For a limited time only: get a huge 64-region Mega World running on a dedicated server for just $99.95/month

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Snoots Dwagon
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Re: For a limited time only: get a huge 64-region Mega World running on a dedicated server for just $99.95/month

Post by Snoots Dwagon »

I was asked to post my dwagony opinion here, so am doing so in the interest of harmony, efficiency, and scoring cookies.

MegaWorlds are wonderful for people who need 1) More land or 2) More ocean. If one owns a ship sailing group, the advantages are obvious. If you love widespread forests it's foreseeable a MegaWorld will be very nice. If you own a densely packed city... the advantages may not be so great (unless you want to surround the city with forests and water).

So the first question to ask: do I need a MegaWorld? If you're outgrowing your boundaries and would love to have more land and/or ocean, there you go.

Of additional bonus (and I don't know the technical side of this) is that a MegaWorld is on a "fast, dedicated server". Most of us know what fast, dedicated server means. What his means technically, behind the scenes, I'm not sure. I'm taking Ilan's word for it, which I've found to be trustworthy over the years. Most Kitely users know that Ilan = bend-over-backward support.

The primary thing to realize about MegaWorlds is that while the land increases some 300% in area, the prim allowance increases only 25%. Moving from 16 regions to 64 regions is adding another 48 regions. Moving from 120k prims to 150k prims adds only 30k additional prims. So this isn't going to quadruple your total building ability. There are trade-offs. The extra 30k prims is nice; you can do a lot with 30k. But it's the extra land area that is the real bonus. (EDIT: see two posts following for realistic observations regarding 150k prims; it's not really a "limit", for two reasons mentioned in those posts.)

The average world owner buys trees and buildings and scripts and places them on their regions without thought to server impact, whether the scripts are well-written and lag-free, or how many different textures are showing all at once on that humongous structure they just added. If everyone knew how to low-lag build and use textures and scripts properly, that prim limit could be upped quite a bit. But that's not the reality of building on virtual worlds. The reality is that folks tend to set down whatever strikes their fancy and before you know it, the world is taking 15 minutes to load and they have trouble moving their avatar once it does. Thus the 150k prim limit. But we should be aware that even with the current 120k prim allowance folks can still bog a world. They could do so with only a 40k prim allowance. It's not the prims... it's the textures, scripts, badly-built meshes, and sculpties. (Omahgooness... those [expletive ommitted] sculpties.) So regardless of prim allowance, world owners need to build wisely.

Allow me please to cite two personal examples: my own worlds of ElevenSong and Frankenstein (on another grid, but still good examples). Replicant City (on ElvenSong) contains a HALL OF FUNNY, which consists of humorous signs... to the count of 1,500+, all with different textures. If I were to put all of those signs inside a huge globe with all of those textures available at once... that would be bad. Instead I created the halls in forms of small, twisting corridors where only 50 or so signs are visible at once. As a result of smart building design (not too many textures visible at once)... one can tour the exhibit without any lag.

Rule of paw: Either repeat texture use (such as on building faces, floors and ceilings)... or if by necessity using different textures, place them so only a few dozen are visible at any one time. This is essential on any world, regardless of the number of prims.

Scripts are the tricky part, because many are no-mod and most people aren't scripters and can't tell a good script from a bad script. Here's a good test on that: Rez 50 of the items (if they're copyable) and see if they have impact on region performance. Look at that STATS box (ctrl shift-1) and see if figures drop. The reality of scripting: it's not how many scripts you have, it's how they behave. You can have 5,000 "good" scripts on a world and the only real effect it will have is in loading time. Or, you can have one really-badly-written script that can regularly cause glitches, slowdowns, and random self-destructions. So knowing your script sources and being able to trust them is important.

REGARDING MERGING WORLDS. In my humble dwagony opinion, I believe the ability to merge worlds is essential to MegaWorlds. It is predictable that someone who currently owns 2 or 3 worlds is going to want to join all of those on one MegaWorld. It's not so much a question of IF Kitely should implement that, but rather what is the best way to implement that? Because people are going to want to do it.

