Unobstructed flight path?

Skyboxes. People would like to ban people from their houses in the sky, up ABOVE the clouds. No one (or very few people) have a skybox *at* the clouds because they drift through the building. So, that 100m range is empty of stuff, but both above and below you need ban walls.

I suggested, long before the ban walls were upgraded, that they be limited to a 50 meter range... but that the low bound of that range be selectable.

Right now they seem to be from z=0 to z=256 or so. This means that areas like the extreme south-west of the Southern continent and areas in the Attol continent like the north of Arches have little if any protection, and in low-lying areas they're five or six times higher than necessary.

Someone with a sky box at 500 meters would be able to set their zone from 475 to 525. Someone in Arches could set it from 300 to 350. Luskwood could make it start below the platform.

This would at least reduce the perceived need for security scripts, and make a "free flight" zone less worrisome to the folks who want an illusion of privacy.

I feel a little silly asking this, but my searches of the KB and the forums just pulled up definitions of griefing and various types of security devices. What I'm wondering is, what, exactly, are we protecting ourselves from? IOW, what is it that someone can do to my avatar or property that I should be so worried about?

Someone should build a club at cloud level, using the clouds as a free fog machine.

Oh, I know there are uses, but it's probably the most prim-free zone there is inside of unassisted flight zone.

No, you don't. You might have the right to refuse access to a range of IP that you CONTROL, but not to interfere with access to something you DON'T control. And that's what this is all about.

Figure it out.

Since I started this thread, I feel a sense of responsibility to come back and offer my conclusion after spending quite a few hours experimenting with a variety of vehicles (planes, submarines, powerboats and sailboats). My conclusion is that security is an annoyance, but it pales in comparison to the real problem: SL doesn't really work for this activity. SL appears to excel, however, when it comes to gambling and porn...and stripmalls. They all seem fully supported. But if you want to sail a boat, you can pretty much forget it, unless you plan on crashing every 5 or 10 minutes.

Sorry...I'm a bit frustrated as I've only been here a week or two and it's already beginning to seem pointless.

I go cruising the waterways in my boat and have fewer issues than flying. I attribute this simply to the fact you go slower. There are a few empty water sims out there where you can open it up and spray rooster tails around at high speed, but I prefer site seeing. There comes to a point in speed where things dont rez fast enough to see, so slow is the way to go. The biggest problem with boating is the people who obstruct the waterways with platform builds extending into the water. Ive seen bridges built too low to pass under for example. The worse is the guy who has a platform house extending over the water with a deadly ban machine in it. So even if you can squeeze by the platform, the security script blows you out of the water.

Most of my experimentation in the last day or so has been with a sailboat. I'm a pretty crummy sailor, so speed isn't an issue.

I have a couple of very low speed planes that I've used for nap-of-land siteseeing, and while I used to be able to use them to fly across a continent at 40-50M AGL, I can't even do it at 250M AGL - *above* the ban line limits - in the past few months.

Ok, I admit, I'm one of those evil landowners that has ban lines around my land. I also admit that until recently I didn't really give much thought to how it might affect ppl trying to travel across my land. I can't see the lines, and when I travel, I usually TP directly to my location and back. I have the land ban in effect mostly because I spend a lot of time there coding scripts, and find in annoying for strangers to come up and make suggestive or even aggressive, violent remarks, which has happened on more than one occasion. I wouldn't mind helping a stranger with an innocent question, but really, I prefer to be left alone on my own land so I can focus on what I'm doing... anyway...

I would be happier if I could set my ban so the lines didn't appear visible to my neighbors. I'd also like a way to allow people to just pass through overhead. I don't want to mess with some stupid security system (I'm already getting spammed by one located nearby which I can't find). So, what if...

... what if there was a way for land owners to adjust settings for their ban lines - like, make them invisible to adjacent landowners? or set the height? or floor for that matter (for the case of skyboxes)... surely there would be ways of giving us options.

The best solution is for ban lines to actually block the *client application* from seeing anything in the parcel but the ground terrain and *maybe* Linden plants, and have the sim not bother to do any interactions between those objects and you.

This is, if you don't have access to a parcel... that doesn't mean you ca't enter it, it means that:

* You can not see any content in that parcel, because nothing in that parcel is downloaded to your computer.

* You can enter the parcel, but it will be as if it was empty. While you are in the parcel, you don't get downloaded to anyone's computer, the sim doesn't perform physical collisions between you and other objects.

* "You" includes objects you own and vehicles you're riding on.

Aside from that, your suggestion of being able to set the *range* of a protected zone (0-100 meters, 500-600 meters, whatever chunk of space you're trying to protect) is a good one. I proposed it several times over the last year. It would better solve the problem of protecting high builds (which is what the change to the ban line altitude involved), and limit the damage to freedom of travel that the current system causes.

There's still the issue of banned person and non-banned friend one of the Lindens mentioned somewhere.

There's a number of possible solutions to that, including simply letting it happen and letting people get used to it. But the scenario simply doesn't need to happen: the problem is simply that of having people "nearby" that you expect to see and you can't.

Well, first of all, any indication that you are in the phantom zone, or that a resident has entered the phantom zone, is enough to make it a non-issue.

Second, SL already has this problem: it's common for people to fail to appear after teleporting for extended periods of time. Not even a label appears to indicate that someone's there. If the Lindens really thought this was a "stopper" they'd have done something to address that problem long since.

Don't give up SL will be better. There was a point in time that border crossings were a dream and flying from west to east on mainland was a breeze and fun. Sure the security bots got annoying but they were easy as long as you were above the 1500 mark. The parcel full issue seems to be new....in the 2 years, I have not encountered this till recently. I do agree with a commercial flight lane or something, we may not have commercial flights now, but perhaps one day aviators/builders like myself could offer those services