How can we get more avs to an event?

Originally posted by Stephane Zugzwang as a hotline question:

Currently SL Sims as well as the client software can't handle much more than 40 AVIs at one time, considerably less when there is a lot of sophisticated hair or clothing needing to be rendered (a problem touching both the client and the download of objects).

This limits the size of events and shows we can have, and the economic impact of any event. A fashion show, or an important opening like Chinatown, cannot have much more than about 20-30 attendees for example, putting a cap on the trouble people can reasonably be expected to go thru to organize any event. The proposal below is a solution to allow SEVERAL HUNDREDS of people to attend an event, not a couple dozen:

I once was on a much simpler 2D virtual world called VZones (still running actually), where people could "ghost" in any location, ie:

They would be able to see other avis and conversations
They would be able to IM AVIs present
They would be able to "move around"

But:

They would be invisible, except for an icon on the screen of other AVIS present denoting the presence of "ghosts" -- no "spying" allowed
They wouldn't be able to interact with the world
The wouldn't be able to participate in public chat

In other word, presence in the world in "view only" mode, no "be viewed" mode. When I'm a "ghost" I'm only a "camera" in the world and a voice in IM, not an avatar.

That way, additional AVI's don't require ANY rendering at all. On the server, the only thing that scales up then is the bandwidth coming out of the location (in purely linear fashion, with one additional stream per ghost). The client is not affected.

It has many implications too long to go into here (emptying the world of visible AVIs for one if allowed outside of specific, Linden sanctioned events or places) but I feel there are events where it would be TREMENDOUSLY USEFUL, such as town halls, fashion shows, important openings, and any events where you have a few 'doers' and many onlookers. It would ENABLE MUCH BIGGER AMBITIOUS BUILDS AND SHOWS, given organizers could get a sizable audience/impact (100s, not 10s). SUCH EVENTS WOULD GO A LONG WAY TOWARDS REBUILDING THE SENSE OF COMMUNITY WE ARE LOSING AS SL GROWS.

Any thoughts ?

I don't think we'd have any problems with the world depopulating permanently due to an "invisible avatar" feature for events; at most it would be temporary during a popular event.

This would be fantastic for townhalls, where we really really REALLY don't need 50 people clamoring for linden attention (silly or otherwise); that worked in 1.1 when the world had 100 people in it a night; now with every town hall having 400 listeners on a bad day it's getting to the point where you can't hear the lindens from the noise everyone else is generating.

Invisible "camera" avs would be awesome. Or even just "camera" prims that let you shift your view to the PoV of a prim (unable to move it, of course, or talk).

If i recall, though, that would require video cards in the servers.

I dunno. Just thoughts out loud

LF

Forgive my possible ignorance on the technical side, but I thought a large amount of Avitar lag was caused by attachments - and lots of them.

If it were possible to set a "prim limit" per AV on a parcel, would that not help immensely with lag? If I had to remove most of my attachments, or use lower-prim ones to attend a popular event, I'd think that would be a small price to pay.

Just an idea

Hehe, my Lost Therian hoochie hair attachment (no disrespect, Lost ) often just detaches itself on lag-prone parcels. Someone mentioned that this unexpected detachment phenomenon can happen on "no-build" lots, but it doesn't seem to always be the case.

Interestingly enough, I just hosted an event on my very laggy sim, Palulop. There were particle streams, lots of lighting and scripts as well as plenty of avatar attachments. However, compared to past events, lag was much less of a problem than in the past. All that to say I am not entirely sure avatar attachment limits, in and of themselves, are a complete solution to the lag problem.

Personally, I think a reasonable limit makes some sense, but it shouldn't just "happen" without warning. Maybe the better approach would be to pop-up a dialog alerting the user that their avatar attachments are contributing to lag, and then an Ignore/Accept button set would allow the user to choose whether or not to detach all objects. (Alternately, they could just selectively detach some objects.)

i think having the ability to "ghost" into an event would be quite helpful; HOWEVER, upping the servers ability to handle more AVies should be the ultimate goal.

"ghosting" sounds like a wonderful fix for the interim though.. no matter how long that interim would be.


so yes, i endorse this feature!

What I remember from my time in VZones is how huge events with 100s of people could happen on the tiny VGA 2D screens. It really got people to SHARE common experiences, typically when they were opening new parts of the world, and people would gather and IM to their buddies as the countdown to the opening would tick .

As SL grows, I feel we're really missing that kind of community building events - and for the worst reason of all, technical. When an event is a huge success, we get many people attending, like Chinatown -- and then it fails precisely because of the number and the framerate that creates. Having a fashion show is impossible: If the show is any good.... the clothes won't render because of too many AVIs. How sadder can it get ??? And SL is growing, we don't need a 20% improvement in the size of events, we need 2000% at least.

Performance increase CANNOT be the answer alone: Scene complexity grows quicker than the number of AVI's (I'm no 3D expert, does it grow O(N2), O(N3) ???).

