How can we get more avs to an event?

How much of lag from an av is from rendering, and how much is from physics interaction? I thought that a lot of it was from the physics engine having to worry about collisions etc. Perhaps we can do something that is like the avatar ghosts on the street in Snowcrash, where your avatar is visible but is phantom. That lets avs show up, interact in conversation, move their POV around, etc, but puts no load on havok.

I, for one, would be interested in hearing from any devs which rendering/processing is the most expensive in SL.

Maybe a top ten, if you will

Maybe it's difficult to quantify, as with many things...

can we start by disabling open listens on attachments?

To add to Robin's original, and so I don't get buried here (bolded):

How about a Linden-endorsed IRC feed to supplement the "ghost" thing (if chat commands are not rendered), so dialog can be piped both ways with the option of closing the floodgates should the discussion become potentially noisy?

Also, a "ghost" could easily become a new avatar class alongside (human) male and female, as an attachmentless (chatless?) system. This would be particularly useful for games utilizing advanced avatar options.

Since IRC can support a huge amount of people, perhaps this would be viable for allowing residents to attend both in body and in spirit. It'd also be particularly nifty to give us a new "feature" as an avatar.

/STAMP

and we can finally get in/out game IM support. I like this idea.

Jeffrey, do ya know about Adam Zaius's IRC relay system? Cool stuff -- it points to the right direction of the future.

I've known some people on crippled computers wanna come in on SL and help, so they log on and use debug menu to turn off most rendering types until they essentially just see floating nametags. This is certainly along the lines of what you're describing, and I can see a use for it transferred to, for instance, portable computers being able to "tap into" SL chat feeds.

Yes Torley - the resident-made IRC feeds were what I was getting at. Linden endorsement of it for events, well... would be divine.

Well then... ENDORSE ENDORSE ENDORSE!

Another option to degrading avatar visual quality would be to have the client render a one-time alpha texture of your avatar (it could do it invisibly to the client) and then use a billboard flat with this texture as a replacement for your avatar. The flats would always be facing the viewer (like the floating text does) and would look like the avatar.

If physics simulation is still a problem, they could be phantom as was mentioned above.

The flats could kick in automaticly when you enter an area with too many avatars already there. The first X avatars would remain 3D, so hosts have a more solid presence. Perhaps members of the land's tagged or owned group would also get priority for 3D-ness. The flat's image would be new each time the flat kicked in or the avatar changes appearance.

For extra credit, instead of just one snapshot four could be taken, with a 90 degree rotation of the avatar between each. Then, depending on which way the avatar is facing, a viewer would see one of the four different "sides".

The neat thing about this method is that a screenshot would look like there's a TON of avatars gathered in one place.

I like this idea... but I want to suggest something to go along with it. Let people create their ghost themselves as a kind of proxy of themselves. Set some kind of limits on it like "5 prims, 2 128x128 textures" or somesuch. It would create a lot less lag than avatars but still allow some individual personality. Half the fun of events is seeing the other people in attendance so that would make it a little more fun than just seeing a hundred spheres that are all the same color floating around Even if it is just a hundred spheres though I still think it's a good idea.

My Eggy outfit looks just like my forum icon and uses 4 prims and no texture... unless you count Blank as a texture.

I think the original idea of the thread is getting completely distorted : The goal is to make spectator events possible without any degradation in rendering quality. This is the only way to have:

- Town halls
- Auctions / Sales with many attendants
- "Master" building classes with world-class builders
- Fashion shows where a sophisticated dress doesn't take 6 minutes to render

- Big, community-building, openings or spectator events. Events where people can say "I was there" 6 months later. Some examples:
+ An inauguration by Philip Linden, with streamed voice, of a Sim like Chinatown
+ After 6 months of slugging it out with weapons in Chinatown or Simcast, a final duel between the two best warriors/teams, for all to watch, with BIG Linden Prizes, and betting (think "SL Superbowl" - in other words, SPECTATOR SPORT.

Some of these event could be fee based - today it is NOT POSSIBLE: given the VERY SMALL number of people that can attend an event while still getting a good framerate, price have to be very high to bring a sizable return to the organizer.

As for a way to enhance the participation of spectators, a simple alphabetical list of all AVIs present in a separate window, with IM a simple click away would do the trick. 300 3D or 2D shapes, however simple, would NEVER be a solution, even if performance were infinite, for ergonomic reasons. What would be the point of filling the screen with an unusable mess?

Scene scalability to the 100s of spectator AVIs, is a NECESSITY if events are to scale to the new size of SL. It requires radical thinking.

No offense but I hardly call turning SL into a yahoo chat room "radical thinking."

Hi Chip.

You wouldn't get to see Philip Linden in an AVI boxing match or urban warfare against Mitch Kapor on Yahoo would you ?

