Land physics.

(or, Yet Another Prediction Thread)

I have observed the changes that have taken place in SL for almost two months now, from trial user to Lifer. I have often commented to others that I believe that this is the future of the internet. SL, or a similar application, will become the default means of communication for many people, and will eventually become a full fledged society, bringing with it all that comes with such a distinction.

Before this can take place, however, there must be considerable progress made in the technology, the interface, and the customs and courtesies within SL. The Lindens are doing a fine job of maintaining and fostering the progress of this fledgling world. There are, however, a few points (for the more distant future) that I would like to address which haven't really been covered in the forums, to my knowledge:

I truly feel that, while it is important to keep the illusion of being in a consistent world, it is also going to become apparent that in some respects, SL is making the age-old error of trying to immitate old media. Once upon a time, the web was like this, with people creating web pages that looked very much like paper pages. Eventually, the building tools began to grow into themselves. The page that I'm writing this post on looks nothing like anything I'd see on paper. Hopefully this will happen with SL, over time. I think that this is the goal of the Lindens.

SL is, in some ways, trying to immitate Real Life a little too closely. Many deviations have taken place (i.e.: Teleportation, Flying, IM, etc., (thank you Lindens)), but there are many areas in which SL clings a little too closely to life. Land is one of these areas. Why do we need land to look like dirt and grass in every sim? Could a sim not consist of plain geometric shapes quite easily? Could a themed sim like Gibson be styled a little more closely to its nature? I know that people have talked about an underwater sim on the forums. How about a sim based on Tron? I like the Linden approach that themes should be determined by the groups, not by the Lindens themselves. More control over the land would be helpful in this regard.

Also, why are physics themselves not a little more malleable? I would like to see a house that is nothing more than a 5m x 5m cube on the outside, but which is considerably larger on the inside, a sort of Tardis effect. These sorts of options could be controlled by the owner of the property, or the group, in the case of a sim or large section of land. Gravity, too, should be owner controlled. Moon gravity, Jupiter gravity, or 0 gravity environments should be allowed. I think that if sims with these properties were kept near one another, while sims with more realistic physics schemes were kept together, no one would have a problem with maintaining suspension of disbelief.

These are all things that I would like to see in the future, particularly as the new group governance rules begin to take off. The best tools are those which give the most control to the user.

Dude... you're on crack. How on earth would you fit a bigger space inside a 5 meter cube. You would have to rewrite the engine to define virtual zones that you cross into like sims and that would be one heck of a lot of worm cans being opened... I dont think we need that feature though you could theoretically enter a cube and be teleported into a bigger space, somwhere else in the world, to mimic the effect.

Dude! Get an imagination! All Arik's saying is that he'd like to see parts of SL where the rules of a simulated earthlike world don't apply.

And I tend to agree that it'd be a natural evolution of an SL-type experience. Over the long term SL should (and probably will) encompass other physical rulesets.

That said, I don't think you can alter physics or land on a sim-by-sim basis and have the illusion hold up. Probably it would have to be islands or continents of sims, set apart from the main one. And that's not likely to be feasible anytime soon.

So I'm not demanding Klein bottles by next Thursday--or even a year from Thursday. But I do think that given a simulated reality, it'd be a little sad if all you ever wanted to do with it is, well, simulate reality.

-Jay

These people come in here all the time, wanting a special sim of some sort, well, how about this, you kindly donate $1500 to LL and they buy you a special server, then you pay them even more to change the code to fit your imagination, along with a monthly fee for the server upkeep... its always good to dream but we must keep in mind that SL is subject to RL constraints.
Most of the physics behaviour can be altered with simple scripts.
You can make yourself float as if you were in space with a single line of scripting, for instance.
This world is open ended. If you dont like the way it is, build it differently.

Arik, I love your post. You know why? Because it sounds exactly like me.

As far as land goes: Those features are going to eventually be implemented. The current system of having grass and dirt is only in place to keep a consistency so that the game doesn't look like utter chaos to the world outside of ours, where we all know what Second Life is.

I think that the land editing will begin to evolve as soon as the world is popular enough that we can get those extra sims with editable land up and have a system where the utter chaos does not ensue.

As far as "large space inside of 5x5 cube", that's seriously mind-bending as far as actual virtual spaces go... If you can give an example of any virtual 3-d game/environment that has this feature I'd like to take a look at it if you may direct me.
Until then, teleporting as soon as you enter a door to a small looking house and ending up in a larger house is about the only way I can see this being possible.

Edit: Oh and Eggy, that's not a bad idea.
But how about only $100 for the open ended server, and I do the coding

There was an interesting related discussion previously about the shape of the world.

