Virtual Space/Infinite Space

Virtual Space/Infinite Space

How to never run out of prims or space on any sized parcel or sim.

Over the years I’ve tried to help shed light on tips and techniques to allow anyone to get the most value out of their SL land, from shrinking oversized builds and altering your viewer camera settings to make your parcel larger, to squeezing out the most from your prim allotments by optimizing prim and mesh builds. Still, there’s one aspect of virtual land that is long overdue for a discussion.

That is the nature of land in SL itself.

Most people see their virtual land in Second Life as finite. You have your prim limit and your land area and that’s it. If you want a bigger house, a bigger RP area, more content to play with then obviously you need more land, right? Everyone knows this, it’s the typical understanding of how SL works.

It's also wrong.

Land in Second Life is virtual. Bolded and underscored. Everything about it, from the terrain to the content you fill it up with, is nothing more than a collection of 1’s and 0’s. What’s more, Second Life gives users an infinite amount of storage space for those 1’s and 0’s. You have an infinite inventory and can store as much content as you like in rezzed, in-world containers. What’s more, you can script those containers into what we call “rezzers” or “Holodecks”, after the famous virtual reality room from Star Trek.

Chances are, you’ve used one of these already. Ever bought a house or other large SL object which came in a scripted package? One that would allow you to rez and position the item just by clicking on and moving the package around? Or a skybox that lets you choose from a selection of pre-made scenes it can rez for you? These work in the exact same way and you can use the same sort of scripts to make any size land into an infinite space for all the content you could ever want.

And this works for any sized land, from tiny 512sq.m. parcel homes to full sim RP builds. The size of the land you own only limits the amount of content which can be rezzed at any one time.

Let me illustrate using my own home as an example. I have a 64x64 square parcel of mainland.

This is considered a mid-sized piece of land. It supports about 1000 prims. Most of the neighboring 64x64 parcels have a single house with maybe a quarter of the space left over for a tiny yard.Most of these parcels devote all of their prims to said house and the furniture inside. Possibly a single skybox for the illusion of privacy.

 We can do better than that.

Paying for Land

Now, before I continue, let’s look at the cost involved here. If you decide to upgrade your tier to purchase a mainland parcel this size, it’s going to cost you $25 a month on top of your Premium Membership. That’s $372 a year, a little more than a sim owner pays for one month. However, as I pointed out in a previous article, there’s cheaper ways to buy land. You can check out that article by clicking this link, but here’s a quick recap:

• If you have multiple accounts, upgrade them to Premium with an annual membership. This will cost you $72 per account up front, but if you save the stipend and cash it out to put towards your annual payment, each account will only cost you $14/year afterwards.
• If you have accounts made before LL lowered the stipend in 2006, then the tier will more than cover the annual payments.
• Lump their 512sq.m. tier into a landowner group, giving you a 10% boost, and use that to purchase the land.

To buy a 4096sq.m. parce like mine you’d have to upgrade 7 accounts to Premium. That’s a lot of money up front but also look at it this way:

• If you pay tier annually that’s costing you $372 up front and $372 every year after if you upgrade your tier and buy the land directly.
• If you upgrade 7 accounts that’s $504 the first year then only $98 a year every year after.

On top of that, you don’t NEED to upgrade all those accounts at once. If you can afford the monthly tier costs, but not the up-front expense, upgrade the accounts with a monthly payment, then upgrade each to a yearly as you can afford to.

I’m Not Very Neighborly

I didn’t buy land in SL to experience mainland neighbors, so I ignore the ground level entirely and built my house as a skybox, complete with self-contained yard. Seen here:

Of course, no one wanders around SL with their camera pulled out that far and when you live on a 64x64 parcel there’s no reason to have your draw distance any higher than 88m while home. To anyone visiting my house, the yard looks like this:

 

As you can see, 64x64m is actually pretty spacious if you build efficiently. What’s more, the yard only uses about 300 prims and acts as a hub area for the rest of the build. Remember, we’re taking advantage of the infinite space virtual land affords. This yard, and the 200 prim barn interior, are the closest my home has to “permanent” structures.

Pick a Door

Spread around the yard are doors. Most of these doors, when clicked, will play a sound effect and give you a dialog message saying “This door appears to be locked but maybe there's a way to unlock it?” And there is!

Underneath the bridge people arrive at there is a terminal labled “Door Lock Terminal”.

