Nara started out with us, wanting to provide an interactive way for writers and readers to come visit and interact in a virtual world. Bringing books to life, so to speak. But when she started out, she decided to go with a standalone, as she wanted control over her users. But then she noted, after months of building up these huge and wonderful places. She began to outgrow the ability of standalone setup. This turned into me informing her, that she would need to upgrade to a full grid plan, to take the load off or move her regions into a grid.
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| This is a Grid Setup, notice how simulators are separated from the backend services allowing the regions to have more room to breath without the overhead of pushing everything through one single instance. (Image from Opensimulator.Org) |
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| This is a Standalone Setup, it houses every single service under the same roof. This is great if you need a quick and simple solution for building. But for a bunch of users and heavy usage, it is not ideal. (Image from Opensimulator.Org) |
As many people come to these levels, the price of running a grid is high, and requires a lot of work. Then she didn’t want to have to walk her users through someone else’s registration system, then not be able to go into the back of it and mange that user if she needs to. So I sat down and did some thinking, of what I could possibly do to make a middle of the road solution.
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| This is the layout of how the experiment works with Nara’s Nook (Image from my horrible artwork skills) |
So the solution we came up with is what you see in that horrible demonstration I drew. Nara’s Nook now is only responsible for taking care of her users, inventory of her users, and the assets of her users. We thought about putting those in our own system, but realized that yes it will be duplicated when they enter in and out of ZetaWorlds, but we wanted our future users to know they have all their data in their hands and not just the grids.
As you can see groups and profiles are from the same system, merging these together allows us to make sure residents if they interact in ZetaWorlds or other places they can all take advantage of the shared service, no need to replicate these and waste space.
Next you notice that users simply check-in with the grid when they login and are then passed over to ZetaWorlds regions. This is where the new Nara’s Nook lives on ZetaWorlds. Users have their inventories and assets and they work across this divide. Now this is nothing too new, this is just us working off the hypergrid and a few other simple systems we created to help the process along. Now that Nara’s Nook only has to worry about the users, ZetaWorld’s simulators can take the hit from her amazing and wonderful regions.
