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. _______________________________________________ Opensim-dev mailing list Opensim-dev@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev