Thursday, November 6, 2008

Fun with prim math - What would YOU do if you had 45,000 prims at your disposal?

While many of us are agonizing over how to cope with Second Life®'s upcoming 750 prim limitations for the same Openspace sims that were sold to us with 3,750 prim allocations, I can't help wondering what you would do if you had FORTY FIVE THOUSAND prims to play with on your sim.

Consider, too, that each of those 45,000 prims is scaleable to 100m....

Indeed, you can purchase a single Openlife Grid region within a private cluster for $145 with $75 monthly tier.

And yes, your ankles will often sink into the grid, your avatar may bounce dizzingly, and even endless Ctrl Alt R's (rebake) won't save your often sorry bald self from a bad case of the greys. It's not a grid for the vain. Yet.

No charge for texture uploads, either. Yet. I imagine this will change when Openlife's new economy kicks in by the end of the year.

Many thanks to Osiris Indigo who sent in this photograph of a playful moment over at one of the more viable alternatives to Second Life, the Openlife. He reports that it was "rather easy and stable," to do.


45,000 prims! by Osiris Indigo (Click to see large)

Seriously, what would you do with 45,000 prims on your sim?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have many ideas about what I could do... Interactive fractals, morphing geometric sculptures, evolving constructions such as 3D cellular automata, sphere packing in 2D or even 3D...

I have a local Open Simulator on my PC, which is great for responsiveness and testing. However... script communications are not working really well yet in OS (I believe messages get lost), which makes it difficult to pass parameters to prims. Also, deleting many objects takes a very long time...

But things are improving.

And really, here is my opinion about the Open Space story: prim cost is much too high in SL, even before LL decided to raise them. Well, actually not just "too high", it's really outrageous IMHO.

Living in a prim shortage environment is not viable. We need prices divided by 10 with an optimized server (and client code) to support high numbers of prims. Period.

I hope that some competition will drive things in a good direction.

Jo said...

I usually only run out of prims when one of my "algorithmically generated structures" runs amok. I guess I'd get lazier and do REALLY BIG structures.
@suzanne - Prim costs are, pretty much, directly tied to computing power. OpenSim is not going to help you unless it can remain a significantly more efficient simulator than Second Life (once they add little things like robustness and stability into it) or you run it on high end hardware. High end hardware costs more so you're back to the beginning again.
What I would really like to see is simulators running on virtualized servers clustered on some Big Iron. Then the Big Iron can timeshare it's huge CPU between the simulators that are occupied and the ones that are unoccupied. That would be HUGELY more efficient use of the CPU and, thus, lead to cheaper costs per prim.