Grid Q: max ppl

Hi. I am looking at the "grid" stuff for "virtual conferences" in Second Life. There is one thing I'm still not totally getting.

Developers I spoke to say that if I buy a SIM, it's $1000 + around $300/month. That's all the money Linden gets. And that based on how much we develop and how, I may only be able to have around 70 people there at a time. If I let more in, things could really lag, and possibly eventually crash the server.

I then read about Life08 or some sort of conference that seemed to be happening earlier this year in SL. They claimed around 1000 people were coming. How do we do something like that? Would I really have to buy 15 SIMs and distribute people around them?

But if I do that, then still, not more than 70 people could listen to a seminar I was giving (for example). Even if 300 people wanted to hear that talk, I'd have to give it multiple times, 70 people at a time.

Am I understanding this correclty? Or how do you scale this so that you can do events with more than 70 ppl (give or take) in the same place at the same time?

Thanks!

One way is to have four sims. You place your auditorium at the corner where they all join.

And 70 is a very optimistic number. Most sims are full at 40 avatars. So a 4 sim configuration would allow you 160 attendees. Having been at some Mentor meetings with over 100 in attendance, I can tell you that the lag is going to be significant.

SL is just not set up to handle very large groups of people.

Those prices sound right. See http://secondlife.com/land/privatepricing.php .

If you don't need the region long-term, you might be able to rent one instead. Dunno what your options are there but I don't think you can do it directly from LL.

The number of people a sim can hold at once depends on how hard you're pushing it but the absolute most you'll be able to get on at once is about 100. It's really just a computer on the back end - the more you load it down with scripts and objects and people moving around, the sooner is going to grind to a halt..

edit: and, as Lindal says, 70 in a region at once is going to be hard to hit unless you're careful about the build and the avatars attending are not loaded down.

If you mean Burning Life, I'm guessing that 1000 estimate was over a period of time, not all at once.

Then again, it's LL sponsored with 20-odd sims, so maybe not. *shrug*

Hi, Aquaria, welcome to the forums.

Life 2.0 was a week-long conference in SL last March, bringing together technology professionals from companies like SUN, IBM, Dr. Dobbs, Cisco etc. to discuss the issues and future of virtual worlds. So, yes, it is completely believable that they had attendance of 1000 people over a week of seminars, workshops, etc.. The central Life 2.0 venue was I think is at a juncture of 4 sims; however as in real conferences that would host keynote speakers and events, with streams available for viewing inworld and from websites. Smaller events for such conferences can be scattered around the grid.

http://www.life20.net/ You can probably find the organizers from the website; if not, they have a new inworld group, and I can send you the name of it if you drop me an IM.

If I were holding such a conference, I would do as they did: a central, low-prim gathering area at the juncture of 4 sims, where about 150 avatars could be accomodated simultaneously, and a schedule of smaller meetings in existing venues (such as Reuter's conference rooms, NMS, etc.), probably donated by partners.
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Well I will say no more than 200 people spread across 4 sims, this is just because everyones computers will start to burn from all the avatars.

Life 2.0 was setup across 4 sims, I believe one sim had the stage, and three sims setup for the audience. They had a pretty decent setup, I was able to speak there with horrible internet and on my old laptop (Long Long Long and funny story)

Yes, it was over the course of a week. Still pretty impressive.


There is still another option though!

You can have multiple events at once. Just have a carbon copy of the event in several different places. They did this once for a concert that I believe had few hundred people across several carbon copy areas.

Thanks to everybody for the info!

As for the carbon copy thing, if I am the live speaker and I'm giving a live PowerPoint presentation, can all those places hear me and see my presentation at the same time?

Thanks!!

There are a few different ways to do this. If you are doing the speaking in voice or the presentation through media, then perhaps the best thing would be to do it all through the land media settings and stream it from outside SL. Then you just set the media settings for each parcel / region, and everyone will be able to see and hear.

If its something you are doing with inworld chat and using a scripted slideshow device, then it is also possible to have things 'echoed' to 'repeater' objects in other regions - you could have a podium and mic object that echos your chat statements to other objects in other regions, and when you change slides on a scripted slideshow, it can echo those commands to other slideshow objects in other regions.

Different methods have different pros and cons, of course.

-Atashi

Wow, that sounds genius! I didn't even know you can do that! I admit to being a n00b. Only signed on to SL for the first time not even a week ago.

OK so I can stream my webinar from outside SL... the PowerPoint comes from somewhere, and my voice comes from somewhere... I guess someone who knows scripting and building would know about this?

I'll ask my builder once it looks like we're going to build.

Thanks again!