SL Grid Geography

So I recently learned that very few of the oceans and rivers and lakes and whatnot on the grid have actual names. I know that parts are referred to as their void sim names but why the heck do we not have a name for that large expanse of water that surrounds us? Or those lakes on the west side of the main grid? What about islands that aren't their own sim or the ones that are made up of multiple sims?

Or....am I just rambling?

Don't know why we don't have names for geographic features. It would be kind of nice to have names for the multi-sim/partial sim water and land features.

It would also be nice to have names for roads and bridges.

HP

The geography changes too much. What was a lovely lake next door one day might be a Gothic castle the next. Same thing for roads and bridges. Most roads only go a short distance through one sim. I have seen very few that go any farther than that.

Entire sims get moved on a regular basis. There's no way to keep up that makes sense.

Excuse me?
Someone here never heard of protected land and terraforming limits...

I don't think the major features change that much. Take this part of the main grid for example:



Those five lakes and the rivers connecting them have been like that for as long as I can remember.

I'm sure private islands change up much more rapidly though

Eggy, I've lived on a plot of land where the sim next door got moved, then the lake to the side of me became a castle (and an ugly one, too), and then the whole sim got moved elsewhere in the grid. All in the span of a month or less!

Protected Land is becoming less common, and doesn't exist off the mainland.

Terraforming limits don't prevent someone from making a lake on their own territory, or turning it into a hill the next week.

The only constant in SL geography, as far as I have observed, is change.

Maybe the mainland doesn't change as much as the private sims do. But the areas I have visited in my time in SL seem to change frequently.

Well, we should freakin' name 'em then.

I think there are a few reasons which together account for the absence of names for many geographical features in SL.

The main reason is that the population is fluid. Names are part of a shared language, and you need a group of people talking to each other about places for that language to develop. The same people just don't tend to exist in one place in SL long enough for that. You don't need to impose names, either. If people need to refer to something, they'll refer to it in a way that means something to them and it will become the name.

People don't talk about the geographical features much. For various reasons, I don't think they really interact with them much.

Unlike in RL, in SL people are accustomed to using specific coordinates rather than directions to navigate. In RL, you'd probably be confused if someone told you a store was at a certain latitude and longitude. In SL, you find it natural to be told a store is at Ohno (87, 211). With teleportatation you don't need to navigate anyway. So overall geography is just less meaningful in SL.

I used to wonder why the Lindens don't name features and regions of SL. Now I suspect no one would remember them even if they did.

Dyne Talamasca has been making efforts to properly document the grid for quite a while now.

If you care to see Dyne's map and many, many names of things, the map takes up most of the upper floor of the Caledon Academy of Virtual Wizardry.

This is not a small map, you could throw a good sized party on it.

Find the sim "Caledon Highlands" - the Academy is right at the telehub, you can't miss it. One flight of stairs up, just past the faculty offices and you are there.

My interest in naming these features doesn't have much to do with detailing an exact point on the map. There's nothing better than Sim Name, X, Y, and Z for that. It's more about giving a name to these things so we can talk about them more easily. Instead of saying "that big multi-sim lake south of Suisun", you could just say "Lake Whatever".

If the lakes were named, for example, when selling land, you might say, "This land can be found in Some sim at X, Y. It borders the very lovely protected Lake Whatever."

Or for those of us that like to travel 'the old-fashioned way' once in a while, we could describe a route as "I took River XXX down to Lake Whatever for a little fishing trip."

That's the sort of thing I'm getting at.

Oh I'm not arguing aganist naming things, I'm just commenting on why they don't seem to have names already. I've given features names myself, as part of my own mapping efforts. Best of luck on the project, honestly.

I call the river that flows from Tethys to Pomponio the Serpentine River, but as far as I know no one else does

I think I will make the Big Chicken and put it on my store lot. (I'll need someone to help me script the beak.)

Then everybody can say things like, "You turn right at the Big Chicken . . ."

coco

The SL sailing/yacht racing community has names for some of the large areas of protected linden water sims. The big water area with Torch, Tompson, Duryea, etc. sims has been known as the "Sea of Sighs" since sometime in January. This connects to the "Sea of Lost Souls" through the Portage sim narrows. The Sea of Lost Souls has Hatten, Lembeck, etc. sims in it.

In the Southeast continent, the navigable waters near Sanchon and Jinsil sims have been referred to as the Ryuku Kingdom or the Ryuku Ocean.

I bet I can take a guess at where you're from.

Betcha can!

coco