Once great clubs, being killed by their own popularity...

then again some owners make some of these clubs for the design and look.
the club i worked for is on it's 6th version and the owner has beautiful builds..it's just got a following now and people are just used to the rezz times and look forward to the builds..

they really have not slowed in traffic much in the last two years..
most people follow the rules posted.scripts are not cut off because people do use huds.
but there are some that go overboard..i think those get asked to reduce more than just anyone walking in with prim clothes on and a hud..

it you are flashing partical sticks and blasting off fog or star explosions around youself you are gonna get asked to stop or get ejected..
atleast thats how it used to be..i don't work there anymore but i would hate to see the owner cut back on his style for traffic or any other reason .because his builds are beautiful and part of the attraction to his places..

i think 10 avatars is the most a club can handle with all the textures and scripts running, and all the attachments and alphas the avatars are wearing. unfortunate that av's can't be supported.

That's what I like about the club I work at. It may be a small place, not the busiest, but it's a simple brick building (think remodeled warehouse or something like that), no fancy lights or flashing signs, no gesturbating or anything. We just enjoy hanging out, dressing up and picking on management. (it's safe to say that, they don't read the forums. I think. >_> )

This reminds me of a Yogi Berra Quote:

"nobody goes there any more. It's too crowded."

That's better than the ones who only ever say anything by running multi-line gestures with sound effects, movie soundclips, and the like. Of course they tend to infest sandboxes as well, so it's not like I'm getting away from them by avoiding clubs.
Bots and campers count as "anybody", Yogi?

The same types show up in classes too

If a place is high lag, I leave,. simple.. I don't go to clubs anyway, I just kinda hit the live music.. A few certain musicians you expect it and if you are not up for it... then catch the next show. But this is why I tend to stick to the new musicians, generally there is little lag and you usually discover an AMAzing talent that everyone else misses because they are at a lag filled old timer show singing the same songs day after day..... ; )

I'd just like to throw in the new viewer is a brutal bandwidth hog too. Using an older one with the command line change makes a MASSIVE difference *shrugs*

Yeah clubs, I remember when I was a noob too. What's the point? You want lag, go to Ahern.

My business partner and I run a club - we try so hard to keep the lag down, and I agree, it's about how many people are actually there, not all the little things that club owners often try to blame things on. I want to wear my HUDs and fully scripted hair and shoes, I don't want to have to take them off just to go to a popular place.

I think the dilema and the desire to get lots of people into a club, all comes down to making enough money to stay open. We don't have vendors (but we will need to soon if we are to stay open, and vendors pay for clubs with high traffic) and so we rely entirely on donations. While our staff get tipped well (which we both love and encourage), our donations can be pretty lame and so we actually pay to keep our club there for people to enjoy. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, I love our club and the atmosphere - we try to keep it intimate as we love how people connect and chat there. But if you want the clubs to stay intimate and not turn into the giant marketing factories, please think about dropping the odd donation - even $5L makes a difference.

And if you don't like lag and you want to connect with people - come to my place! LOL.

usually if its too laggy, ill get the media url and listen with winamp while I go elsewhere or log off, etc.

My partner and I do this if we are attending a live concert when the lag becomes sufficating. He usually grabs the medial url and we head home for some intimate dancing.

How do you do that? How do you get the media stream for a live concert and hear it elsewhere?

I can't be the only one who doesn't know. Thanks in advance.

Well... having owned 2 clubs now... first one open over a year and a half, second is fairly new but having a good start... there are two "rules" I have learned that I would like to mention:

Rule #1: Clubs Don't Make Money. Period. You simply won't ever get enough donations to keep the club running. Except *maybe* if you had it on a very tiny parcel like a 512 sm plot. Maybe then you could cover tier. But what kind of club would it be then ? (Okay <cough, Elbow Room, cough> it's possible... but, I prefer to have a bit bigger space... )

Traffic - real traffic, not bots, not alts - is an ongoing concern. In my case it's not because I want to get more money, because I fully understand Rule #1, that Clubs Don't Make Money, it's because, the more people, the more FUN the place is.. up to a point.. if it's totally lagged out, yeah then, that's not fun at all.

So, if you are only going to stay open if you make enough money to cover costs, best to shut the whole thing down now and save yourself any more effort and struggle. If, however, you approach it as a *hobby* and a venture for the fun (and headache) of it... then cool... Set a budget... e.g. you will dump 100 USD a month into it, for example, and move forward. Yes, it IS possible to cover costs in running a club, but whatever subsidizes the club won't be the club itself - it will be by selling mall space, products, etc. So then realize you will have *2* jobs... running a club, and running a mall/being a shop space landlord.