Click the terminal and you get a menu asking “Unlock which door?” and a selection of doors to open. Choosing one will “lock” the currently “unlocked” area and “unlock” the newly selected area. If someone is in the currently “unlocked” area, you will instead get a message saying “The lock controls are overridden from the other side.” and nothing will change.

My liberal use of quotation marks is because this terminal is really the rezzer controls for the parcel. When you “unlock” a room, you’re derezzing the currently selected room and rezzing another. In addition, the rezzer replaces the locked door with a door that acts as a teleporter. The teleporters use the (as of this writing) recently added Experience Features so you just click the door and walk into it to teleport to the room interior.

Since I have nearly 500 prims free, and all of the rezzable areas are connected via teleporters, each rezzed area can be anywhere from a small room using only about 200 prims:

Or a 64x64m outdoor area bigger than the yard:

And I can add as many of these additional areas as I want! There’s no limit. Already my 64x64m parcel has more content, more places to go, than any homestead on the grid. Eventually, as long as I keep adding new areas, it will be larger than many RP sims.

Affordable RP Sims

That’s right, if you ever wanted your own RP sim but can’t afford, or justify the cost of, a sim, this is a great alternative. Sure, people can’t spread out to the four corners of the world, but unless you’re building a sim like Doomed Ship, where most of the experience is in exploring a twisting maze of corridors and secret passages, there’s RP benefits to keeping people restricted to a few locations at a time.

Not to mention, RP sims are rarely self sustaining. That’s why they’re always shutting down. Rather than spending hundreds of dollars a month on a brand new RP sim, the best bet has always been to start with a small, affordable RP area and expand only as your growing player base allows for it.

On top of that, as long as you expand in a modular fashion, an RP area that finds itself facing a dropoff in support can easily scale back during tighter times  without a whole lot of work, or permanently sacrificing content. That kind of flexibility means a greater ability to whether the ups and downs every RP area in SL faces.

Keep it Simple!

You don’t even have to get as fancy as I have. Have a 512sq.m. parcel for your house and want to take advantage of this to have infinite rooms? Keep the home furnishings to a minimum and put a door inside to act as your teleporter. Make the rezzer a lightswitch next to the door and use it to select the room the door will take you to.

Or, even simpler, a holodeck skybox where you just change the scene around you, without the need for a HUD. Setting up and packing your own scenes is super simple, and you can get free holodeck scripts off the marketplace to set up your own right now!

Thinking Big

The larger your land, the more you can do with a system like this. Have a full sim and you want to make the most of it for an RP area? Then taking advantage of the virtual nature of SL land will let you turn a single sim into an entire world of environments. Where my previous examples each used a single rezzer, a full sim build could use multiple rezzers spread across the sim.

You could have entire sim-sized environments accessible via rezzers, as well as multiple, smaller rezzers for individual areas. And since each of these rezzers can have an infinite number of rezzable environments, your RP sim can keep growing as long as you keep coming up with ideas.

Using Doomed Ship as an example again, using a rezzer the sim could be set up so that all of the core decks act as the permanent hub area, with rezzers built into various controls and locking mechanisms on each deck to open up further areas for exploration, separate from the main, twisty maze of rooms and corridors that make the sim so much fun to explore.

No-Mod/No-Copy Costs You More Than You Know

There is a catch. Rezzers only work with copy/mod content. So any no-mod/no-copy content you own will either have to be retired or limited to the hub areas. The best policy, of course, is to avoid no-copy/no-mod content altogether and encourage your favourite content creators to abandon bad, anti-consumer business practices which prevent you from getting the full value out of your virtual land.

Not all content creators sell no-mod/no-copy content to intentionally screw you over like this, most are simply unaware. Luckily, there are solutions for content creators who've been selling no-mod/no-copy content which could allow customers to update their content with more sensible perms, such as using this handy Item Exchanger/Updater from DesolateStudios.

Conclusion

SL has it’s share of problems, but the cost of land has always been overstated. Every landowner in SL has, at one time or another, wished for more space or more prims and I hope this article shows how you can achieve that easily, without breaking the bank.

The Island of Milk & Cream

 A word of note to those wishing to explore the build featured in this article, the Island of Milk&Cream has plenty of quiet, relaxing areas, much of the island being very scenic in nature, but it also has a significant amount of adult content. You're very likely to encounter that if you go exploring in the sim. 

