Phantom Login

I actually wrote this as an answer to another thread, and it hit me that this idea, stated before in these forums, is such a neat concept that it might deserve its own thread.

The ability to log in totally invisible to everyone else and everyone else invisible to you. Anything you build or alter does not appear in-world, but only on your client screen. Theoretically, this would allow multiple people to use the same sandbox at the same time without ever seeing each other there and without seeing each other's builds. It would be a mega-boon for builders and scripters and would allow building/scripting away from prying eyes and constant interruptions.

Right now I'm in a contest that I'd really prefer no one saw what I'm working on until I'm finished. While I could build a sky-platform on a private sim with a security grid spanning 100m, that's still not going to prevent a fly-by camera-zoom space invasion. Being able to do a full-phantom-login would be fantastic. You couldn't affect anyone else. No one else could affect you. Everything you do is updated to your inventory. That would rock.

Cool idea Wayfinder how about doing it kinda like other MMOs do? Why dont we have an Sandbox that is "Instanced" it seems like it would afford you the same properties without creating a new login procedure.. Of course they still would have to make a new type of sandbox. Wikipedia entry below for those who never heard of this technique.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instance_dungeon

Yup. But not just a sandbox-- the entire world would be at your disposal. You could go anywhere, build where you wanted, update what you wanted. Such would just not be visible to anyone else until you were finished and it would not remain in-world until you come back in and make it so. In addition, no one else would be visible to you (so this could not be used for spying or peeping-tom activity). If security was a real factor, it might be a feature limiting travel to lands that are owned by you or your group, but I don't think even that would be necessary. The whole grid could be open to exploration... including shopping for needed textures/supplies.

What this means of course, is that we couldn't use it to add to a building (otherwise, griefers would use this feature to suddenly make massive grief builds appear). But we *could* build furniture to go inside that building, take it to inventory, then come back in normal mode and place that furniture. We could clean up inventory and script to our heart's content, test that script and debug without contant interruptions from friends and bypassers.

A nifty idea would be to make this an in-game toggle feature where you could instantly switch from visible to invisible mode and back again. While griefers might make some use of this to appear, grief, disappear, some already do that now by teleporting in, griefing, teleporting out. No real difference there. So might as well make it an in-game toggle. LOL. But if that were a concern, a forced relog to trigger this function would be a solution to that concern.

But in general, the ability to work in-game-solo would be great. My productivity would zoom.

There is one other advantage to both LL and the grid as well. If people could log on to work on their inventory without interruptions... it might actually start reducing inventory sizes, thus reducing drag on system resources.

Another use for "parcel basements".