[Opensim-dev] weird idea #1: lightweight agent/ spectator

[Dirk Krause]

Sounds good.

 

Remember that someone (you?)  in the openviewer discussion back then
told me, that there were server updates everytime you turn around?  I
was really surprised at first because of the inefficiency that I
suspected. Then I thought, ok, this is not WoW - the scenery can change
anytime so the next time you look back the wall behind you could be
gone, so it is a good thing that the server does send it again.  

 

But then again ... if there was a flag saying 'this is a wall' and it is
not going to change anytime soon and 'this is a powerpoint presenter'
this *will*l change anytime soon ... the stream of updates for a regular
agent viewer wouldn't need to change then (thus not breaking SL
compatibility), but for a 'simple observer' I would hope that the number
of updates decreases dramatically.

 

I am not saying this is the solution, but I think it's worth the while
thinking along these lines.

 

 

Von: opensim-dev-bounces at lists.berlios.de
[mailto:opensim-dev-bounces at lists.berlios.de] Im Auftrag von Dahlia
Trimble
Gesendet: Montag, 26. Januar 2009 12:23
An: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
Betreff: Re: [Opensim-dev] weird idea #1: lightweight agent/ spectator

 

I thought that the biggest contributors to agent related overhead were
the object updates and asset downloads that had to be sent to each
viewer - not sure that a "simple observer" would reduce that overhead
all that much. Perhaps if these data transfers could somehow be
offloaded from the host that was managing the scene, some sort of
"sharding" but only scene content and updates, and let the clients still
send their individual updates to the main host? This may accomplish
something similar to what you are describing.

 

 

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 2:21 AM, Dirk Krause <dirk.krause at pixelpark.com>
wrote:

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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