We were talking generally just about how the borders are connected and some lindens (I think philip or peter) were saying there was no technical reason for sims to connect in the 'logical' flat plane method. Some really weird connectiongs were even proposed. What if going east, north, west and then south didn't bring you back to your start sim?

Just thinkin about non standard physics/space. heh.

Like Jay said, I'm not talking about this kind of thing happening tomorrow, here. What I'm talking about, however, is quite necessary IMHO.

The Lindens are creating something that looks to me less like a game, and more like a world. They want this world to be open ended to the point where standard gaming terms like "Replay Value" no longer apply.

In the (perhaps distant) future that I see, I will own a home computer that functions as an SL server, using technology licensed from Linden labs for a monthly fee. In this future, that fee is perhaps $25/mo. for a single user license, and I am capable of running this server with as little effort as I would a home brewed web server. My server will contain a sim, designed to my specifications, which will be mine to keep. It will be accessible only by invitation or teleportation from the main SL world at Linden Labs, which, this being the future and all, will be at least a hundred times its current size.

In my own private sim, I will build a home, much like the home: Perhaps a Japanese temple, surrounded on all sides by rice paddies, with little robot workers in the fields; Perhaps it will take the form of a Tron-like game grid filled with light cycles and monolithic tower structures. Whatever the case, I will have complete control over this, my area.

In this version of the future, I see the primary Linden Lab SL servers as a haven for explorers (many more than we have today) who have neither the time, money, or inclination to operate such a server, but only want a piece of land on the main drag to call their own. And yes, I see commercialism taking root, in all its mottled ugliness and bizzare beauty. I see major corporations, like Amazon.com building sim-sized book stores with entrances on the main servers. But I don't see this becoming a bad thing. I simply see it becoming a part of every day life. (I also see regulation for this sort of thing.)

In the end, I see SL becoming: 1) Enormous, encompassing thousands of servers across the globe. 2)Ubiquitous, known to people the world over as a possible destination on the internet. 3) Diverse, (not that it isn't now, but perhaps more so) 4) Not under the control of anyone but the people who live and play and even work there. We should have control, from top to bottom, from av to land to script (I also think that we should be able to tie in other scripting languages, eventually, such as Perl).

Of course, I'm not sure if the Lindens share that vision of the future with me, but if they don't, someone does. The modular construction of SL tells me that this may be the direction that they have in mind, and the constant improvement in-world suggests the same. I don't think that I'm being unrealistic. The best tools are the ones which are simple and flexible. SL has the makings of such a tool.

Oh, BTW Ama, can you post a link to that thread about physics?

Eggy, you think inside the box too much man. I bet that during the SL beta test you would have said no to all the new terrain features in 1.1 because it would be too much local stress. And don't say "well if I had known they could do it..." because that's not the point and your right and you being right doesn't help me ego any

But as for this... sure. I would like to see a few different grids, like some space grids, some abstract grids, etc... far in the future of course.

OMT, excuse my poor grammer, it's too late for me too be wrighting anything

yes, Snow Crash...

I'd like to have concave terrain, i.e. caves and such, without having to resort to clumsy methods such as rezzing huge piles of rocks and arranging them to form tunnels. I'd like to see vast subterranean caverns, such as those featured in HP Lovecraft's Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

I'd like to have water and fog zones, so that (for example) a pond could be filled with water.

The idea of a "tardis" can be achieved in games like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, both of which have "portals." You can walk up to a portal and look through it and see through to the other side, and if you step through, you are instantly there. I only ever saw one UT level that used a portal - one of several zillion adaptations of the "Facing Worlds" CTF map. In Quake 3 portals were a little more popular. The tesseract effect can also be achieved in Descent (2?) due to certain oddities in the way the vertices are handled.

I was just saying that you dont need to bother the devs about including sims with custom gravity and other physics related stuff when you have such things as llApplyImpulse, llSetForce, llSetBuoyancy, llSetHoverHeight which can be used to counter the effects of gravity, mimicking zero-g, moon-like gravity, or increase it to the strength of jupiter's gravity merely by modifying a single value in a single line of scripting.
If you can do it in 5 minutes why ask for the devs to put it in the server code, let alone add in special sims just for the gravity tweaks?
IMHO if you're new and not aware of how much you can customize the world you shouldnt come here and ask for "new" features that are already in the game... its annoying. The next time someone posts about making a bank I swear I will send them an IM full of foul language.
Standard usenet rules should apply to these forums. First you LURK for an extensive period of time, reading all posts old and new and acquainting yourself with the kind of comunity you are about to join, and THEN you start posting. But I guess not all of us even know what usenet is. Sigh. Take me back to 1994...

Eggy man chill !
For a nightclub operator you seem a bit stressed... Go have a dance....

I always thought forums were for discussion ... i love it when someone says ..this has been discussed and gives you the previos thread... great..helpful..friendly..

