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Sim Aware

The Sim Aware project was created to help land owners and renters on SecondLife know more about the performance of their investment. The way SecondLife works, a single physical machine holds multiple "sims". At this time there are usually 4 sims on 1 machine. When a sim is restarted or crashes, it usually changes which physical machine it is on. This project was created to help you find out which other sims share your server. Normally there is no reason to be concerned with this information unless you are hosting an event or you are having performance problems with your land and want to see if another land could be causing it (or feeling it as bad as you are).

Want to see the history of changes (or crash/restarts) for your sim? go here.
Want to see which sims share your server? go here.

There are 3 ways we get our data currently.

• A beacon land owners can leave on their property
  This device connects to us every 5min to update it's location.
• HUD device which users can wear to actively participate
  This device is triggered each time a user changes locations and checks in with us. There is a verbose version which reports back to the user that this is new information or old. There is also a silent version. This active participation system does track which user was responsible for updates for those with a competitive streak. The information provided to users will only be who was responsible for updating how many sims, NOT a full history of where a user has been.
• Embedded version (sim aware code added to other scripts)
  This is similar to the HUD device and connects to us when a user changes locations. The main difference is it is included or embedded in other scripts. This makes it easier for people to help the project without having to take up valuable HUD room or adding more scripts to their AV. Information collected this way is anonymous. [Example: SL blog hud we created to alert people about changes on the SecondLife blog also sends us anonymous data to help us track sim locations for this project]

SL resident Max Case was the first to do this type of a project to my knowledge. His site is still online and going strong and can be found here. Of course, this begs the question "why didn't you just ask Max about teaming up with his site?" ..and I don't really have a good answer, I just like figuring out how people did things.. and once I did I realized I wanted to go ahead and do something with it.