block camera panning across parcel boundaries

anybody know if there is a proposal entered to prevent free camming across property boundaries? specifically, if you don't have access to a parcel you shouldnt have the capability to pan the camera across the property boundary. is there a proposal entered for this? the FVT search feature is broken and returns all regardless of what you enter. many thanks in advance

it is technically impossible to prevent it, the camera movement are a client side capability, and even if you where restricting it, it could be bypassed using some debugging tools

Do you work for Linden labs? If not then please refrain from making such comments since you aren't one of the engineers. And yes it is possible to set a trap for boundary detection but it might be rather processor intensive. Simply knowing where you are located, which you do, and knowing the distance to the parcel boundaries, which is possible, and halting the pan key actions when the boundaries are detected. Or, put in the same collision detection system as is used when an avatar collides with a parcel boundary.

Sorry Kyrah but i don't pay much heed to forum primadonnas like you.

Besides, i asked a question as to whether or not the feature had been requested, not for yet another espousal of your fantastic realm of knowledge.

This isnt counter-strike. Were not into flaming eachother. Was that really nessecary?

i don't work for linden labs, i just happend to know what i am talking about

one of the standard plugins of gl intercept is "free camera"
http://glintercept.nutty.org/Ver0_4/freecam.png

it allow the end user to detach his camera from the program camera, of course it is mostly usefull for debugging an octree or a bsp tree

but it just show you that the client side camera, being what it is cannot be enforced by the server in a secure manner, in fact anything happeneing on a client machine is usually "untrusted" when you make a client server app, wich is why most of the critical work is usually done by the server and never by the client. since the client's task is to render the 3D scene that compose the world, the camera being simply the "point of view" of this 3D world, if you move it , at the open gl level, the server will never know it, you could even move it at the sl level and give false data to the server to make him believe your camera didn't move.

Kyrah may not be a LindenLab employee, but as a long time user and a technicly capable person, she is pretty much entitled to explain the situation as much as any other programming-capable person on this system. If you do not like an answer someone posts, i'd advise waiting for the next post by the next person rather then reply with a flame.

That said, while blocking the camera would be indeed possible, it would be pointless:

You could set a no-camera flag in a parcel that would be taken into account client-side, but as this is a client-side restriction, a simple proxy would be more then capable of removing this flag - like the God Mode proxy tool that is still available for sale as I am typing this post. That tool, as well as other existing tools such as GLIntercept would make camera restriction pointless.

Besides, when you concider the kind of an enviroment SecondLife is, camera movement restriction would be a pretty bad idea in general.

My very own realm of knowledge agreed with kyrah's (not-so-)technical explanation.

To do simple :
1) yes, LL could implement a feature to restrict camera moving in banned area
2) but yes, we can by-pass any client side restriction like this one

As a veteran game developer for realtime multiplayer games, I can assure you that limiting camera target in this way would be so distruptive to the user experience over all as to make Second Life unusable. Imagine flying over the countryside with this restriction in place. You wouldn't even be able to see the contents of the the parcels you were flying over. Users would be only able to see one parcel at a time. The sense of Second Life being a virtual world would be completely lost.

Even if the effect were limited to voluntarily switching it on on a per parcel basis, the result would be vast fields of grey nothing, punctuated by the occasional patch of color and content. Would you want to be in an environment like that?

As a veteran game developer of multiplayer games, I can corroborate the technical limitations which would prevent such a feature from ever being implemented. With a client-server arrangement such as Second Life, the camera's viewing frustrum is controlled by the client, not the server. There is no means whatever of controlling where the user chooses to place that frustrum, apart from limiting the available dataset that represents the environment to be viewed, given the current architecture of the server and client software.

This is not to say that what you're proposing could not be done, but a) the ability to do that would have to have been designed into the system from the very beginning, and b) there would have to be some compelling usability related reason for that to have been included in the initial system design for it to be included.

So in a nutshell, while almost anything is technically possible given enough time and money, your request would require a major overhaul of the Second Life software system, both client side and server side, to accomplish.

Don't hold your breath.

why do u want so much privacy on your virtual persona? what do you possibly have to hide that is so secretive? , and if u do , get your own island and block anyone from teleporting in , or i got a simpler cheaper solution .. don't bring it to secondlife

have a nice day.

FVT voting proposal 1632 contains a section, #13, which states :



This may be getting close to the privacy you seek... but without relying on client-side limits (the server simply refuses to send the client data about things in the parcels they can't access).