FRANKENSTEIN is my 5x5 VAR that literally combined twenty free-open-source OAR files into one world. To do this I uploaded them one at a time, fixed any obvious problems, moved on. That's with OARS built by different creators... and it still worked. I then added to that five OARS of my own creation, for a wall-to-wall stacked world. I did this on purpose as an experiment to see "how much can I cram on one world?" It worked so well I decided to keep it online. No exaggeration: Frankenstein and ElvenSong both are some of the richest, most prim-packed, texture-packed, heavily-scripted systems in the virtual worlds... and they work. Kitely's MegaWorlds are similar in concept. The one I visited at Tessiner seemed to work fine.

IMPORTING OARS. The actual importing of OARS is not difficult if they're all owned by the same person. (It's a little more complex if those worlds are owned by multiple people). If the worlds are all owned by the same person all it takes is a simple line command or two to upload them all to a single MegaWorld (that is, if MegaWorlds work like VARs in OpenSim. I dunno). Of course that doesn't mean everything will work right off the bat. Landing points will need changed. Teleport and portal vectors will need changed. Land masses may need changed, as might organization of building, paths, and available cookie jars for visiting dwagons. But all these things are a given. If you're going to convert from two or three 4x4s to a MegaWorld... it's going to take some adjustment.

I see merging OARS not as a "maybe", but as an essential service. In the simplest of situations it will be very easy to do. With multiple-owners Ilan is right: that can be quite a bit more complex.

Okay, those are my thoughts-off-the-cuff. Without doubt there is going to be a shift to MegaWorlds. Keep in mind you're going to more than double the price of your region (from $40 to $99.95 a month) but you're not going to "double" your asset use. You'll gain a significant increase in available land and water space, from what we understand faster and more responsive server speed, but only a relative increase in prims.

We decide what our needs are and if a MegaWorld will meet those needs. As always consider finances, especially in this time of increasing costs due to Covid. It won't do any good to switch to a MegaWorld if you bankrupt yourself doing so. Count the costs and make sure you can afford the upgrade. I'm sure Ilan himself would strongly recommend that wise examination of finances.

Many people have commented they wished they had the ability to "hook worlds together". If you're looking for increased world area-- this is a new product that Kitely is offering to accomplish that goal. Is a good idea I thinks. : )
Last edited by Snoots Dwagon on Sun Oct 25, 2020 9:11 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Re: For a limited time only: get a huge 64-region Mega World running on a dedicated server for just $99.95/month

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Thank you Snoots.

One comment about what you said. I think people who reuse meshes and textures can definitely build a city using the allotted 150K prim quota. It's important to remember that we don't use Land Impact in Kitely so 150K prims could potentially be 150K complex meshes. In other words, if you reuse meshes and textures intelligently as building blocks then you can construct a 64-region sized city that would even provide decent FPS on viewers running on lower end computers. It all comes down to good content selection and layout.
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Re: For a limited time only: get a huge 64-region Mega World running on a dedicated server for just $99.95/month

Post by Snoots Dwagon »

Ilan Tochner wrote:
Sun Oct 25, 2020 3:08 pm
Thank you Snoots.

One comment about what you said. I think people who reuse meshes and textures can definitely build a city using the allotted 150K prim quota. It's important to remember that we don't use Land Impact in Kitely so 150K prims could potentially be 150K complex meshes. In other words, if you reuse meshes and textures intelligently as building blocks then you can construct a 64-region sized city that would even provide decent FPS on viewers running on lower end computers. It all comes down to good content selection and layout.
You totally right. I failed to mention that. This is a huge advantage these days; I've seen large mansions that used to be 350 to 500 prims meshed down to 60 prims or less. As you state, that is a great advantage. : )

What I also failed to mention is that neither of the two heavy-build world examples I mentioned in my prior post reach 100k prims (I think the heaviest barely tops 90k)... and they are packed. I think one would have to try pretty hard to hit 150k. ;D
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Re: For a limited time only: get a huge 64-region Mega World running on a dedicated server for just $99.95/month

Post by Arton Tripsa »

What are the options for creating new terrain in the new Mega World? A raw file uploaded in the Region terrain will take forever and perhaps crash the server? Although the Mega region is a VARegion it does not seem that Kitely owners have access to a sim console command where raw files can be loaded. You could use Kayaker Magic's fractal seeds or I guess finally there is also the shovel....:-) I'm sorry if I am too ignorant on this subject but I really need to know...thanks for your time.
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Re: For a limited time only: get a huge 64-region Mega World running on a dedicated server for just $99.95/month