 In addition, aside from the text added to the Milk&Cream SL search image, none of the screenshots in this article are edited. I did not even use "photographic" windlight presets just for these images. This is how SL looks using my custom windlight day cycle. I find it amazing LL refuses to update their own default shader settings to look this nice, but that's a subject for another article.

The Island of Milk & Cream 

 One of the things I do in Second Life is design environments. Basically level design and modeling for a great big social sandbox. It can be a bigger challenge than videogame levels since you're not designing around goals, and there's so much more you need to take into account due to the sheer amount of freedom SL allows in avatar sizes, camera placement and even interface. Not to mention the lack of base tools and settings to allow for more universal concepts such as scale, which videogames take as a given.

 As a multi-player environment you also need to see where people gather, where they avoid going and what they fail to discover entirely (which can be good or bad).

 At some point I'll probably write an article going into these differences and the challenges unique to SL in environment design, but for now I really just wanted to share some of the work I've done this week.

Aside from the text added to this image, all the screenshots in this article are unedited.

   

 The Island of Milk & Cream is a project I did for a few friends. Alyce Beaumont-Snow, Kichi Kutanaga and Lilyth Lykin. I had my own tiny 4096 sq.m. parcel where I had a little tropical farm to house my shop of cowgirl avatars and accessories, they ran a similarly themed club that was much larger and had much more traffic and invited me onboard. A short while later a move to another sim prompted a redesign of the club and they gave me complete control over the project.

 So, basically I moved up from my tiny 4096 sq.m. (937 prims) tropical farm;

This is actually a screenshot of the 2048sq.m. farm. I can't seem to find any from after acquiring the neighboring 2048sq.m.parcel. I added a cabana, more beach front and a whole lot more detail.

 To a quarter of a sim (16,384 sq.m. and 3,750 prims). Kichi was really keen on returning the club itself to a "treehouse in the sky" theme, so we decided on a floating island with giant trees to support the treehouse.

A quarter of a sim is a huge amount of space. Most people reduce that to an area that seems only as large as my old 4096 sq.m. parcel. I had Kichi set out enough trees and island pieces that I was able to construct a single large floating island with a bit of landscaping to the surface. Particularly, I wanted to have a river flowing through it which ended in two waterfalls on either side of the island.

SL can look magnificent with a good build and decent atmospheric shaders.

  With the layout in place I started in on detail. The farm portion of the island was easy, just laying out all the pieces of my old tropical farm build, minus the palm trees. I also cut out the stables from the old farm, since with plenty of island space I didn't want the farm itself to be the only interesting spot to go, so I spread the content out around the island.

The treehouse entrance is right next to the farm, at one end of the river bridge, making that one of the central gathering places of the island.

  I love to explore, so I also love to craft environments full of nooks and crannies for others to explore. I'm particularly proud of the secrets for people to uncover at the Island of Milk & Cream.

Just a well in a gorgeous forest setting, or is there more to it?

 There's currently three major secret areas to the island, each one is just as detailed as the island environment itself, showcasing just how much content even a quarter of a sim can hold as well as all of the importance of all of the design issues I've brought up in previous articles about Second Life.

 Observant explorers should notice the rickety looking ladders, catwalks and scaffolding leading down along the underside of the island. Those that do will be rewarded with the discovering of the largest of the island's three secret areas. An underground bunker built into caves inside the island itself.

Originally inspired by locations from the Fallout games, my tiny shop in the Wastelands already has too much going on for this extended bunker area.

  The island's other two secret areas are much more tricky to find. It helps to think of Second Life like a videogame, poking at those items which, in a videogame environment, most would explore as a matter of course, but such secrets are so few and far between in SL that few SL users develop the habit.

The "Heaven" area is a homage to the previous "Milk and Cream Club", pieces of which we used around the island as "ancient ruins" to investigate.

 Still, the secret areas of the island are rewards for those who do, and fun little building projects for myself. I'm considering releasing some of them as skyboxes or building sets on the marketplace.

The underground spring grotto is still my favourite of the secret areas. You can't see from a screenshot, but the cavern is filled with animated water effects, including light reflected off the surface of the underground stream.

  There's plenty yet to do with the Island itself. I have big plans for finally working on the treehouse area and the airship docks that serve as the arrival area and shopping district for the island once mesh arrives, particularly the addition of 64m prims. For the time being, the current dock area was created by Alyce Beaumont-Snow and the current treehouse area is mostly Kichi Kutanaga's work with a bit of additional detail added by me.

