Land on the Second Life grid can either be on the Mainland or on an Estate. Land can be owned either by an individual avatar or by a group. Estate land can be created whenever a user pays the start-up fee. Mainland comes into existence only when Linden Lab's management decides to create some. Linden Lab tends to be cautious about doing so, in order not to drive the price of existing land down too far. New mainland is usually auctioned off to dealers who subdivide it and sell it to other avatars, although Linden Lab does hold on to some Mainland for its own use.
The grid is made of identically sized regions (also called "sims"), each 65,536 m² in size. Each standard sim can support up to 15,000 prims. There is a limit to how many avatars can be on a sim, depending on the sim type. Mainland sims can support a maximum of 40 avatars, full regions can support up to 100 avatars, homestead regions can support up to 20 avatars, and openspace regions can support up to 10 avatars. On private estates, estate managers can set the maximum number of allowed avatars to less than the hard maximum.
An estate is an isolated group of one or more (usually contiguous) regions, all controlled by an estate owner who rents land to users. The estate owner pays a monthly "tier" fee to Linden Lab for the use of the space: the standard rate is $295/month for a "Private Region." Non profit users are eligible for a 50% discount, and sometimes Linden Lab makes regions available for free for special projects. The servers are owned by Linden Lab itself, not by the estate owner (although there is one famous exception to this rule: 's many regions are housed on IBM-owned hardware behind IBM's firewall.)
No comments:
Post a Comment