At 21:27 14/12/98 -0800, Jeff Sonstein wrote:
>Danielle is not totally well yet
>and I needed to deal with that
Hope she gets well soon. Best wishes to her.
>...lag... a lot of people running around
>during the tag game...
>how many people and how much lag? (subjective is okay)
Only 5 people I think. I got the impression the lag built up whenever
people moved and decreased some time after everybody stopped, when it would
catch up in a rush. When many people moved, the bottleneck in messages
seemed to build up to a log-jam faster, and take longer to empty
afterwards. At times the message blockage would get so bad it would appear
that the world had frozen. Only logging off and re-entering the world fixed
this. Presumably with one less client to send updates to the jam was able
to free up much more quickly.
>the avatar-switching referred to
>in the note about the poetry part of the session
>sounded like it worked well and was interesting...
>anyone want to talk about it some to the list?
I thought it was a very neat idea and a cool way to perform poetry -- you
can't do THAT in reality. :-)
Steve -- tell us more about the nuts and bolts of it.
>any interesting lessons learned?
>or improvements noted which are needed by VNet?
Yeah. We gotta get this flooding problem licked. I hope I'll have time in
the near future to help with that (though my java talents are next to
non-existent)... but we are gonna need every pair of eyes available
checking the source for ways to squash this ugly bug. ActiveWorlds proves
that it can be done.
Ignore the following if it sounds a little too ambitious for just now.
Perhaps a place to perform such theatre a bit further from the landing pad
would be better. I have noticed that there is some kind of psychological
pressure to hold meetings on the sidewalk there. Maybe a more appropriate
place would be a stage in the center of the Town Square or the underground
bar that I promised Jeff (when I get around to making it.. "real soon
now"... [gulp]).
The problem with holding an event any distance from the landing pad is that
anybody entering the world may feel it is empty if they don't know exactly
where the performance is and can't readily see anyone else. They will see
the names in the list but will likely not "hear" anyone if they are beyond
hearing range. I guess they could always whisper...
Here are some possible solutions to that:
* A logon message of the day which tells people what is on this world today.
* A bot that visitors of events and their the location (like Blaxxun's
Dusty the Dustbuster). Jeff has already got what amount to a pair of bots
in his world already. Equipping a bot with AI for more complex behavior and
the ability to get a part of its conversation from an events file would do
the trick.
* A sign inside the world (like Jeff's one at the landing pad about moving
off to make way for others). If there is an underground bar it would need a
bright (flashing?) sign above it announcing the event inside to attact
attention... so that would need to be alterable. I guess this would require
either shared behaviors (someone setting up an event can switch on a sign
and alter its contents), or persistent objects (someone can cart a sign
into the world and leave it there) would be required.
All this would be nice, but we really need to get this message log-jam
thing fixed first.
Cheers,
- Miriam
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