Which brings me to Rule #2. I said "job"? Yes, that's the other thing. Ironically even though you're paying *out* money, for a club (or any venture in SL) to be successful, you have to understand Rule #2... and that is, you have to treat the venture/venue nearly as seriously as a RL job for it to be truly successful.

What? But this is "just" SL, and SL is meant for "fun"!? Approach it like a job?!? Yes. When you start digging in your heels you'll realize that with all the competition out there (thousands and thousands of similar venues)... it's a job... that you pay for... and your profit is in warm fuzzies.

Is it worth it? Who knows. Warm fuzzies can go a long way, though

The media stream can be listened to outside of SL via a URL like a web site address. You can get it from the person performing or sometimes it is posted in a club or note card. If you don't see it posted, ask around and see if the venue you're at has this option available.

Of course, this means you can still be in SL but not have to be at the actual location of a live music event.

Nope, it's your fault, if people like you would stop going to clubs just because they are good clubs, they wouldn't be so crowded.
{ersonally I suspect you have a poor spec computer or ISP connection, because the most popular clubs I've hung out at don't seem to show any worse lag than I've seen anywhere else, and I'm connecting from Australia.

Intel Quad Core running on an intel passed motherboard.
4GB of dual channel DDR 2 RAM
nVidia GeForce 8800GTX (2 of them in sli)
Connection = 10mb down, 3.6 mb up

Got anymore bright ideas?

Don't hang out in clubs full of facelights?

I tend to visit sims and find small places with dance anims that are not heavily visited clubs. It can be very nice to be dancing on a beach or in a quaint setting and not have tons of people around. Since we have dances on our sims, I tend to be there alot too. We usually have anywhere from 5-30 people which is a nice amount without making it impossible to move. Conversation gets lively, there is great music from great dj's, but none of the massive chat spam etc that you typically find in clubs. So for me the answer is to find some nice places either by a happy accident or word of mouth.

Intel is overrated, and SLI even more.
But your system specs are fine on running anything I guess.

I can tell you that it is the overloaded avatars that cause severe lag when a sim is crowded. This coupled with too many scripts and nonsense running in the place. I have run events with over 80 people, and I routinely run events with at least 40 people, and the lag is never that bad really. This is because I have a strict policy on bling, AO's, HUDs, gesture spam, particle stuff, etc. These events are hand to hand combat events too, and our fight hud is a pretty heavily scripted item...and yet, our lag is very very reasonable even at these numbers.

Move to Australia, similar computer specs except only 1x 9800, my connection is 8Mb/1Mb, maybe you aren't really getting the 10Mb you thing you are (my ISP tells me I am paying for 20Mb), it's quite common for ISP's to throttle users during peak load times.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about how SL rendering engine works, and I can tell you something...

1. CPU matters less than people think. Extra cores do not get used.
2. SLI doesn't do any good because triangles per second aren't the real bottleneck, it's textures. GX260 is 10 times faster than 8600. but the practical FPS gain is only 30%.
3. Texture memory on your graphics card matters more than you think.
4. ARC is a joke. Two nude avatars with an ARC of 1 are roughly equivalent to one avatar with something like 6000. Avatar mesh itself is more render-intensive than is usually believed. ARC growth does not correspond to true rendering load.
5. If the avatar you don't see is behind a sufficiently big wall, or behind your back it doesn't affect your rendering at all, no matter how much ARC it has.
6. Object occlusion is computed not by prim, but by object, which means that if you see one prim out of a 255-prim linked building, all of it is rendered anyway.
7. Rendering the ground itself takes at least 20% of all the rendering effort, as well as rendering all the things that you don't see which don't get occluded. Go 1024m up so you no longer see it and your FPS skyrockets.

In short, the optimal set up for a club in terms of rendering load is:
1. A skybox well above 1024m off the ground and far from anything else that's floating up.
2. Partitioned in such a way with sufficiently big non-transparent and mostly unlinked walls, that no matter how many people there are, you can never see more than 10 or so at the same time.

This however will do nothing about sim being loaded to death by people downloading textures. That could be avoided if the texture-over-HTTP loading subsystem in the viewer and the related serverside support was finished, then it could be aggressively cached at numerous stages, including trivially caching them clientside. But this code stayed abandoned and commented out since spring 2007, and it doesn't look like anyone's working on it.

Go into the Advanced menu (if you don't see one, hit control-alt-D to enable it). Choose View Admin Options. Then either right-click on the land and choose About Land, or if you can't see it, use World -> About Land, and go to the media tab. Voila, what used to be ********************* now shows up as something like http://stream.slserver.com:8078 and you're in business, you know the address to listen to.

...or you can just click on the parcel name at the top of your viewer to get About Land.