Ambrosia Dance Club

By Phil F. Kearny

People come to Ambrosia looking for a job.  They fill out an application and they are asked a  simple question.  How old are you in Real Life.  Sometimes the answers are quite surprising and range in age greatly.  Sometimes the reply is 16 or 17.  Uh oh.  We have a teen on our hands.

Well you have to admire honesty at least. They say to you  “Well I am almost 18.  I will be so in about a month.  So big deal”  So now you have a dilemma on your hands.  It is a TOS violation for a person under 18 to be on the Main Grid.  Linden Lags has created the teen grid that is specifically for those under 18 years of age to protect them from adults and visa versa.  So do you file an abuse report and turn in the miscreant?  Or do you look the other way? Are you morally obligated under the rules of the TOS to turn in people who tell you that they are underage?

I am of the opinion that your maturity level and adherence to the club rules should dictate whether or not you can stay in the Ambrosia Dance Club.  While there is mature language and the occasional naked noob, Ambrosia is an Adult Sim, not a pervert sim or whatever it is that the Lindens are designating the porn sims.  It is not a PG sim because what the hell does that mean anyway?  Parental guidance?  I know most people certainly dont want their parents supervising them in a sim. Well, let me look this up.

According to the Lindens, “A Region may be designated PG if it does not advertise or make available content or activity that’s sexually explicit, violent or depicts nudity.  Likewise, sexually-oriented objects such as “sex beds” or poseballs may not be located or sold in PG regions. As we’ve also often said, PG regions are areas where you’d feel free to say and do things that you’d be comfortable saying and doing in front of your grandmother, or a grade school class. ”

Well I think for sure that just the act of having Stevo Omegaman in your sim makes it instantly non-PG.

Ambrosia Dance Club is of course not a strip or sex club.  The dancers are hostesses and entertainers and while they wear some pretty racy outfits, the naughty bits are always covered.  The VIPS understand the rules and generally are very well behaved and stick within the club guidelines.  There is of course no way to stop a person who comes in and acts in a vile and crude manner other than to eject them and this happens often enough to keep the staff constantly amused.

My general course of action if a teen slips in to the club and confesses is to ban them and ask them to voluntarily leave the adult grid. The teens that confess are usually very well behaved and for some reason think its perfectly ok for them to be on the Main Grid.   I am not a police man and its so easy for a person to lie anyway.  They can just get right back in as an alt if they want to.  If the Lindens were serious about enforcing the age restrictions they would place age verification as mandatory for the entire grid and not just the adult section.  Even if it is just cartoons.

By Phil F. Kearny

People come into Ambrosia Dance Club not thinking of the effects that they have on the simulator.  They just want to have a good time wearing whatever scripts and attachments they want without thinking about the effect they are having on some mysterious thing called a server. They want it to be just like real life.

Second life is of course not real life.  It is a bunch of code running on a box somewhere allowing our avatars to move around in a 3D environment. The technology blows me away. I don’t pretend to understand the inner mechanisms of it. I just want what everyone else wants. I want it to work like a golf cart. I turn the key, step on the pedal. and off i go. I don’t really care how the process of the electric motor and transmission works – I just want to get the next hole. But what if i took 15 morbidly obese people and stuck them in the golf cart with me. Well If the thing moved at all, it would move very very slowly. And no one would have a particularly good time on the golf cart.

Everyone knows what lag is and has experienced it in Second Life.  Lag is caused by many factors.  There is client side lag which is on the users end and is caused by sub-par internet connections, weak/non-existant video cards and insufficient RAM.  Then there is server side lag which can be a multitude of factors.  When they experience this slowdown at a crowded party at Ambrosia sometimes an avatar will shout out “LAAAAG omg its so laggy!”  Often  these are the same people who are wearing 400 scripts and don’t even realize that they themselves are a major contributor to slowing down the server.

I have been following the debate on scripts and lag with great interest.  It is a huge problem when a person teleports into the sim wearing hundreds of scripted attachments.  I can see the time dilation and sim frames per second (FPS) numbers spike downward on the sim statistics whenever this occurs. The biggest culprits lately are resizer scripts that are built into shoes, hair, belts and hundreds of other items.  All of these scripts continue to run when an avatar teleports into a sim.  Since the server must recognize these scripts the result is lag. It is very simple to see for yourself the number of scripts that are being introduced with each person teleporting in.  Press CTR SHFT 1 to bring up the sim statistics, stand at the teleport point and watch the number of active scripts jump up with each new person that comes in to the club.

But the problem may not even occur on the sim you are currently in. Since there are 4 full estates to a server, excessive scripts running in a sim that others are sharing a server with can bring all four to a crawl. When too many scripts are running in a region the server simulating that region runs out of memory, dramatically increasing the lag experienced in all regions running on the same server.

Babbage Linden has announced that the future of Second Life will see script limitations.  And I applaud this. The problem is that anyone can write a script and some of them are written quite badly.   A malicious person can bring a sim to its knees by just coming in wearing a few dozen scripts with infinite loops.  Most people are of course not malicious but are uneducated about the facts.  Wearing countless huds, resezer scripts, AOs and other scripted items, they go about Second Life slowing down sims wherever they appear.  Is the answer more server memory? No, because more will never be enough to answer the demand for more and more scripts.

The only answer is to limit the usage to reasonable levels and allow everyone the tools to see who is going over the limits of usage. As a private Estate Owner the tools are available to me to see all of the individual scripts that running in the sim. This in itself is not fully useful since it does not display script use over time but in a single slice which fluctuates as scripts run.

Individual avatars and estate owners need the ability to see how much script usage each one is using in real time.  Perhaps some sort of graphing meter that showed an avatars script usage in real time would allow people to monitor themselves and limit the amount of resources that they are using.

