What you're looking at above is a web-based heat map of Second Life. It displays the number of users in any given location by color, with red indicating a region with 30 or more users. And according to Katharine Berry, the MIT-bound wunderkind who created the heat map, she's discovered something interesting about Second Life activity:
"There's very little concentration – most of the time there are fewer than a hundred regions with over thirty people." She told me this on Sunday afternoon, Second Life's traditional activity peak, and sure enough, at the time there were 168 with 30 or over. "This is gathered entirely based on counting map dots," Ms. Berry added, "so it relies on the accuracy of said dots." I knew Second Life activity was diffuse, but it's fascinating to realize just how diffuse. With 40-70,000 people in Second Life at any given period, only some 3,000 of them are in a crowded location. That strongly suggests Residents prefer more intimate group settings, than large throngs. (Perhaps as much to avoid lag, as social preference.)
The heat map itself is the latest project from Katharine Berry, who created the indispensable AjaxLife web-based Second Life client; indispensable, that is, until the Lindens shut it down, citing security risks.
How'd she create it?
"It's a byproduct of some playing around with collecting data from SL with bots... It uses a combination of Linden Lab's Map API and the Google Map's API to render visualizations of the collected data on top of a map of SL. The 'Popularity' overlay reflects the number of people currently in a sim (where 'current' means 'at some point in the last hour'.)" Her map can also display Mature areas, and region names, when you zoom close. I just wish it had been a feature of AjaxLife, but wishing won't make it so.
For a lot of places (unless there's a location-specific reason keeping users in place) in my experience people will generally spread out to other sims once the population of the sim they're in rises above a certain tolerance.
The exact tolerance varies from person to person, but generally doesn't exceed roughly 20.
Posted by: Tateru Nino | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 04:07 AM
MY Island is a homestead that cant have more than 20 avatars on it at one time anyway.
Posted by: LokiLoki | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 04:17 AM
Once you get over 10 on an island then things start going downhill fast. Mainly because of the mono script problem. On mainland it is worse. S effectively secondlife regions can only handle about 5 people. Less if there are script infestations or physics above 2 msec in the region.
Go to Truth Hair while it is busy to get a feel for the mono script problem. All those people teleporting in with the poorly written resizers in their hair and shoes and fingernails and anything else someone could stick a poorly written resizer and color/texture/option changer in. Every couple of minutes you get the sim freeze for 30 to 60 seconds. Might as well be an SL combat sim with people fighting lag instead of each other.
Phillip promised to fix everything though.
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 05:19 AM
"Phillip promised to fix everything though."
*facepalm*
Sorry... one of the most persistant cries in all of virtuality is "but you PROMISED!"
Inevitably, if you go back and read the fine print, nobody promised anything. But that doesn't change the perception that a promise was broken, even if no promise was ever made.
The net result is that developers clam up and never tell the community what they're working on, because you never know when some nutshell is going to take it from "no promise" to "broken promise" to "breech of contract".
I know Ann meant it ironically, and I hope that nobody reading this blog would be gullible enough to believe that Philip actually said he was going to fix everything.
I just have a strong Pavlovian response whenever I see some variation of the phrase, "they promised" in conjunction with a virtual world.
So sue me.
No wait, I didn't mean that literally...
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 07:01 AM
Chat can effectively beome Babble in a large group, depending on the group, especially when you add in Gesture spam. That's Not So Much Fun.
Posted by: Corcosman Voom | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 07:13 AM
Who are your legal representatives, Arcadia? Ann, I'll need yours too. You typed your fifth sentence incorrectly, and that has caused me mental anguish. /cry
Seriously though, this makes sense to me. I know I avoid the sims where I see a whole mess of people. I've been to big events with around 40 people or so, and the novelty of 2fps has worn off. The busiest I'll go now is around 20 people or so, and those events will mainly be talks or something like that where people are sitting and talking. I can definitely see that others might be actively avoiding that stuff.
Posted by: Loraan Fierrens | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 07:42 AM
If I remeber correctly, Ann has done a piece on lag...50 avies naked would be near zero lag?