The list of AVI is not different from your IM list today -- how many of your inworld communication is just thru IM today, and you can't even communicate with friends on stuff you see together.

Imagine being able to auction live some great custom skins or clothes to an audience of 500 ?

Best,

I get where you're coming from Stephane. I just feel that half the fun of attending an event is the feeling of community of being there with the other attendees. I can't see myself getting that from a list of names. Considering that some people wear hair attachemts that contain as many as 150-200 prims as it is, I don't think that allowing people to create their own avatar proxies out of a few prims would cause much negative impact to performance. It would allow attendees to feel more like participants instead of just a name in a list.

I haven't read all posts carefully, mostly skimmed, so sorry if this is repeating of something I missed.

I think the idea of "ghosting" or plugging into someones "ghost" (to steal from GITS), would be a neat feature, but not an all out solution. I imagine it could work as the following:

- John Smith is at an event and wishes to act as a Ghost server, he opens up a window and presses a button "opening" him to be used as a server (perhaps the window would have a list where he could specify to only be open to specific users, or to ban certain users from using him as a server).

- Sue Smith wants to see the event, but can't get in the sim because its full, so she brings up a search window and looks for available servers at the event, the list shows John Smith, she then "plugs" into John.

The camera could either actualy act as if Sue was John's camera (john still maintaining his own) or John's camera could in some way be represented on Sue's screen in some other.

John could also perhaps select a setting to manualy approve users, or limit his servering to a certain amount of users.

Sue could maybe transfer her type perhaps through a different window to the event and it would still appear in Sue's name, not John. This however could cause confusion as well "Is sue really here? Where is she? Do I look for her?". Maybe the text could be represented as "Ghost)Sue Smith: Hi!".

Another idea, borrowing from the Ghost servering idea, would be to instead of having *avatars* have *prims* act as the servers, i.e. someone could setup a prim, and set it to act as a camera point to which people could "plug" into. Not sure how feasable that would be, but if you can remotely plug into avatars, are you just using the avatar as a main focus point to know where the camera should go? Could this not be applied to a prim? Hmm.

Regardless if its used in events or not, I think it'd be an awsome idea, but some restriction should be applied, no one should be an "open ghost server" for obviouse privacy reasons.

The other idea, which has been affore mentioned, was the Snow Crash idea, where avatars become phantomed. This would be a neat idea as well, say if you have more than x ammount of avatars, they become ghosted physicaly. But this begs the question, would it be just to other avatars? Would it be to objects? Would that be open to abuse?

What about selectively making avatars invisible? I.e. right click an avatar and select Hide. Thus I could Hide the crowd, but yet keep Philip Linden visible, maybe make it so I can drag select avatars I wish to Hide.

Or a setting so you could lower the quality of avatars farther away from your camera view in some sort. I could say, the closest 5 avatars to my camera should be in full detail, but the others should be of less detail, their attachments should be invisible, and maybe automaticly make them invisible all together.

How would I keep from coliding from invisible avatars? Perhaps if an avatar is infront of my avatar, make them automaticly somewhat visible, say 50% opacity?

Its a hard problem to solve. I think actualy *being* at the event, as in avatar presence, always holds some value, so ghost servering wouldn't be an optimal solution, but yet it'd be an awsome feature to see regardless, more of a novelty if you will.

Don't really see the point of any of these myself. I agree event hosts would probably love it (for the reasons lotte said ). But it wouldn't make me any more likely to go to events. What would be the point?

And I definitely am against all these suggestions about forcing attachment numbers, banning open listeners and the like. Find another way than handicapping my avatar - thats DEFINITELY not going to make me come to your events.

A lot of ideas Oz .

The "Prim server" seems to me the closest to bring out the benefits of "ghosts". Here is how it could work:

An event is dubbed a spectator event. Not a club meeting, not a party. Something that really screams for many spectators and fewer "doers", for a very special show where rendering and physics speed is paramount. For example:

A huge fashion show
A huge inworld auction
A "sporting" event - Doom like or boxing, or whatever, between finalists or SL Icons.

The events gets a Linden Sanctioned Ghost Server: An object, prominent in the location, that displays the number of ghosts (to build the suspense as each event tries to beat the record for more spectators ).

Spectators arriving to the location can't enter - they get the option to "ghost": They then only exist as a camera, with a starting position on the ghost server object. From there they can manipulate their camera just like we already do: Move it around, anchor it to other places or people... within a certain distance from the prim, just like today you can't move your camera miles away from your AVI.

A nice feature would be an alphabetical list somewhere of ghosts present with IM a click away- we assume there will be many, so there needs to be a way to navigate them easily (300 simplified AVIs on a screen WON'T work - remember how it felt to try to rate back someone in a room with barely 30 AVI's ?).

