Hi Jecel,
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.
The answer as so often is: it depends. It's not only the number of players but also the complexity of the scripts. And then there are efficient and not so efficient ways do script players.
Would it be feasible to use StarSqueak for some of the simulations? It is not directly accessible through etoys (yet) but it is reasonably fast for even a larger number of players.
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.
One of the things OpenCroquet is built for :-) Taking into account the time needed preparing for the project, using any version of OpenCroquet in the first half doesn't seem feasible. Should work for the second half though.
Cheers
Michael