One problem with SL that is addressed quite often is the limited number
of AVs that one region can hold ('the number of people on an island').
This comes up in the 'big number' discussion and especially in nearly
every meeting scenario that is of high interest to the community.
Somehow this is also influencing the 'relevance of SL' (and thus
OpenSim)technology and grid technology in general ('I can have hundreds
of people in a Habbo place but only around 50 in SL')
I really want to dodge the official 'big numbers' discussion by stating
what would happen when there would be hundreds of people in one IRC
channel and all of them were writing at the same time. But I do believe
that one viable 'big number' scenario is a podium discussion where a
couple of persons are discussing and most of the other people are
listening/watching/reading in general. Or a sports event of sorts, with
- well :-) - 22 people acting and many more watching.
So what I think what would be valuable is a 'lightweight agent'
construction. This would be an AV that basically can't do much except
listening/watching/reading, she especially couldn't rezz anything. It's
a bit like the 'spectator mode' in some games. This way there could be
big numbers of watchers, thus giving more people the opportunity to
attend a meeting - practically increasing the number of virtual beings
in a region, without bringing the region down.
I could think of at least two ways to acchieve this:
- a camera woman AV that 'lightweight agents' could hook up to, using
the client only as a viewer; this would be a bit like a video stream,
just with less impact, since the rendering is still done in the viewer.
- a stripped down agent that got rid of everything that causes too much
stress on either network or server. Unfortunately I don't know how to do
that because I don't know the OpenSim construction enough. These
lightweight agents could have a representation (a sphere?) while they
are online, a distinct place and the ability to look around and maybe
move slowly.
By having something like that we could get rid of the 'theres just a
small number of AVs in every region' dilemma.
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