Viewing the  statistics  at Ambrosia shows that  the simulator runs about 4000 scripts when it is totally empty.  When a crowd of 50 avatars appears that number jumps to almost 15000.  That is an incredible load on the server.  At these peak times the usual result is that if any scripts run at all  they do so at a molasses rate.

The easy answer in Ambrosia of course would be to disable all scripts for visitors.  The end result of that of course would be that people would stay away in droves and complain endlessly that their Dance Chimera does not work or they could not hang out on the dance floor and play a minigame on their HUD.  Or they could not resize their heels for the 400th time. So what is the answer?  To me its always more horsepower!  To the Lindens its always limits.  I want scripts to run and i want people to be able to use them.  But if the cost of this is that the entire sim is useless and everyone is grey then what good are scripts.

I leave the solution of this up to the Linden Labs gods since the only thing i can do is bitch and moan about it. We need better scripting that is more efficient. We need people to be educated about scripts they wear and we need more memory on the servers. Most importantly we need the tools to assess the scripts that we all create and wear.
Without this knowledge, even the most brilliant SL user cannot know how much resources they are using.

If you made it all the way to the bottom of the article I apologize for the massive amount of text. I just feel that this is an important issue that we need to be aware of in order to do silly things in world and write short pithy articles about.

After several false starts including 2 sim resets, the Christmas party finally Got off the ground. The red curtain was raised revealing a wintry scene and the sonorous voice of DJ Mark Attenborough as Santa Claus boomed out proclaiming Christmas cheer to all with a special poem written just for Ambrosians.

The stage was set as a mountainous snow scene complete with skiing snowman, Mark as Santa and of course very sexy Ambrosia Dancer elves to heat things up.  Ambrosians were invited up to sit with Santa and take pictures.

Too say that some of the outfits were a bit extreme for the holiday season would be an understatement . But hey sometimes less is more! Good thing it’s nice and warm in the club!

The venue jammed up quickly with the sim maxed out at 65 avatars. Naturally, it was a bit of a  lagfest but people come to expect such things in SL, especially since the Lindens chose the date of our Christmas Extravaganza for a grid-wide rolling restart.  The nerve of these people! But everyone took it in good grace and had a great time anyway.

Santa had so many requests for songs and doled them out to all the good little boys and girls.  I am sure there were a few requests for one of Santa’s elves as well.

Here are a pair of very interesting outfits.  Once again, less is more.  And it appears that Melly is branching out and growing a set of balls.  About the other outfit, well a picture says a thousand words.

The top of the bar is always a popular place to hang out and dance with friends.  Thank goodness that the liability insurance is paid up for the year.

So many festive costumes. Thanks to all the photographers who battled a possible crash to take these wonderful shots for us to enjoy.

Having a man looking totally buff for Christmas is on many a woman’s wish list.

Gorgeous Ivoni is a decoration in herself for the festive atmosphere of the club.  Red was definitely the colour to be seen in during the party.  Unless of course you were totally lagged out which results in everyone being grey.

Some people are in color, others of course are greyed out in lagville.  This is what happens when you stuff 75 people in a party.  How about some more horsepower Linden Lags!!  Or maybe we can just get people not to come in wearing 400 resizer scripts in their hair.  Yeah right.

Macy Paige shows off her sizzling outfit on the stage and spreads some holiday cheer.

Blueraine was not wearing holiday red since she has that on her head year round.  Tell that avatar behind you to turn off that damn typing animation.  It’s so 2007.

Kev the bartender had plenty of Eggnog to distribute and even in a total state of inebriation managed not to spill a drop.

What a capacity crowd looks like.  Considering that we had up to 75 people in the club the lag was not that horrifying. Some avatars actually rezzed in full colour.

Another great shot of Santa Claus surrounded by his helpers Ivoni, Sapphires and Nevea.

What a great looking crowd.  That girl has the longest legs I have ever seen.  She must do the hurdles.

You have to love synchronized dancing.  With a click of a button you can emulate weeks of hard work with a choreographer.  You and your uncoordinated friends are ready to appear in a Broadway musical!

The cap will keep this Ambrosian warm.  You mean tats are not a shirt?

Over L 10000 was awarded in cash and prizes.  Gifts were awarded from hot Ambrosia retailers.  Blacklace gave away sexy lingerie sets.  Alphamale awarded a L1000 gift card and Fab. Pony gave away several gift cards for the latest fashions.

The most fun was the 50/50 where everyone in the club was awarded a notecard and then the winning numbers were called out for cash prizes.

Another fantastic event with a capacity crowd.  We can look forward to the next one when Ambrosia celebrates its three year anniversary on December 29.   It will most assuredly be packed with prizes fun and surprises for everyone.  Once again thank you to all the intrepid Ambrosia photographers who braved the lag to take these pictures for all of us to enjoy.

By Megs Tharnaby

Why travel all over Second Life to seek out the best designers when Ambrosia has already done all the hard work for you? Our retail experts have scoured the grid to find you the very best designers to outfit your avatar in the latest in club trends.

Ambrosia is proud to announce that Tatianna Faulkes has joined us with an amazing shop featuring the hottest club clothing.

Fab. Pony features gorgeous individual components as well as full complete outfits for the discriminating club-going girl. There are bikini tops to choose from as well as jeans, one piece rompers and playful tops. Accessories include sunglasses belts and earrings. The best part of Tatianna’s designs is that they are perfect for mixing and matching stretching your clothing budget dollars to the max.

“Quirky, easygoing and hella-fun – thats the perfect embodiment of the Fab.Pony girl I design for.” – Tatianna

I have been shopping at Fab.Pony for months now… and how nice is it that I can walk out the doors of of the Club and pick up a new outfit? Her creations are very high quality and is so fun to mix and match. Check them out today!!