bottomline.  Especially when what they are advocating can already be done to some extent by themselves.......they doint want that, they want done by someone else for them.

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This.

Agree.

[Cio Koba]

Thanks everyone for the replies.

When i thought about this idea i never said it would be feasable, popular or any other adjective that could go with it. it was just an idea, a thought, something i thought i could post to make people think and post their thinking beyond what should i wear or what should i do if he f"·%ed me and then disappeared.

Its neither something I particulary want or i want to impose to the rest, I know there are people who like to push things on others, so u might have been confused, but having those thoughts about me, asuming Im lazy (well, I am lazy, got that one right), intolerant, selfish, without knowing me its just laughable, and rather hostile. But you know, everyone has a way to express themselves.

At the moment i like sl as it is, it could obiously improve, but im happy, im happy with my  house in my 512, its on a lovely hill side, i was lucky with the spot i found, so this was nothing I was comanding LL to do, maybe i had to explain my self better.

I had also good reasons esposed explaining why it couldnt be done technically with sl as is (my favourites)

So, nothing I expect to become true in a near future, but could happend. Some people like the idea, some dont.

[Cio Koba]

Maybe i should have asked: Would you live in a virtual world that was basicly a city( not having it to be SL) keeping the private sims as they are now?

Peggy:

The base of my argument is that someone always wants LL to do something that they personally want LL to do.......regardless or whether or not it's feasible, doable, popular or profitable.  Just do it for me and to hell with everyone else and to hell with your bottomline.  Especially when what they are advocating can already be done to some extent by themselves.......they doint want that, they want done by someone else for them.

Its seems u got some issues with this type of people, who wouldnt, I just think im not one of them.

peace out!

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Yes, that would have been much better.  I probably wouldn't have even responded and, if I did, it would have been a simple "maybe".

 

You're right, I have "conditioned" to people asking for things that they want and expecting LL to actually doing it for them.  I'm sorry.  I guess I did sort of misread your post.  My "lazy, selfish, intolerant" comments were generic.......not directed at you or anyone in specific.  Just people who do think I want it my way and LL should do it my way..........there are plenty of those types.  Thank you for explaining............it gives me a chance to clarify what I objected to.

[Cio Koba]

I indeed thought they were generic, thank you.

The opening question was an easy way to get people to post here ; )

So, ''maybe'' would be your answer, great!

[Pussycat Catnap]

SL wise: There are some estates and even a few mainland places that are city like or at least sprawl like (Bay City resembles a newer California city - like Bakersfield or LA if they were on the water).

As to living in a city in a virtual world; sure. But it would need to be built for it. You'd need to not have camming tools like we have in SL, sound would have to be blockable by walls, and a number of other things would need to be fundamentally different.

Building opportunities would be more limited, avatar sizes would need to have an enforced standard - with these two things built in relation to each other. 3D camera positions would need heavy redesign to fit tighter spaces and have good instant responses to cornering or changing rooms / closing doors. 'Policing' of public space would need heavy active resources of admin accounts. Certain social norms would have to be more enforced - and they'd need to be acceptable to a global audience.

In the long term metaverse thinking, a city is probably a more viable model than the one SL chose.

But its not SL, thank goodness.

 

 

[Jennifer Boyle]

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Peggy Paperdoll wrote:

You're right, I have "conditioned" to people asking for things that they want and expecting LL to actually doing it for them.  

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What is wrong with customers of any business asking for things that they want and expecting the business to respond?

In my (RL) world, you respond to your customers' wants and needs, or you perish.

[Cio Koba]

I dont see places as bay city as proper cities, but they look good as towns, which is a start.

Well, i too think a city is more viable and a qute atractive option (im sure there aremany people who think the opposite). Everything could be packed toghether and there could be rural sims outside the city, and private sims as always.

Probably it should be another vw outside SL (neither a opensim based world) cause as its now its almost imposible to fit an average avatar in a room without the usual problems.

BTW that Ciaran Laval article about convex hull is a great piece of info everyone should know, good on you for posting it on your blog and provide a link in your signature. Seriously Convex Hull!! It really  brought fresh air to my 512m  parcel.