Another basement proposal

I do not plan to add a voting proposal since I do not think we need more than the dozen or so proposals.

Id just like to propose a possible implementation and see what others think.

I think that people in SL should be able to build using the same restrictions that they have in RL.
1. you can't dig close to the property boarder
2. you can't dig really steep without it caving in after a while.
3. If you dig below the water line you will get wet.

I propose that a slow background task cycle threw all 4x4m squares and check the surrounding 8 squares to see if they are owned by the same person/group. I'm thinking of a once a day or Idle task.

If it is owned by the same person/group the routine would set some flag or setting that would set the lower Terriform BBox limit to zero.

If it is not owned by the same person/group it would unset the setting or flag and then raise the land as needed.

Note: The routine would have to recheck the first square again to make sure the land wasn't sold during the scan. If it was resold, recheck that square and the surrounding squares from the start. This would prevent the land being mangled if the new owner want's to keep the basement.

Either the editor or the background task would then enforce a 10m high per 1m wide limit so that the vertical tris can only be 10m tall. It would raise each 1mSq as needed.

Limits and implications
1. You would not be able to dig more than the normal BBox range in the 4m strip along your property line.
1. Ban height?
2. Zoning?
3. Sim boundaries?

edit: typo

I can see no point to this restriction, and I don't see what it has to do with the previous "parcel basements" proposals. What problem are you trying to solve?

I'm trying to suggest a simpler proposal that would give us basements without changing the rendering engine. Sim owners can already make basements and I think an automated system could allow mainland users to do the same.

LL can’t simply turn off Terraform limits without making it really easy to grief your neighbors.

You also can’t let them make a 100m hole right at the property line since that would bleed over on to the next parcel.

On the one hand, It would be nice to let landowners make interesting builds, but I don’t think we want to turn the mainland into a pothole landscape.

“Turning off” the land would be more useful, but would be a lot harder to implement and would lead to weird results.

Even this proposal would add an extra bit field to the 16mSq land block, but it don’t think it would require a client change since I think BBoxes are processed on the server.

I wonder if each 4x4m square doesn’t already have a “Property line” flag to speed up drawing of property lines.
If so then you would just need a Sim setting “Allow teraform to zero on continuous land”

Im not a sim owner, I rent land on a sim with huge terraform limits, and I have used this technique to create "basements". I've also built basements on the mainland... the 8 meter difference between +4 and -4 is plenty big enough to create a basement room..

This kind of "basement" doesn't provide any significant ability you don't already have even on the mainland, because it doesn't provide any privacy, and adding limits to how people can adjust the land at their sim edges actually removes functionality.
Sure they can. You can grief your neighbors just as effectively with a 4m terraform limit as with a 40 meter one, or with no terraforming at all. I just watched a whole sim full of people griefed out of their land simply by building almost-but-not-quite enclosed walls until people sold out... and buying up the land to take on the next parcel...
A pothole landscape with 4m "sills" around the potholes doesn't look any better than one with the potholes right next to each other. For that matter, a landscape where every parcel is a +/- 4m platform or hole with no attention paid to the adjacent parcels is pretty damn ugly as well.
Letting landowners teleport people to a basement zone at some negative offset wouldn't lead to weird results, and the client handles rendering objects at negative offsets just fine.