Re: For a limited time only: get a huge 64-region Mega World running on a dedicated server for just $99.95/month
Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2020 2:46 pm
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. : )
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. : )