[Squeakland] eToys scalability

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

My sister is the "coordinator for technology in education" at a school 
in São Paulo, Brazil (http://www.colband.com.br/edutech/index.htm in 
Portuguese only, sorry) and decided to do an EToys project with 9th 
grade students. She is interested in doing an ecosystem simulation like 
in the old Vivarium project.

I was wondering about how many players you can have before performance 
drops to an unacceptable level. Her students will be using Pentium IV 
machines with 1.4GHz and up which are far faster than the computers I 
have around here, so I can't test this myself.

Another limitation is the fixed size of the world. Unless the players 
are really tiny (like the dots in StarSqueak) it probably isn't 
practical to have more than a few on the screen at a time. Since the 
project schedule is from February 26 to June 3 and then from August 5 
to October 28, perhaps one solution would be to use EToys in the first 
semester and then move the simulation to OpenCroquet in the second? 
That would allow a really large environment.

-- Jecel