But not the 'They should not be able to rez objects in the parcel, or move already rezzed objects into the parcel.' part... if you're in a vehicle and you get unseated when you fly in that's just not cool. But if they left the vehicle on the parcel, the vehicle should instantly be returned, IMHO.

Technically feasible, but I think many would agree, aesthetically unworkable. Imagine a vast patchwork of unrenderable grey parcels littering the landscape - not to mention the huge amount of user-created content this proposal would break.

Face it - you're online, in a massively multiuser community where everyone can fly, and everyone can teleport whenever they please. We don't even have gonads, fer crissakes, what could one possibly be doing that requires that level of privacy?

That and the fact that camera viewpoint != the ability to overhear chat from a distance. The fact remains that most interpersonal communication still happens via chat, not visuals. You're not gaining much in the way of privacy by trying to block cameras in any case. If you really want privacy that badly, log off.

Good point. I did intend objects which are being sat on (vechiles) to be exempt from this. Sorry that wasn't clear.





There would be would be blank parcels in which only the terrain renders. These parcels would not be 'grey' unless the terrain texture was a grey texture. Perhaps the proposal could be slightly modified to also let linden trees render, to avoid having the parcels totally blank. In any case, I think that almost-blank parcels would look better than full parcels surrounded by huge walls of red tape. As well as looking better, it'd also help fliers move around unobstructed.



1632, and even #13, is not just for privacy.
It also helps preserve the ability of flyers to fly around unimpeded, while stopping banned people from harassing you from outside your parcel.
The fact that it helps with privacy too is a big plus (considering you bought and paid for the land, and thus, should be able to stop people seeing it if you wish)... but it has many other points in favour of it too.




Overhearing chat is covered too. Someone who can't access a parcel shouldn't be able to interact with anything in it. This includes the idea that their chat shouldn't be heard in the parcel and vice versa.



Chat would be addressed too.
If everyone who wanted privacy in SL just "logged off"... SL would be far worse for it.
Instead of forcing people who care about privacy off the grid, why not give them basic privacy? If you give them basic privacy, they stay in SL, contributing to SL's social life and its economy. It's all very well saying "if you want privacy, get the hell out of SL!"...... until you realise that some of the people who want privacy are your friends, your customers, maybe even your landlord... and that telling people who want privacy to get off the grid means you lose friends, loose money and lose opportunities to enjoy / use SL as a whole.

With very basic scripting knowledge you could attach a channel 0 listener to that camera...and have every word sent back to you. They're even sold on SLX. (TOS violation to use them, obviously.)

As you say though...


At the end of the day, it's just pixels and words. And I doubt any player's pixels and words are unique or important enough to justify a detrimental impact on the game play of everybody else.

Thank you for answering my question.

It's a really thought provoking and well-written proposal, and my only gripe is with point #13. You see, my land buying decisions always take into account what surrounding builds look like, and it would annoy me no end if all those beautiful mediterranean builds in the sim where I once bought a small island disappeared overnight simply because the owners felt like allowing group access only (or have I misunderstood and it's only explicitly banned avatars that wouldn't be able to see the parcel?). It would equally annoy me if I bought land only to find an outrageous eyesore next door when the owner turned his privacy off. Yeah the mainland is transient and things change quick, but when parcels, prims and inhabitants are allowed to drift into a parallel universe at the flick of a switch, a significant sense of community is removed from the affected sim, and the parallels with land ownership in RL (an important metaphorical link to the gameplay experience IMO) are fundamentally weakened.

To me, if the beautiful mediterranean build vanished, or if it simply became an impermeable barrier to navigation, it would be equally bad.

And one of the things I take into account when buying land is the presence of access-controlled parcels around me. It's antisocial in the extreme given the current limits, and if there's a lot it means that either the sim I'm in is populated by people who are likely to be problem neighbors, or they've had to take extreme steps because there's a big griefer problem in the neighborhood.

Angela, this isn't a matter that Linden Labs is capable of doing anything about. Even if they managed to lock down the client completely, you could run a separate program (like glintercept) and drive your *own* virtual camera through the 3d model maintained by the video card.

The only way to keep people from seeing something in SL is to not have that content downloaded to the SL client application. There have been several proposals for variations on "limit what's downloadable to the client" that would be able to give you the security you want... but once it's reached the client application it's out of LL's hands.

They wouldn't be grey, they'd just show the underlying ground as if nothing had ever been built there. Heck, I can thnk of a few builds I'd like to block from my view that way.