April 17, 2013
Imagine you have built a home for yourself and your friends. Its a great home with everything you could want in it. Plenty of bedrooms for people to stay in, fully appointed kitchen with walk-in pantry, fridge and freezer, dining room, wine cellar, spa, gardens, living room, den, library, games room, the whole works. And you’ve built it yourself. You know every nail, every bolt, every two-by-four, brick and shingle that went into its construction.
Now imagine leaving that and settling for a smaller place. Imagine trying to build for yourself a one bedroom bungalow for you and your friends. It looks nice and your enjoying the building, but it just is not the same. It simply cannot be the same.
This is the situation that I find myself in with Excelsior Station. In moving to OpenSim I find myself trying to rebuild an estate into a bungalow. It is not the same and it is not satisfying.
I am not a happy camper.
So, I am rethinking my decision to switch to OpenSim. Actually, I’ve pretty much made up my mind. Excelsior Station using AuroraSim is far more satisfying to me than this rebuild can ever be. But there are some questions that need some pondering on.
If I do open the Station to the public, it will be a closed grid due to the lack of HyperGrid functionality. Which brings about the question of, will people take up residence there? I do want the Station to be a success and how popular it becomes will be one indicator of that. Other questions are, how to deal with currency? Can I attract a programmer to handle the AuroraSim software? What sort of arrangements can be made to host the Station? What about expansion, such as private regions? Or should I go with the anyone-can-connect model, such as used by OSGrid?
In the meantime, I’m going to dust off the archives and get back to work on the “estate” of Excelsior Station. And feel free to share your thoughts with me.
Your best bet sarge is to try and find someone willing to work on adding variable region size support to opensim. Justian has already said i beleive that if some one wants to work on it that he is ok with it being introduced into core.
I had to think a little on this, especially in light of a comment recently made on the MIV by Emporer Starfire. Apparently, their grid is implementing some of the AuroraSim features into their OpenSim code. Whether they will pass those changes back to OpenSim or not, I don't know. In fact, I have to admit that I know nothing more than what he posted in his comment. But that was only a few days ago, so I've not had the time to follow up.
One problem, though, would be region size. I am simply not going to rebuild Excelsior Station to fit a standard region size. I've just done that and it just is not satisfactory. Nor am I going to have the Station as a region on someone else's grid. I've tried that twice and both times the grids shut down before they even went online.
Sarge —
Now that you've used both, what do you see as the major benefits of Aurora-Sim? And what do you mean by "smaller space"? Why do you have less space in OpenSim?
Do you mean that, for a given server size, you can have more land in Aurora-Sim?
— Maria
One of the factors that is involved, Maria, is cost. Eventually, the Station will be online and open to the public. Using AuroraSim, Excelsior Station is a single region that is the equivalent of 128 OpenSim regions. Being on a limited income, cost is a huge limiter. I am thinking of going cloud, but I know almost nothing about doing so. Yet *grins*
For other benefits, well, there's the variable regions. Even using megaregions, there are some issues with region boundaries, such as landscaping and vehicle movement. Those issues are eliminated when using AuroraSim. Another benefit is the increased control over the configuration due to the configuration files being broken up into smaller ones. Some view this as more work than needed, but that is not an issue to me. If something is worth doing, its worth doing the work for it. The file based database, working alongside MySQL, is a big help with handling all asset data. Physics works, though vehicle scripts need a very minor bit of tweaking. The overall coding is actually more efficient than OpenSim is, which results in less of a load on your system.
Sarge —
Are these 128 usable regions?
For example, Kitely has their 16-regions megas, but you don't get any extra prims with that — you still have 100,000 prim total capacity, just spread over a larger land area.
With the Aurora-Sim variable regions, can you build up all of the space? I'd assume that prims (and visitor numbers) are still a constraint, both on the server side, and on the viewer side.
And I don't know if you've done the calculation — or can estimate it — but is there, say, a cost-per-prim difference between Aurora-Sim and OpenSim?
Yes, those are usable. My 4k version of the Station, which is what I was working on, is set to a 3,000,000 prim allowance, or the equivalent of 23,000+ prims per region, if those were separate regions. The thing is, they aren't separate regions, nor contiguous, on AuroraSim, its all just one large region. And that allowance can be easily changed using the Region Manager GUI.
In February of last year I did a small comparison between OpenSim and AuroraSim. Each instance had approximately the same number of prims and active scripts and I used similar objects, namely a couple of Linda's OARs and a bunch of vehicles. I did the testing on my single core machine with 3Gb of RAM. My results had both versions using 100% of the CPU, which is not surprising as it is a single core machine. But the RAM usage was significant. OpenSim used 2.58Gb (86%) while AuroraSim used 2.04Gb (68%).
I still have the single core machine but I am now using a quad-core with 6Gb of RAM. Perhaps I'll do a new testing, using the same single region OAR for both on the quad-core. And ti would be interesting if others also did some testing on their own machines, just to get a variety of parameters and results.
[edited to add] Forgot to provide the link to the articles I wrote about the tests - http://excelsior-station.wikidot.com/archives#toc25
What does setting the allowance show?
And can you really practically put 3 million prims on a single region? Sure, I've seen examples of hundreds of thousands of prims on a single OpenSim regions — usually simple blocks — but these were scalability tests more than actual use cases, since a heavily-built up region will take too long to load and visitors will get bored and leave.
The RAM savings are interesting — I'd like to see if other people can duplicate the results, and, if so, if the technology responsible can be ported back to mainline OpenSim.
I mentioned being able to set the prim allowance only to point out that it is very easy to do, that it is not set in stone, so to speak.
The reason I went with 3mil is because I want to have enough of an allowance available so that people won't run into limits if they should choose to visit and build. Don't forget, this is not a region of 256m x 256m with only one or two residents. This is an area equal to 128 regions with possible 100 residents. That would work out to 30,000 prims for each person.
I have been building in Kitely with the 1000,000 prims on a 16-sim size region. I will allow residents to do some building, but I am doing most of the major decor building. I'm not sure giving everyone 30,000 prims each would allow you to make sure everyone stays within theme. I built a sim-size castle, just for decor,
but I have at least 40 plots for homes for role players. And it only cost me $35 USD a month. I don't know the cost of Aurora Sim , but Kitely will be hypergrid enabled in a few months.
I was considering Kitely as well but its that cost. Being semi-disabled, I am on a very low fixed income with no increases in my benefits in sight. That is the limiting factor for me. If I am going to spend money on getting Excelsior Station online, then I want as big a bang for my buck as I can. With an OpenSim based solution, a person pays by the region, whether those regions are separate or contiguous. AuroraSim, though, is still only a single region, whether it is 256m x 256m or 1,204m x 1,024m. Or 4,096m x 4,096m.
What you just said about HG coming to Kitely is, in fact, my own thought about AuroraSim. That HyperGrid will come to it. And, if people are willing to wait for it on Kitely, I am confident that they will wait for it to come to AuroraSim, though there is no definite promise of it happening yet.
As for hosting, there's a couple of options. I could eventually host it from home to begin with. That's not viable at this time but I may be moving next year and so my ISP options will change. Zetamex is another option. To the best of my knowledge, they are able to host AuroraSim based grids. And, of course, there's cloud services. There's a learning curve there, but it is certainly an option.
In any event, it will still be some time before I can get the Station online. And even if I don't, well, it won't be for lack of trying.
why not have 2 excelsior stations, one on aurora-sim and one on opensim you have already anyway.
I'm a one project sort of guy :-) I tend to go all in when I am working on something like this. To try to develop two versions would lead to one or both suffering in quality.
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