tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465985343200553423.post5523650869799653728..comments2010-03-08T10:36:21.554-08:00Comments on Another Day Down: Dragons & Aliens & Monsters, Oh My!Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7465985343200553423.post-50075649115885797512009-10-12T07:12:38.508-07:002009-10-12T07:12:38.508-07:00The Field Trip will open your eyes to the range of...The Field Trip will open your eyes to the range of avatar styles in SL. Robots, furries, warriors, even common animals abound. <br /><br />You may see child avatars. They made me shudder until I discovered that many adults love the idea of being a little kid on the playground again. There may be no darker side to it.<br /><br />As for population, I've heard a number of critics say "SL cannot scale" to millions of residents. For a number of technical reasons, they may be correct. At the same time, Linden Lab has enough server space now to support more avatars. Every time a major "concurrency" number (the number of residents in-world at one time) approached in the high-growth era of 2007, the critics said "massive fail approaching." Yet SL handled 40K residents fine, then 50, 60, and 70K. Even above 80K online it seems to work well, with occasional problems.<br /><br />Numbers in a region can, however, create massive problems. Complex avatars with lots of fancy gear and scripted parts slow performance, often to a crawl. Past 40 in any region and it become acute. You may see this if you go to Burning Life 2009; a few brave 103ers went last year and enjoyed it, "lag" and all. They REALLY got the see the characters on display:<br /><br />http://fall103.pbworks.com/Andrew%27s+Blog<br /><br />Andrew and a classmate decided to go (scroll down about half way to see his photos).<br /><br />But millions online at one time? I suspect SL would need more than Linden Lab's clusters of several thousand computer servers. Advances in processor speed may help. We'll certainly see.Iggy Ohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10834075825456226770noreply@blogger.com