Open inter-sim travel spaces

Here is a proposition (#1911) that may have been brought up before, but you can discuss it here.

The un-owned areas or un-opened sims between the active sims(the mainland and private islands)should be open ocean until someone purchases the rights to use that particular sim.

This way ships and boats can more easily travel to any sim that has an open harbor. Think of it as "international waters". As SL grows the land will simply extend furthur out into the already existant ocean. You could also have empty lands as well; it makes no difference so long as everything is interconnectable (unless a landowner decides to block people out of their property).

Above a certain elevation the airways should also be completely open to all air travel (traveling objects/vehicles included) across and between all sims whether open or closed, active or inactive, owned or un-owned, private or public, etc. Above this elevation the prim limits would be separate from the land below (if it's not that way already).

These open spaces of land, sea, and air would simply make for more realistic vehicular travel. If objects remained at rest and/or away from their owner for any certain duration they could be automatically deleted.

I realize this may take much more server resources, but empty sims with only water (or flat land) wouldn't be too hard would it?

They do this already. They are called void sims. Most fill in the gaps in the mainland and have names like Rosedale or Murray.

It wouldn't be too hard to work in, but it would change the island owner dynamic which accounts for most of these empty spaces. Currently island estates often perform better simply because they don't have to deal with the resources of a possible eight surrounding sims of information to be calculated. Islands can currently be just that, islands on a grid.

Many island owners have actully bought some of the square you speak of in a sense, having used the auction system to reserve them for future expansion. Linden Lab offes a low-prim island cluster where four regions take up the space of four grid spaces but only the resources of a single sim. This is perhaps how some current void water sims are handled in the middle of the Mainland as well.

If you get a chance look at the island auction page and see how disconnected the reserved spaces are. With the current technology it would take hundreds (if not more) additional servers to be added to the grid, using power and bandwidth.

The truly sad part here is the cost of land in Second Life. The hardware resources and maintenance costs of "land" is truly of a diffrent era, what with $60 full-year website hosts that will likely dish out more bandwidth in a month than most sims in Second Life use in a year, sitting their lonely waiting for that stray avatar to visit. This is simply the reality of the physics simulator that runs each region of Second Life. If that technology were ever optimized, and costs were even in line with dedicated virtual hosts ($75/month often with no activation fee, or one certainly less than $1200) you'd find people trying out big projects and even seeing an interest from casual users to spend that sort of money just for fun rather than struggling to somehow cover tier every month to at least break even on their Second Life expenses.

SL should really have had a set "flying height" a long time back. (This would have been particularly useful back when you couldn't teleport closer to anything that the nearest telehub, and had to fly from there to your final destination.) Unfortunately it doesn't, and establishing one now would be unfair, since many people have builds that are already at pretty much any height you might want to set a right of way at.

However, it's impossible to build above 750m and even named bans only go up to that altitude, so above that height the skys are already open.

Setting seperate prim limits above a certain height would esentially require that that you set up a seperate server for that altitude, which would require you to double the number of servers in SL. This would not be likely to be cost effective, to put it mildly.