VOID sims, how do you feel now?

I heartily endorse Jai's suggestion. I would love to see pristine deserts and mountain ranges as well

Why indeed stop at water? In fact, why does the world have edges at all? Why are the sims arranged on a flat plane? Why not on the surface of a 3-D solid? In the real world, if you go far enough in one direction, you get back to where you started (assuming you survive the trek).

Now, due to the fact that each sim is a square, I would imagine that it's hard to fit a grid onto a sphere. So imagine instead a bunch of these polyhedrons floating in space:



Each square surface is a sim, and you can fly to any adjacent square like you can now. Each polyhedron, which holds 18 sim squares, would be equivalent to a grouping of islands on the current grid. You only need a couple dozen of these mini-worlds, all connected by telehubs, to contain every sim in SL.

It's just past 2 in the morning. It's a wacky idea, but I thought I'd put it out there.

1. No icky dropoffs for edge sims.
2. More oceans to sail around; will open up new business for ships.
3. Naval battles. Yeah!
4. Opens up easier possibilities for global navigation systems.

Think about that though, it would be weird.

You can't think of the edges of two adjoining sims in that 3d shape as rounded, they would be angular. The more sims that you have per "sphere" the less that angle, but it's still an angle.

I can see nothing stranger than looking out from one sim's ocean to the next, to see it bent in the middle.

Actually, standing near the edge of your sim, looking out, you probably wouldn't be able to see over the edge unless you get within a few meters of it b/c the angle's too great. Most of the view would be the blue sky in the next sim.

In the smaller version yes that would be true, but wouldn't that be even worse @_@

In effect ,that would make the "edge of the world" scenario we already have even worse - though it could improve framerate.

I think the globe thing is very much a real life concept, and really - when we have 'fantasy features ' such as flying and teleporting, I can't see any great point. I rather like the idea that it is an enormous grid. And besides, managing borders on a sphere would be far more problematic surely.

I could see the point in having 'planes' of grid at some point, so perhaps having a grid that sits below the current one and is therefore underground (maybe only 100m max height with land top and bottom) for cave cities. And a Sky Plane above the current one, or Outer Space even, with lower gravity for the sci-fi fans to zip about in.

Jai

if you were to make a continuous 3-D world like that, I doubt very much there would be actual "bends" - more like it would be a logical sphere.

for instance, a simple example - say you have 2 sims, I'll call them 1,2,3,4. they are arranged in a square, where 1 is Northwest, 2 is northeast, 3 is southeast, and 4 is southwest.

from the northern edge of 1 and 2 you would see 3 and 4 as if they continued flat.
from the eastern edge of 2 and 3 you would see 1 and 4 as if they continued flat
and vice versa for the other sims.

This would work because in RL, we don't notice horizon curvature until we are in space.

What if each square face of this polyhedron were actually a mini-grid of 16 sims? Or 32 sims? That would allow many more sims per polyhedron and would reduce the fragmentation you'd get with only 18 sims per polyhedron.

Jai: I don't think placing sims on a 3-D object is necessarily a real life concept. It's simply a more efficient way to organize a large number of squares. (Also note that this isn't a sphere.)

Can I point people to this post from last year for a true explaination of our world