Post by Trouble Ahead »

I upgraded my world last weekend. Please be aware , if you have systems running with a lot of scripts ( like I have , for example a RP system with a lot of connected system components ) you need to make it as your very first task to reset the scripts ( or stop them ) before testing sim performance. Migration needs work, but well , it's been worth while for us to do it.
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Re: For a limited time only: get a huge 64-region Mega World running on a dedicated server for just $99.95/month

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Hi Arton,

Uploading a RAW file using the viewer is one option for teraforming a Mega World. It could take a long time but it shouldn't crash the server. Please make sure to create a properly sized RAW file for the entire world if you use this option.

Inworld manual or script based building are also options.

Finally, you can replace the contents of your world by uploading an OAR file and that includes the terrain.
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Re: For a limited time only: get a huge 64-region Mega World running on a dedicated server for just $99.95/month

Post by Scurvy Ragu 2 »

There is a problem with the Mega world 8x8 ... All of a sudden notning can be seen for any viewer. I am in Tessin and this happened several times today
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Re: For a limited time only: get a huge 64-region Mega World running on a dedicated server for just $99.95/month

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Hi Scurvy,

I've already written Trouble (that world's owner) about this. That world includes over 65K unique assets taking over 3.7GB of storage and over 6.5K running scripts. You need to reduce the number of active scripts and reduce the number of unique assets you use. It will take a very long time for people's viewer's to download that amount of data and rendering thousands of unique assets at a time is going to cause low viewer FPS for people as those assets get within their current view and draw distance.
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Re: For a limited time only: get a huge 64-region Mega World running on a dedicated server for just $99.95/month

Post by Trouble Ahead »

We keep u all posted, but i think we had problems with an old RP system called Konk, ( builder is not online anymore ) and due to moving to 8x8 the scripts were broken and caused the problems. Cheers
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Re: For a limited time only: get a huge 64-region Mega World running on a dedicated server for just $99.95/month

Post by Snoots Dwagon »

I'm no expert in Opensim, but I do own my own server system and I can verify Ilan's statements about watching your assets and scripts. I run two 5x5 VARs with about 5k scripts each and 80k to 95k prims. The reason for such is that I wanted to see just how much I could cram onto a VAR using a dedicated server. Both VARs work fine... but I would have to say that in most instances such figures would be pushing the edge.

PRIMS: It's not that Opensim / Kitely can't handle that much and more. I am fairly sure I could put a whole lot more prims on those VARs without any problems... so long as I used textures wisely. But the reality is most of us don't use textures wisely. We like something, we set it down, and very few world owners stop to think about the impact texture loading is going to have on viewers. If you drop down 140k prims all with the same texture you'll likely experience no viewer issues whatsoever (it's been tested). You put a different texture on each of those prims and that will be a very different situation.

SCRIPTS: 5,000 well-behaved scripts will work just fine on a server. However they will cause OAR loading time to increase significantly. A LOT significantly. On the other hand, 20 very badly-behaved scripts can cause real problems.

The problem here is that few world owners are aware of script performance. All we can do is check the TOP SCRIPTS function of Region debugging and find the rough spots, but that doesn't actually solve the problem. Like most virtual measuring instruments it provides data to a degree... but not with total reliability. Nor does Top Scripts explain the nasty stuff a script may be doing behind the scenes that can cause problems on a world.

In the years I've been on virtual worlds I've known ONE person who actually wrote every script on his world himself... and his world ran pristine. But he also trimmed textures, was careful how he built, re-used objects, etc. In reality, no one does that, ever. The guy was a mutant. ;D

The rest of us say, 'Ohhhh I love that house!' and slam it down without giving much thought to world impact. So... once a person starts reaching toward 100k prims and as those scripts increase by the thousands, the average world owner is going to start experiencing some serious impact... which is part of the point Ilan is making (and I'm just verifying here with my own experience). When you own your own server you can see the information on load screens, the yellow warning lines and the red "this is really messed up" lines and can see all the stuff going wrong in the background. It's a sobering experience.

Which is why I am content to let people like Ilan run the grid instead of running one myself. Do not wanna be a grid owner. No no no no no...
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