with enough money, can this be done.

Dreams are great if the technology to make them possible is around the corner.

Say your goal is:
Well, you're going to run into issues. I think the current "sim" limit is 40 residents per region. You can get up to 160 if it's 40 per sim and they're all near the corner of the region nearest the other three sims.

Why is it so hard to stuff more people into regions? Can't they just change the code and allow more? Yes. Yes But... Follow this progression:

1 active and relatively stationary resident in a sim. Data flows from client to server and back to the client. They do something, the sim processes the action and sends the result back to the client.

2 residents in a sim. Same deal, double the input from clients... but 4 times as much output. Person 1's actions are seen by himself and person 2, likewise, person 2's actions are seen by person 1 and themself.

4 residents in a sim. 4x as much input ... 4 times as many events to mediate for the sim... 16 times as much output to send.

8 residents.... 64 times as much output from the sim.

16 residents... 256 times more output data.

32 residents... 1024 times as much outbound network traffic.

64... 4096 TIMES as much output.

160 residents all within view of each other all moving around, chatting, interacting with objects... results in 25600 times as much outbound network traffic as one person all by themselves.

Clearly LL has decided that this is their functional limit and put a restriction down preventing more than 4x40 people from congregating within sight of each other.

It's not just a limitation of the sim server to handle mediating all the interactions between people... and clearly SL has some ability to split that load up over a few servers effectively.... but it becomes a massive networking problem. Every connection to SecondLife is like a private phone call. You're looking to deploy a phone system that can handle 100,000 people dialed into the same conference call, more or less.

for 100,000 people to see each other all at the same time would increase the amount of network load associated with it to 10 billion times that of one person... roughly 4 million times more network output than SL has shown itself capable of for people in proximity to each other.

Understandably, 100,000 is a stretch goal.... perhaps 10,000 is more realistic? That only requires that SL technology advance to accomodate 4000 times as much outbound networking traffic for a small grid cluster. Which, at the current rate of technology advancement might happen sometime in the next 17 years (assuming we see a 10x improvement every 5 years which may be way too optimistic)


Anyway, yes there are clever tricks that can be done... maybe things like 'multicast' could help whittle away much of the unnecessary duplication of outbound traffic, if we could count on it being available for all users. Finding ways to more cleverly distribute the central processing would help to.

In any case... too many residents quickly creates a black hole where there's so much density of messages that a tiny percentage actually manage to escape to be successfully delivered.

If you make the island out of multiple sims, yes.

Number of servers needed is directly proportional to what the people are doing, and when. This is key.

I'll cut to the result of some longtime personal research: essentially one sim 'supports' about twenty users apiece, on average, if they are to interact with anything in-world. I'm not going to support this figure here, but it's an economic metric I've learned the hard way, in business. A few factors can sway it but I won't get into that.

So, 100,000 / 20 is 5000 sims. Or very roughly, about the size of all those sims you see on the world map.

Integrating your systems with the Company's (whatever your system may be) could be fairly easily accomplished with someone versed in libsl and some dedicated servers.

There's one very critical point, though - where are these people coming from? Who are they?

Building such a network is a pale shadow of the effort required to round up a userbase.

You can look at the opensim project at:

http://opensecondlife.org/wiki/OpenSL

Jopsy, Desmond and Destiny. I thank you very much for your information. What i have gathered from your posts is that it may be possible to realistically try for 1-3,000 residents provided i have enough sims/servers. So for example: to get 2,000 residents to an event, i could combine 100 sims supported by 100 servers? Can i make the residents who show up empty their inventory (concerns about people bringing scripts to purposelydisrupt the event), and down load the inventory that they would need for the event (cheers, boos, screams)? And with 2,000 residents can this be done smoothly without lag,freezing, or getting booted off? If this is possible, then this is where i must start until LL catches up to "your World, your Imagination". Thank you all again.
As for the marketing strategy, i plan to advertise both in-world and in the RL world for any and all events. I have secured letters of intent from potential talent and agencies. So it is very funny that the only thing that may alter my plans is the technology. But someone must be the Maverick!

Jamil

Considering the number of people who I get complaints from about not be able to get their inventory it is possible, however; many avatars especially furries are all attachments and scripts to look like themselves. And some basic items need to be in inventory - clothes, skins, shapes, etc.

The most direct way I can think of would be to negotiate a pre-created set of alts with Linden Lab.... attendees are given the alt and its password as their "ticket" to the event. The alt becomes active shortly before the event, and connects to the grid AT your event. Afterwards have LL destroys the alts used.

It's certainly not fool proof.... but could help.

Likewise, if "money is no object", you could commission LL to create another area like the teen grid to host this event, and do the above with accounts created for the event, which would prevent anyone from importing objects they could attach during the performance.

Where there's a will... there might be a way.

If you are running an event you will need a lot less than 100 sims - my figure of 20 per sim is for long term avatar usage, not merely a span of say, less than a week.

You might realistically get 50 avatars per sim before it gets less than usable.

No need to have people empty their inventory; there are estate management controls, such as shutting off foreign scripts, that will reduce the event disruptions considerably. It's also very easy to 'push' items to arriving avatars along with a note explaining that these items are for the event.