While I didn't ask all to get naked...a resident of mine held a music gig at her place on one of my homesteads. We got to 20 agent limit and everything worked really well.
Oh, that's right I played script police, asked all to turn off Mystitool, extra AOs, I called people on badly done attachments and............
Ann was right, near zero lag.
Posted by: brinda allen | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 08:22 AM
Bang that drum Hamlet.
Posted by: Adric Antfarm | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 08:24 AM
It's an interesting visualisation, but it'd be nice to be able to change the threshold to bring the level where red starts showing as 15 concurrent. I spend a lot of time on homestead land so 15 to 20 feels like a crowd to me, 30 or more is an unmanageable lag fest, something that only happens for special events...
Posted by: Nat Merit | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 08:42 AM
What a perfect map for spotting 'bot farms.
Posted by: Marianne McCann | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 09:10 AM
Hasn't anyone ever done a simple experiment with lag? Like, round up 30 volunteers, have them all come to a prim-heavy location with all their bling on, test the environment, then have the people leave and come back naked, primless, and scriptless and test again? I'm so sick of the back and forth on what causes lag! I don't understand the technical details - give me science! :)
Posted by: Lessa Joubert | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 09:16 AM
This seems like an obvious opportunity for Linden. If they can realize even just a few virtual spaces that allow for 100s or 1000s of simultaneous visitors for more significant happenings then they've created some very valuable real estate.
Posted by: Mark Young | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 09:51 AM
@Lessa I have done some tests like that, but results vary too widely to generate useful data. The same group of 30 at 10am give you very different results to the same group at 11am.
Too many variables to do proper science.
Posted by: Tateru Nino | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 10:23 AM
Would just point out that August is typically not the busiest month in SL. Nice maps though.
Posted by: Graham Mills | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 10:31 AM
i shall be the first to post about the experiments being performed on the open sims. high avatar counts on regions are being realized there by code changes. while 1000 on a sim seems to be hyperbole: http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2009/11/1000-avatars-on-a-sim/
85 and upwards seems totally achievable:
http://archvirtual.com/?p=1747
Posted by: Wizard Gynoid | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 10:38 AM
I'm not positive due to the typos, but if someone said above that the effective limit on people in a region is 5 (five), that's completely contrary to my experience. I'd say I spend at least a third of my SL time at clubs or music events or art openings with 10 or more people without any detectable sim problems, and even 30 is generally not very laggy these days. I don't know if it's just that I have a pretty fast computer (not state-of-the-art anymore, but not bad), but the effective limit is no way as low as five in my experience...
Posted by: Dale Innis | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 10:54 AM
@Ann, we have weekly gigs in Helvellyn (Mainland) with about 15 to 25 avies and no lag. The region has 3526 scripts running.
All we do to control lag is using a MystiTool sleeper, and not all the time. We had up to 35-40 avies in some cases and the region handled them quite well.
You are right about avies teleporting in being a major cause of lag but, as Tateru says, there are too many variables to take into consideration to make a blanket statement. At least, this is not what we experience.
Posted by: Indigo Mertel | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 11:01 AM
I'd like to see how many regions had no visitors in a certain length of time, like the past week or even thirty days.
Posted by: Lili | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 12:08 PM
2,269 sims have not been visited in the last five days (which is all I have data for) – at least, not during a period which intersected with a scan, which takes place every half hour.
Posted by: Katharine Berry | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 12:41 PM
I just looked at the map, and there is hundreds of regions "in the red" (> 20 users).
Even just landing on the map I saw maybe 50, and dragging the map revealed uncountable more.
Re the technical achievement, well done.
Re Catherine Berry's future and Second Life, I see her A) either employed by LL, or B) legally squashed. Pick one.
Posted by: Breen Whitman | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 12:43 PM
Breen: Following Nat's comment, I swapped the maximum value from 30 to 20 – and there are hundreds of those. I actually had it set at 100 to start with, then knocked it to 50 and then 30.
Note that regions with any reasonable number will look reddish – only those with merely a couple, or none at all, will turn out completely blue. It's a gradient.