But when they get on a high horse saying go learn the whole game before earning the right to post or discuss ... get real...

so what if you have read it before..scan it ..move on....

about my bank comment..it said BANK in the thread title ... so ignore it if you dont wanna talk about it again...don't come in all huffy puffy ?

Tardis... I guess you could go in a 5X5 cube and then transport off to your bigger space ? if you could set teleport destinations by script... The point of the tardis query IMHO was simply to say lets stop mimmicking the real world and get some fantasy and impossible things happening here.... I agree totally...the funniest thing about SL to me is we all fly around but hardly anyone designs landing pads etc on their builds..all the doorway down on the ground...I bump my head soooo much !!!

I wanted to design my place in a very original way. I wanted to design it vertically, sort of like a bird cage, with lots of free space to fly around in and little perches on the walls where you can land in. I wanted to stretch it all the way to 512 meters altitude, above which the system wont let you build.
But sadly we have height taxes to worry about, and our neighbours have their aesthetic concerns that we must respect.
I too dream of a city in the clouds, like Darwin. I just dont think it is proper, polite, or appropriate to claim that this is the Linden's fault.
We can work within the constraints of this system, and accomplish great things. We already have an aerial theme in Gray - Kazenojin.
I love their mountaintop platform. It is very original and creative in a world mostly populated by boring, TSO-ish, rural/suburban housing.
I was merely stating that instead of ignorantly claiming that we need some sort of new feature, we can very well use the existing features to accomplish awesome things.
Like candie apple once wondered, why do people not take full advantage of the tools we have been given, and instead restrict themselves to crude and simple builds?
Well that my friends is the inevitable outcome of living in a world where, if you will excuse the cliche, 90% of ppl are idiots and 10% of ppl are brilliant. There are indeed a few brilliant builds, and lots of boring ones. Maybe as time goes by ppl will become more skilled with the building and scripting tools, and create more wonderful things. But we really shouldnt blame the lindens or demand some sort of new features when the unoriginality of this world is above all *our fault*.

Arik, thank you for your post, it's always nice to read something that's considered and thought provoking. I'm not sure I agree with you, though, about the need to be more radical with the landscape in SL just because we can be. I know that this is a matter of personal taste and that some people will feel differently, but I like having grass and trees around me. Given the choice, I'd rather live in the Cotswolds than on Jupiter. We humans are simple creatures - grass and trees fulfill a basic need for us because we find them beautiful. In fact, could we have more forests in SL please?

As dag alluded to though, I think the area where we are being overly conservative is in our architecture. Who needs a doorway anyway? In fact, come to think of it, why do we need walls? I gave up building walls after my first house, using beams or pillars instead, and now I'm thinking, why do I even need a roof? They're just very annoying when you're trying to land somewhere.

I largely agree with Viola, I think that on some very human level hills, sea, grass and trees and so on make us feel comfortable and at home, thus making SL an immediately immersive space.

Where I would agree with the original post, is where physics are concerned. Why have gravity for example, as surely it is irrelevent in a game that lets you ignore it completely when building. Why should I not be able to fly up through the clouds and then land on an upside-down continent, all it would need is a little camera work to orient me. Come to think of it, I should be able to live upside down if I wished, and build a house accordingly.

Too much caffeine perhaps..

Arik - I'm on the same wavelength as you about SL's future. I see it as a networked space parallel to the web (and the telephone system, and e-mail). It's not an application, it's an application host. If someone makes a friendly protocol for object description and simulation (maybe XML based, and in the spirit of HTML), I wouldn't be surprised to see an explosion of distributed SL-like locations. I'm looking forward to changing my web site with renders of 3D stuff into a 3D sim 3DSMax->File->Export to Second Life!

Regarding your ruminations on an SL less rooted to the world we know, here's an idea I had. What if sims were mapped on the inside of a sphere instead of on a plane, so that you coud literally walk in one direction and end up where you started? The sphere would expand as sims were added, and there would be no "center" to the world (cosmological SL!). People around the net could organize groups of sims as spheres, and arrange teleportation between them. Just thinkin'...

Mmm. Dyson spheres. Ringworld. That'd definitely make travel interesting.

Hmm, I'm a little iffy about remapping SL onto a sphere...for two selfish reasons.

First is that I STILL haven't finished my long-promised astronomy write-up (though I HAVE finally scripted an astronomical instrument, so no more staring at the sun for me). But I've been thinking entirely in terms of a flat world, and don't want to rethink in terms of spheres. Explaining sunrise and sunset in terms of a world on the INTERIOR surface of a sphere would be an interesting challenge, though.

And second is that I only just thought of a tagline for my posts.

-Jay

Immaculate: It's not the end of the world. Oh wait, it IS.

Why do I think these are 'Active Worlds' escapies...