Large event improvements

As SL continues to grow and evolve, we are starting to see more large scale events - weddings, festivals, dances, etc. that can attract enough people to often times block a sim. The problem is that past a certain number of people, the events become unbearable. At best, they are like being underwater, and worst, like a slideshow. Serious work needs to be done on improving the number of avatars that can be in one area. I don't know the solution to it on the technical side, but as the social side of SL continues to deepen, this is becoming more important. I have been to far too many ruined events because of the limitations of the software. There has to be some creative solutions to this problem. One interesting idea I saw in a previous post was implementing the concept of internal areas where you are only rendering that area, not the entire sim outside of it. For example, if you enter inside of a house, or a building, that is what is rendered. Not sure how it would work exactly, but anything has to be better than the lag fest that large events are. I would love to attend events, but they are so often an excercise in frustration.

Cristiano to add my two cents about Events - I'd like to see a broader system to handle Linden sponsered day-long and multi-day events.

The current system only allows for one inWorld announcement per Event. Furstrating when trying to get the word out to people inWorld in real time throught the day & night.

Maybe a new Event Catagory for No or Semi-Host type events?

I agree this issue really needs to be addressed. There are some really popular and neat events that people are holding but the system isn't able to keep up with them - and it gets so frustrating to attend them.

I'm guessing LL is well aware of this and are trying to resolve it as best they can. I wonder if it is primarily the sheer number of avatars to render and keep track of that is the main bottleneck. I don't think it is a problem with the actual environments themselves, but i may be wrong.

It would be neat if they could temporarily boost the server power for large-scale events - though I have no idea if that's even possible with their architecture.

One thing you can do is split your event into multiple events. Let's say you're having a day-long festival.
- Event 1 is the grand opening of the festival at 9am.
- Event 2 is a contest or some activity at noon.
- Event 3 is the closing ceremony with another contest or activity say from 5 to 6.

You can have 2 Linden sponsored events in a day. Ask a friend to do the third, or do it yourself as a non-Linden sponsored event. You can have as many non-Linden sponsored events as you like in a day, and they also get announced -- you just don't get paid or get prize money.

If it's a multi-day event, just repeat the process above on the second day with various activities. As people come to the official 'events', people will spread the word that there are on-going activities throughout the day.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,
Candie