Posted by: Katharine Berry | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 12:47 PM
Nice to see a few EDU sims on the 20+ list. Our VWER meeting attracts 30-40 each week, but that's only for an hour. Still, it was fun, during that time, to see the sim "heat up" on the map.
Posted by: Ignatius Onomatopoeia | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 03:31 PM
(psssst most of the the bot farms will have a medium scoville units heat level because going over some certain number (like 6-7 or something) attracts Linden enforcers)
Also when I say a value it is based on long term studies. If you go get in the middle of 9 mainland regions all with 5 avatars each all using the typical sort of avatar script and attached prim loads and all 9 regions are all running the usual sort of script mixes then evaluate things and see how far off I am. If you are out on an isolated island that will never have any child agents to keep track of and your scripts are heavily managed then of course you can get more avatars in. Hint: You have a port open to every region you can "see" into. And thus that region must also keep track of you. So increasing view distance does more than increase your ktris/fr.
And then we enter the viewer lag department where you have to manage your ktris/fr. And yes you can have a reasonable ktris/fr managed experience even on the most "interesting" mainland. Sorry for having a medical event in the runup to the birthday bash and not being able to get that informational display done. It would have proven you could be in the middle of the SLB party and be in an area with managed ktris/fr and have low viewer lag. Maybe next year.
Lag is complicated. But there are commonalities.
BTW 30% of the grid is now on http textures. Hamlet might want to bug Oskar for a rundown on what sort of exceedingly pleasurable experience improvements that is going to wreak across the grid over the next few weeks as people begin to realize something good happened. (fingers crossed that it all works as planned)
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 04:43 PM
The mono script problem is a big issue on Dark Eternity, too. Even when theres the same number of avatars or more on Cursed, there's much less lag, even though Cursed is running more scripts than DE on any given day.
We see the problem on DE with people tping in and out with a metric assload of monoscripted attachments, which occurs less on Cursed.
Posted by: bronxelf | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 05:10 PM
"What a perfect map for spotting 'bot farms'."
I was kinda wondering that myself, if the survey bot that gathered this info could be modified to distinguish between the real movers\shakers and bots.
Looks like it might be worth checking into.
Posted by: Little Lost Linden | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 05:30 PM
Under my point of view Second Life still keeps not difference with any other graphic chat. Their 3D character it's only a decor. In dynamics matter nothing to compare to HOME and the simulation games from PS3. Still sadly seamed dwarf regions where the poor traffic, crossing it's not what acceptables wear and quaility textures we use. It's so simple, the main program platform can't support high quality nor real dynamics simulation. And just show a "nice" chat program. Despit of efforts such so brilliant residents on design and development, that inworld can't reproduce more than limitations and crashes.
Posted by: elMegro Magic | Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 11:51 PM
are there still Bot Farms? or just harder to spot? what do they look like these days?
Posted by: Paisley Beebe | Wednesday, August 04, 2010 at 12:52 AM
I'll go check up on my list of top bot-locations. Last I looked, they were still in full-swing.
Posted by: Tateru Nino | Wednesday, August 04, 2010 at 01:50 AM
They look mostly the same as always cept they are in smaller groups and they move around more frequently. You can go visit them. Amethyst Rosencrans at Sensations has a few that are there every day:
http://thebotzone.net/2010/06/07/sensations-anomolies/
Posted by: Little Lost Linden | Sunday, August 08, 2010 at 11:21 PM
Unfortunately not everything is so beautiful. Take a look here: http://blogs.secondlife.com/thread/33007.
At this time even posting author is suspended by Linden Lab.
Posted by: ab Benusconi | Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 12:17 AM
Don't forget that several instances of the SIm Code will share common Server hardware, so, unlikely though it is, a couple of busy regions on the same hardware could be a big problem, and neither need look dreadfully busy.
If LL want to set up regions for an event they need to better plan the server allocation. Maybe a CEO speech should be made in regions running alone on a server? Or would network bandwidth be the bottleneck?
Posted by: Dave Bell | Monday, May 02, 2011 at 06:56 AM