Land tunneling.....

It would be cool if we could have a land tunneling tool. I know you can achieve some great effects using prims as a 'top', but its not quite the same ...

I've actually been hoping for a giant tunnelling drill for some time to dig into the Earth... or some way to use a vehicle of sorts to manipulate land in this fashion, provided you were the owner of course.

While it would be cool (this has been discussed before), given how mesh-based land works you would have to either 1) deform the mesh in ways that don't facilitate pretty building or 2) allow for holes in the land mesh to achieve this.

Either option, I believe, goes against what the Lindens intend for building, as the first would allow land barons to tie their land into a giant knot (!) and the latter would equal falling through the world... which, frankly, I wouldn't like to do.

So yeah. Stick to prim tunnels.

I wouldn't mind risking falling through the world, but I suppose it would be a good idea to have a base plane down there somewhere to stop you, or turn off gravity at a certain depth, or something. (How far underground can you stick prims currently?) And obviously, you should be able to fly up through the surface of the world so you can't get stuck "under the ice" as it were. I think we need this feature.

neko

We can already build tunnels, but we have to use prims to cover them. But that's not so bad.

Simply take pics of the land. Use those pics for the textures on prims. And use the prims to cover your tunnels. It works! I had tunnels under Chase's Manhattan this way.

You don't even have to take the snapshots, the land textures are all available now. But this still rather limits how you can arrange your tunnels, due to sim landscaping limitations and the fact that the prims don't look as natural as the surface mesh.

Maybe I'd settle for a new distortion parameter for prims: "wrinkled." It would put a mesh on the prim face, though not one that could be easily controlled. Cheaper prim-wise than using a bunch of prims to give an irregular surface, not much needed in the way of interface changes, and it's hard to see how it would add any more polygons than rounded objects or the existing dimple commands. Need to be able to set it per prim face, of course, using LSL. You wouldn't be able to adjust the textures on different polys in the wrinkles, though -- they'd still count as one "face".

Yeah, that would about do it, I guess... well, that and rounded corners for prims.

neko

I achieved a fairly decent tunnel below our clubhouse (Mieto (46, 69)), but I am sure it had much to do with the existing terrain and the sim's terraform capability (as Nekokami stated).

I also took snapshots of the surrounding terrain in order to cover up the top and although they did not come out as I would have liked, they were passable.

The tunnel was just an afterthought, so it was not so very important, but I agree, it would be nice to be able to make underground structures.

One month and I am so addicted! This is the ultimate software! I admit my next challenge will be to spend some time in the social part of the game, although even without trying, I already had the pleasure of meeting some incredibly nice people.