John Hurliman

Last week I found out about the very cool band Long Range (MySpace), and also got the chance to help put on their concert in Second Life. Second Life has a problem with hosting large events as the maximum capacity of people on a private island is 100 people, but performance starts to degrade after about 50-60 people in the same area. The solution that was thought up was to “shard” the concert, with 12 identical islands running the same concert and load balancing people between them. The island setup was cloned, some very fancy LSL scripting kept the show and the lighting in sync, but there was one remaining issue. With five band members and 12 islands how do we get 60 band members playing their instruments at the same time? The answer was to use libsecondlife to log in 60 “actor” bots that would appear, set their appearance, and look for a specially marked object that was their “seat”. Once the bot was attached to this seat (which were really just small out of the way objects) the seat would trigger an animation for that actor to play the appropriate instrument. Using some hidden throttling techniques in Second Life I managed to get all 60 bots running from a single server, which might be a new record for stable connections with libsecondlife. A good show of music and technology, check out Long Range’s music and maybe we can talk them in to another show for Second Life!

And Merry Christmas to everyone, time for me to start wrapping gifts ;-).

This entry was posted on Monday, December 25th, 2006 at 3:31 pm and is filed under second life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.