Stephane, another nice thing about this is if feasible, it opens up room for more possibilities. Awhile ago I was discussing inworld "webcams", so people who couldn't log into SL could easily see what was going on inside. This, of course, may initially seem to be an unrrelated idea, but part of webcamming is the voyeurism -- and spectacle -- of it all. This would include videoconferencing and the chat interfaces popular with current technology.

Maybe even guests who are not yet Residents of SL but curious to get a look into, and chat with occupants, would do so through these interfaces. Especially those who are shy and don't want to be overwhelmed but perhaps have some questions to ask. We already have gateways proposed on several fronts, such as a web-to-IM interface, and the IRC two-way comm system. With scalable bandwidth, streaming video is no doubt a possibility.

A mistake would be trying to segment and split things up into narrow branches, because we are in an era where customization is key and a modular system that could accomodate and be flexible enough for a diversity of tastes would rule. (Or rock, or roll... LOL.)

I myself, if unable to access SL in its full glory, would find this handy for mobile purposes.

What do you think?

AFAIK the load on the sim server comes mostly from the act of an agent observing the scene (when there aren't lots of lag scripts running ofc). Thus, allowing extra agents into an area whether they are represented by a proper avatar or by an icon would still slow the server down. It would help a little bit because all the other clients wouldn't have to download the avatar for the new agent, and it would help with the speed of the other clients because rendering an icon takes less time than rendering a whole avatar. However, I don't think it would improve scalability that much overall. Maybe if the person coming in as a ghost also saw everyone else as a ghost as well, but then the server would still take an initial hit as the new client downloaded all the prims and textures in the area.

The only real answer to the problem of too many agents in one place at the same time is dynamic sub-division of sims. That's a very hard thing to do technically and I doubt if SL is set up technically with that in mind (otherwise they wouldn't need a physical server for every sim in the map as most of the them are empty most of the time).

Richard,

From what I understand of declarative 3D programming, allowing invisible observers within a a confined space would only lead to a linear increase in the bandwidth out of the server, with no impact on scene complexity. That compares to the quadratic (at least) increase in scene complexity in regards to the number of visible AVIs.

What breaks down our frame rate today is too great scene scene complexity, leading to some problems on the server and many problems on the client.

Invisible avatars go a LONG way towards improving scalability.

I'm not saying it wouldn't make any difference but I don't think it would make enough difference to the point where you could have 100 or 200 people in the same place.

The biggest improvement will be in the frame rate of the other clients. However, as I understand it the problem is with the speed of the server not the client. If the extra agents are completely invisible, don't participate in collision detection or physics, then they don't increase the amount of data sent to other clients. They do however need a full set of data sent to them so they still increase the load on the server. There's a similar situation already with child agents (agents in neighbouring sims who can still see in). Annecdotal evidence suggests they increase the server load almost as much as normal agents. You can see how much time it being used using the Alt-1 display.

It would be an interesting experiment to get 30 or 40 people in one sim and then add a similar number along the edge of a neighbouring sim and see what the effect is.

I think this plan could work but it requires a bit more effort than just making the extra agent's invisible. If the extra agents don't interact with the world at all you could have them connect to a proxy/shadow server. Then the main sim would only have to send updates to one extra machine and that would then update all the clients. That would be a lot of extra coding though and it would get very complex if you did want the invisitble users to still be able to add to the chat.

I think the distinction between spectator events and participatory events is important, and ability to raise attendance levels of both is needed.

For "spectator" events, e.g. a speech by Philip, sports event, etc., I think the proxy server-ghost-camera idea would be sufficient, and should dramatically reduce load. It would also reduce interactions between avatars except to IM, but there is sort of a tradition that people at some kinds of events stay quiet so everyone can hear the speaker or watch the show or whatever. Showing participation in terms of number of ghosts is a really good idea. I would also suggest adding "applause" and other crowd reactions, because that is part of the general fun as well, especially for noiser sorts of events, e.g. sports. Maybe a set of smileicons that would grow as multiple people picked them, and even bounce around on the client screens if the count got high enough....

But we still have the problem that you can only have 30-odd (some very odd ) people in a sim concurrently, which just isn't enough, given the size of the sim and the price of having a sim. 30 people on my 1028 lot would be a somewhat crowded party, but it ought to be doable without crashing the sim or restricting my neighbors also wanting to login or have guests. More to the point, if I buy an island for the purpose of implementing a game (as I would like to do), I need to be able to have more than 30 people at a time able to login, or I doubt I can recover costs with modest per-player usage prices.

neko

And out of curiosity, how would dwell/traffic be generated by ghost avatars?

The real world doesn't bog down when a lot of people get together in a crowd. What kind of method would one use for a simulator to get a result more like what the real world does in that the computational power is always equal to the task?