Whatever LL does, in the foreseeable future, HUGE EVENTS WILL JUST ATTRACT ENOUGH PEOPLE TO FAIL... whether that number is 40, or 60 if we have HUGE improvements in rendering.

"Camera AVI's" or "ghosts" are a radical solution around that hard fact: Disconnect rendering limits from the number of attendees. Enable events with 500 onlookers and a GOOD (not just decent) framerate.

Why 'ghost' at all? Why not just reduce the quality of avs? I feel that a lot of massively attended events involve interaction and would lose that without the ability to interact. If the lag comes from rendering so many avs, why not dynamically reduce their quality, perhaps store a very low poly and high poly copy of every av and show the low poly ones when a sim gets crowded. You could even simplify the bounding boxes a bit too. People would still be able to see each other, interact, and participate, but it would scale quality with quantity. Afterall, I thought that was the primary principal behind SL and its streaming capabilities.

Oh, some fascinating possibilities proposed here. I'm personally in favor of something simple too, like a slider in the menu bar (perhaps next to your L$ balance and the time) which you can slide to the left to drop a lot of graphics settings down for the benefit of performance. Like when I'm in a lagged club, or a popular fashion show, I often go quickly to turn my draw distance and avatar detail down.

Now, if such things could be automated with a click-and-slide, it would be one step towards facilitating a venue accomodating many avs.

I'm looking forward to the day we can have an event with 100+ attendance and FPS still above 10. Taking a metacue from Snow Crash, even, for those who want to chat in a crowded space and are really willing to sacrifice quality, I wonder if their avatars could drop down to a monochrome, fuzzy version as well as the surrounding environs. I'm not saying graphics as bad (or as classic, LOL) as Battlezone, but just a drastically lowered setting to help people be there.

I also wonder, I'm not sure how SL handles sound in this regard, but I note that I can "Mute" SL sounds in the Preferences -- but does that still stop them from loading, or do they just keep on playing, albeit silently? Sound is part of the processing as well, and those cycles could be freed up (if they aren't already), then we might have something going on. Also applicable to those events with Live DJs but you wanna cut out the annoying triggered noises that some repetitively hammer.

Hmmm!

Robin, I think this is a wonderful idea, or at least the beginnings of a wonderful idea. If you're going to implement it, I would like to add a suggestion:

Make the "ghost" av control as fluidly as possible. Don't lock it into "Walking, jumping, flying". Treat it as sort of a hovering sphere/drone, and permit it to control like one. This would be invaluable for future SL projects, especially making in-world videos or movie clips. One av can simply ghost themself and become the cameraman.


Also: Add a feature so that av's can be notified via popups when a ghost approaches within a certain distance of them, AND add the ability (toggle on/off) to view ghosts as a simple prim, say a pyramid or cone with the "point" indicating what direction they are looking. These two features would assist in lessening privacy concerns and dampen the careers of any up-and-coming upskirt portraiture artists.



Edited to add: Come to think of it, why wouldn't it be possible to have a toggle on/off option to show "point of view" for other avatars anyway? I don't need to see through their eyes, but it'd be cool if I could be shown a single-prim representation of where their camera is and where it's aimed at a given moment.

Rathe, Torley,


Lowering rendering quality is precisely what ghosting is NOT about:

1/
Given how scene complexity grows very quickly with AVI number, that would actually degrade the SL experience significantly, without allowing much more people. And a fashion show with monochrome 2-prim AVIs would grow boring quickly.

2/
We want something much more radical: A GORGEOUS 30-fps Chinatown opening presented by 10 members of the designer team and 300 PEOPLE IN ATTENDANCE all navigating smoothly the reflection lit streets - or a magnificent fashion show by Shiryu, Nephelaine and Chip, with the best models in SL, and 200 frenetic buyers - or an auction with the same designers for some EXCLUSIVE pieces where prices actually go through the roof, because there are 300 onlookers, not 15.

I know, I know Stephane.

I am in favor of this, and something tangential as well in addition. That is what my post said.

There are times where I would like to use "ghosting", yes, but times I want to interact as well. Some method to blend in and out might be nice... to be a spectator for awhile, and then a participant. There have been occasions where I was just watching the action, and then became part of the action.

Fascinating possibilities for sure.

I think we need a more unique term than "ghosting" as that currently carries negative weight. Any other ideas?

A good idea, but I think that there should be a graceful path of degradation, rather than all-or-nothing (even though all-or-nothing would be easier to implement, I'm sure).

Level 1: Ban attachments, object creation, outside scripts, downloaded sounds, and custom anims.

Level 2: No avatar textures. Avatars all look like monochromatic mannequins. (Maybe color them using their Effects color, just so there's a little differentiation.)

Level 3: Avatars are featureless spheres, again perhaps colored for some differentiation. All avatars are "phantom" and permanently in "Fly" mode. (Alternately, allow users to select any basic prim in any color to represent them; but no resizing/shearing/hollow, no texture/shiny/bump, etc.)