 In the meantime, the island is coming along nicely and there's already plenty to see and do, even if cowgirls aren't your thing. If you have an SL account, you can visit the island by following the SLURL here.

A Brief Thought About Script Memory

 I have seen  a growing number of people in Second Life lately claiming that excessive script memory use does not create lag.

 I understand the argument. Theoretically, when script memory use exceeds a sim's allotted 300MB of memory (I've also heard 100MB, not sure which is the case), scripts simply cease to function, going into a queue until it's their turn to get some of the sim's limited resources. A step LL took deliberately to reduce sim lag.

 It makes sense, and yet experience tells me it's not entirely true.

Just today I was at the Island of Milk & Cream, a sim I did the majority of the building and design for, when the lag spiked terribly. With 10 people in the sim, at one point four of whom were using around 20-26MB of script memory. One of them quickly left but three remained. The avatars in range of my script memory HUD were totaling 120MB of script memory, in addition to whatever the various builds in the sim take up and the avatars not close enough for me to see.

 As the worst offenders dwindled to only one. the sim performance improved substantially. At the moment there are still 8 people in the sim totally only 38MB and the lag is pretty much gone. 

 Another sim I frequent, Doomed Ship, regularly has 10-20 people or more and yet never has lag as bad as Milk&Cream regularly experiences. Neither sim is a Homestead, they're both full sims. The difference is that Doomed Ship does not allow individual avatars to exceed 7MB of script use and runs a campaign to encourage as little individual script impact by avatars as possible. They're quite friendly and helpful about it with staff members willing to take the time to actually sit down with visitors and help them reduce scripts without losing their favourite features.

 Admittedly,  this is all based off my experiences, not hard technical knowledge of how script memory impacts sim performance. However I work closely with a number of SL's top scripting talent and they all agree that script memory use does have an effect.

 When Linden Lab first introduced the feature to see script memory use among avatars many people worried it would turn into some sort of witch hunt. In some places in SL maybe it did, but I never experienced it. Most places I have seen which even have public "script use boards" displaying avatar memory use still have no actual rules against excessive script use, but encourage people to understand that such excessive script use is a primary cause of lag.

 I think that is a good first step that should see wider use. Rather than immediately clamping down, popular areas should merely point out avatar script use and explain how it impacts the performance of the sim for everyone. Explaining how to avoid excessive script use while still enjoying the range of features people are accustomed to (lower script memory use does not mean sacrificing features, many scripted items in SL are simply scripted poorly and there are better scripted alternatives).

 LL should also make it easier for the average SL resident to check their own script memory use and what attachments contribute the most to their impact on sim performance.

 I'd go so far as to say LL should make some of the better shopping habits a part of their own suggestions to new residents.

 1. Avoid no-mod scripted items. 

 2. Look for script memory use to be listed on vendors. If script memory use is not listed, ask the creator how much memory the attachment (and any accompanying HUDs) uses.

3. Remove scripted items that you do not actually use, such as combat or role-play HUDs in areas where they serve no purpose. Or hidden attachments that you're not currently using.

4. Remove unused scripts from attachments. If you have a favourite gun you wear on your intergalactic bounty hunter avatar, but you don't actually use it's scripted features it's just for looks, make a copy and remove the scripts! Have some heavy armour filled with colour change scripts you never use? Remove those scripts! Resizable hair? After it's fitted, make a copy and remove the scripts from the copy you wear.

4. Try and keep your overall script memory use under 2,000kb.  Most places generally suggest 5,000kb but you really should be able to have all the features you enjoy and stay well under 2,000kb. Aiming for 2,000kb and lower (I'm usually around 400kb-500kb and my avatar is heavily scripted with features) will put more demand on content creators for efficiently scripted attachments and HUDs.

 Content creators themselves should remember to try and make script efficiency a feature. Advertise how little script memory your attachments eat up. Work towards reducing the number of scripts in your creations whenever possible.

 Linden Lab should take this a step further by making script memory a part of marketplace listings just like perms and prim count.

 The onus is on LL and content creators if we want people to reduce their script use. The average user just knows that they want their features, and reducing script use by sacrificing those features is not what they want. However, once low-memory alternatives are available, it becomes much easier for them. There's really no reason why having a well scripted avatar shouldn't be that easy.