To to this 'smoothly' you will probably need a very, very carefully made environment for low lag conditions - very few really know how to do this and make it also look good at the same time. Also, you'll need to limit avatars to maybe... less than 40 per sim.

The problem is that all sims by design are 1/4 kilometer wide, so your event will resemble small groups of 40 standing around at 1/4 kilometer intervals.

It's possible to use 'maximum' values at sim corners: 100 avatars max at a junction of four corners, or, 400 avatars at an event. Such an event, while possible, would not be characterised by anyone as 'smooth' by a long shot.

But by the time you have all your ducks in a row, likely the technology will change a bit.

This blog http://davancamus.hexaflexagon.com/blog/ is full of posts regarding the creation of the Longrange concert in SL last December; thousands attended.

Just scroll down the page a bit; look for Longrange, Sine Wave Island, and related posts.

I'd strongly suggest contacting Davan Camus, Horg Neurocam and Easy Babcock inworld for more information.

The size and shape of sims in SL are just a programming decision. No technical reason why a sim can't be 1/10 kilometer or 1/10 meter. It's a choice made for 'human' factors. For a special event I don't see any technical barrier of having the participants being shrunk down in size and give the performers a more close up relative appearance.

It might actually be better to make the avatars larger instead of smaller, and increase player's draw-distance... as far as I know it is non-trivial for LL to change the dimensions of their sims. It's probably hard-coded in at 256m x 256m per region. If that's only going to hold 20 to 40 people, all the more reason to make the sim look smaller by putting larger people on it.

Thank you both for your continous help, and i have already taken a look at your friends sims, i will definitely try to contact them this weekend. I see that they have meshed 12 sims together(i think i read that right). If so i am curious to know if that could be done with 100sims? To answer your question, i plan to have the sim ( however many i can mesh together) open for performances ( i would not mind if people came to the island to walk around and look at the venue when there are no events) however, when there are'nt any performances it will be empty. If i could mesh together enough sims, i would not mind trying to build more than one venue (of different sizes) so i can keep a diverse group of entertainment performing on a daily basis. (shh, don't tell anyone).

Ah, I think Easy got the Company to 'mirror' sims for him for a fee; I'm not sure if they still do that any more.

But if you are willing to buy a large number of sims, there are other ways to accomplish the same thing. I think Sine Wave Island is back down to only one instance at present; you'd have to ask Easy.

It's pretty easy to tile 100 sims together. Just reserve the area, then buy 'em for $L 167,500 USD, and spend $L 29,500 USD a month to maintain 'em.

You can copy the content from one sim to the other 99 using 3 or 4 Rez Foo devices, though it would take a while - heh, for the trouble, you could prolly get something to be automatically scripted to do that for you without too much fuss.

I still think the real issue is attracting 4000+ people to what you have made, daily. That's fully 10% of the total users online right now, at peak.

If i build a venue that holds 4,000 people, i may only have major entertainment three days out of the month. With other venues on the same island (smaller sizes), i can host entertainment on a weekly basis that will attract people who are interested in niche genres of entertainment (still being vague). This will allow me to continously generate an income during the month. Trust me Desmond, with the line-up of entertainment that i have access to, i will not have a problem filling any venue.

Jamil

If I were in your shoes (and thankfully, I am not!) - I'd possibly look at an approach much like the one IBM took.

Multiple venues at 4-sim borders, each capable of handling 400 people (100 per sim x 4). They have three of these for a theoretical capacity of 1200.

Look up IBM on the grid map; if access is closed send me an IM and I can tell you who to get in touch with (or sneak ya in for a second). The IBMers are good people.

I'd suggest getting in touch with the libsl people too, who can control multiple instances of an avatar to some degree. That way, you can have multiple performances without any particular instance being 'the main one' necessarily. Note that the use of "NPC avatars" is a bit of a controversial topic, but in time I think these will be accepted. Or at least, there are enough human operators out there that are *so* boring you can't tell the difference anyway.

This sort of thing was key to the Longrange concert, and I'm still in awe of how that event was pulled off.

Some idea of who Longrange are: http://www.longrange.tv/music/

The event on their site: http://www.longrange.tv/2006/12/

"Box office": http://www.longrangeinsecondlife.com/

Some press: http://torley.com/omg-longrange-performing-a-concert-in-second-life/

Easy's site (he pulled all this off): http://www.thisisanotherdimension.com

Some Caledon community contributors: http://davancamus.hexaflexagon.com/blog/

libsl: http://www.libsecondlife.org/wiki/Main_Page
(note, some controversy surrounds the 'bots' - but in this venue, they rocked)


You'll need to pull out every stop to make something like this work. Good luck, you'll rapidly find out why these things are relatively rare events.

Would anyone happend to know the server specifcations per island? Information about the process chip, RAM, and storage capacity?

From here:Best I can do.

Like I said before though, to my knowledge LL have never licensed their server technology in the past.

The equation is quite simple really.... 4 x LL...

As the 'game' starts to become unbearable after 25,000 users and almost unplayable at 35,000.. there is your answer

BTW, I have an old 286 kicking about with .512mb ram, 32mb HD and a 256 colour on board graphics chip, Audio sound card (8 bit).. if you need a building block to start with.