Level 4: Avatars are entirely invisible and intangible, as descibed in the original post.

At some level, the ability to chat openly goes away as well; or perhaps set that as a separate control.

Level 3 could be interesting. I can just see a bunch of multicolored prims hovering in the air around Philip as he does a townhall meeting. (Now I know Loki is the orange pyramid, but who's the green cube next to him? Oh, right, Cubey. Duh.)

Yes, my own preference is a slider bar... a FADERSHADER if ya will, 'cuz that's just too cute a word to pass up. This would provide a nice transition. Now, I don't know about the technical difficulties, but if it works, it works. And it'd be a beautiful type of geometric scalability.

The usages of a "Level 1" classification might curb down on GREEFER KIN activity, but then again, it would also discourage people to be social ("Ugh! I'm standing all ugly without my AO!" ).

I'm looking for context. Good point about the townhall.

I second the notion of "ghost" avs that can see chat and move the camera around but who do not stress the renderer or physics engine.
I dont think its very important, but it would be neat.

What's the point of 'being there' if im not there? Ghosting becomes as non-interactive as watching television. Except maybe I get to control the camera angle. This just seems like a cheap hack to say we solved a problem, when we really haven't while that effort could be put towards a real solution.

Believe me, I'm all for finding a solution to allow more people to attend without killing performance, but watching 10 other people interact while I can't, seems kinda pointless?

This idea gets more interesting and more complicated the more I consider it. For most "event" scenarios, I don't think it would be a great advantage. But there are some (like town halls) where there are a small number of participants and a large audience. It would be very helpful in those situations.

An event needs a sense of simultunaiety to make it feel like everyone is actually there, so at the very least the audience members should have some sort of icon that you can click or focus on.

There's another factor: how do you determine who is a participant and who is a ghost? And what if there's others in the sim who are doing other things - does the event force them into "ghost mode" when the population climbs too high?

I like Tinker's idea of levels of reducing detail, especially if it happens dynamically, but I think I'd rather see a binary option first. A single option would be eaiser to implement initially; once it was in place Lindens and players would learn how well it works and how it could be improved.

Robin: would any rendering benefit be gained if spectator avatars were rendered as simple prims, or a single particle sprite? I like that idea, especially if the prim can be a cone or something else that indicates viewing angle, but I realize that may miss the point.

If you do implement a ghost mode (as opposed to a simpler-avatar mode), how would it be enabled? Would enforcing/enabling it on a per-plot basis be enough, or should it be done on a per-sim basis? One option would be to have ghost mode turned on by each player, and have the land owner set a "allow ghosts" option (possibly with an automatic cutoff, e.g. "allow ghosts until 12 hours from now". That would depend on the spectators' kindness, though, so an alternative would be to force everyone to be a ghost, with some people tagged as performers (and therefore fully rendered). How about this: another tab in land options, with a text field and a list. If the land owner puts a number in the text field (lowered to 24 if greater than that, auto-lowered every hour), all avatars on the plot will be automatically put into ghost mode. The list would work like the current allow/ban lists for land plots, and anybody in that list would be fully rendered. This method would allow anybody to stage performances or presentations on their own land.

granted
What's so important about a sim which, though pretty is so laggy as to be unusable on an above mid range PC with all settings possible at minimum? I say nothing.

OK
Hmmm, like a second class citizen who can watch but not take part... Yeah right, that'll be popular!
I disagree, we might as well log out and watch tv.

Elitist cliques like the people who made the Chinatown would love an event where they were being watched by 300 people who couldn't answer back ...

Ummm... Lotte? :|

Well, while I don't necessarily agree with her, I do see her point.

Well, I don't understand what you mean by "elitist clique", Lotte? Unless you were making that comment tongue-in-cheek or not totally seriously?

I like the idea of being able to simplify AV rendering to a colored prim or something, but I'm not that keen on the full "ghosting" idea of being there but unable to interact. I think chat is important, and shouldn't be weighing the server down that much. Text-based MU* servers can handle hundreds or more at a time.

In fact, I'd be more willing to log in through a text-only interface, and only be able to get written descriptions of what's going on.

Actually, this is something I'm kind of interested in for accessability reasons. The existing interface doesn't support the vision-impaired very well. What if there was a MUSH-like interface to SL? You'd connect, be represented by a prim (or I suppose possibly by an av you could construct using text commands), and be able to move around in increments, chat, IM, examine and buy things using text commands, etc. The connection client could be hooked up to a Braille display or text-to-voice converter. Granted, a lot of what people would get on "look" commands would be "object" with possibly a "1x1.5m rectangle" or something equally non-descript, but it could be quite interesting in some ways. And the server load would be tiny compared to the rendering data currently sent.

Just a thought,

neko

Would it be possible for LL to start marketing special "four corners" plots to people with dreams of large events? Set them up so somehow they can share dwell/traffic as one plot (something you can't do across sim borders now) and make them the premium land in SL?