How can we get more avs to an event?

Interesting way of looking at it! Actually the real world can get bogged down. For example, the speed of light slows to around 38mph inside a Bose-Einstein Condensate.

SL gets bogged down becuase the computing resources necessary to simulate the world are finite for a given area of space. I guess in a way they are also for RL (if we consider the interaction of fields between atoms to be computing elements), but in RL there is so much computing power available we only notice it's limitations in extreme circumstances like the BEC. Of course it's not feasible to throw thousands of times more computing power at the simulation and even if it were there would still be some limit to how many people could be in the same area because of the communications overhead, but still, most people who've looked at the problem realise that for scalability you need to be able to dynamically reasign the computing power so you can devote more to areas that have lots going on in them. I expect people in LL already know all this, but SL is the way it is with each machine simulating one fixed 256x256M area because it was simpler to program that way and if you're doing this commercially, you've got to get a product out in the market even if it's not ideal. It has to be said the simple solution is adequate most of the time.

I get what you are saying, Stephane. And reading this thread is a little frustrating as people seem to want to solve a different problem than you're really addressing.

On the one hand people want to improve the current performance of SL under normal conditions. Fully Interactive Avatars doing fully Interactive Things in a Fully Interactive Sim. Which is great and a worthy discussion and I hope some of the fantastic ideas presented here get the attention they deserve. Just as your idea should receive proper attention in the thread dedicated to it.

But what you are talking about is creating a different way to interact with the world. And I think its a fantastic idea that would create a broader range of types of events.

In the real world, I like hanging out with a small group of friends, but sometimes I like to go to a Laker game with 10,000 other fans. And believe me, Kobe does not want me to wander on to the court, bump into him, complain about lag, ask him not to start cause I'm not rezzed yet, or otherwise interrupt the flow of the game. It's a strictly observer activity that myself and 10,000 other people paid good many to do. Sure we could watch it on TV, but it was more fun to be there, even if we couldn't play basketball too.

Thats the type of experience Stephane's idea is addressing. I dont know anything about the technical stuff...but i do think a feature like this would make for events that are not possible now, but I would love to see.

Live theatre comes to mind. A situation where you dont want any degraded appearance/performance for the actors, and the audience is expected to STFU and keep their butts in the seat , so everyone can enjoy the show presented instead of the wisecracks from the peanut gallery.

Anyway, I like the idea, I'd definitely want to use it, both as a spectator and a presenter, and think it would expand an area of SL that is pretty llimited right now.

Thanks for your crystal clear thoughts Bel! You're saying it much better than I am.

*beats up on Richard's analogy* Hehe, light never slows down at all... simply the apparent speed of light changes. But this isn't a thread about quantum physics.

Personally, as a sort of... well, I won't call it an emergency measure... how about an overload handler? ... I like the ghosting or iconification idea. I like Tiger's idea (stop stealing my ideas before I think of them! ), letting someone choose or create an icon for themselves that would act very much like a textured particle (always facing the viewer). I'm not sure I like the idea of muting these poor, iconified avatars... it's bad enough having your body bitten off.

I assume this isn't something a player could do voluntarily at any time, otherwise we get right back into the ghosting-avatar-sneaking-into-my-bedroom problem that everyone gets strangely upset about.

Richard Pinkerton - I enjoyed your idea and it inspired another.

Create a few new "power servers" and somehow dynamically and/or manually allocate them to larger events happening in sl. Maybe deport/snapshot them to a new server before the event w/Veritas or cheap-ass rsync. Create a GUI/automated way to snap the stuff over and sync it to real-time and switch it. As far as marketing and ROI are concerned, you could charge extra based upon a floating scale of user numbers and or bandwidth?!

Even better - dynamically assign power from unused, idle servers. It's not THAT hard to do...