Caves!!

I think adding the ability to make caves out of the land would be a most definately enjoyed feature, espicially by me, since Im trying to make my place have a more natural look.

along these lines, i would like to be able to change the texture of the land i own. Rather than it being just relative to its hieght.

I agree with Nada.

Christopher, seek out Dini`Ura's land and you will see a most excellent cave made simpley from texturing objects. I believe he is in.. Federal? I could be wrong. I know he is stationed near Lynnix Muse, so if you want a landmark I'll shoot you one tomorrow.

Still, any sort of SUBTRACTION would be a good addition in my book! ^.~

Making caves would also enable us to tunnel through land wouldn't it? Oooooo that would be interesting

Instead of just lowering land 'downwards', you could tunnel through it.... would be spiffy, as i can imagine a few themed communities would arise from being able to create tunnel towns hehe

Not sure if that is possible however

Yes--Caves, tunnels, a vote for YES.

As long as there is no visual effect to the land above, I agree that caves would be pretty cool. However, like every other feature in SL, someone will abuse it, and the land will be littered with holes and caves if the proper safeguards are not applied.


-TK

The easiest way I can think of to work it would be to allow one to change the texture, alpha, and phantom of a parcel of land, and then one could build in from there. This would also allow seasons on ones own land (scripted would be nice), but would apparently require some pretty big changes to the way land texturing is managed in SL currently.

A workaround I'm considering involves a walk-in teleport (in a dark patch of phantom), that could go to a hollow object underground with a similar exit. But though it would allow one to build around using hollow shapes underground (if it worked), it wouldn't allow one to look in and out of the cave.

Has anyone else tried this yet?

Neko

If the land is currently a simple height-map (the simplest and most effective way to store terrain data), changing it to allow caves and overhangs requires changing the ENTIRE data structure. A height-map simply stores a location (i.e. "+5 meters from the corner of the sim in the X direction, +7 meters in the Y direction", and a height value at that location("+2.5 meters above sea-level". With caves, you could have at least 3 values at any location: The "height" of the land, the "floor" of the cave, and the "ceiling" of the cave. So you've already tripled the amount of data to be stored, at any cave location.

LL would have to put a lot of work into setting limits, checking for graphical & data corruption based on what people try to do with their caves, making tools and data-structures to store information on the shape of the walls of the caves, etc. More information must be streamed to the client, as well.

A simpler solution would be to allow a "hole" to be opened in the ground - and have the users "fill" around and behind/underneath the hole with buildings / prims (a la Sierra's first "Starsiege Tribes" game). However, this still presents the problem of giving users the power to make holes in the ground and then walk away from the project - leaving behind a hazard for the rest of us! LL would have to program something to deal with these "unplugged" holes; and the Av's who fall through them and "out" of the world.

Interesting ideas, and it would be cool to allow more complex terraforming; but its very technically complex to do so.

Take care,

--Noel "HB" Wade
(Tread Whiplash)

Chris, it's such an obvious, good idea. I'd like to go spelunking in SL too, complete with stalagmite+stalactite and crystal growth formations. Maybe an inner well, some caves-within-a-cave, and deep drops that lead into the bowels of unknown. Perhaps even lost treasure to find!

Would make for some great explorations... especially if someday in SL, not only can you skydive, but rappel down a rope.

Tread, AFAIK it is a height map, so you're right, opening holes and letting us build interior structures would probably work best. I thought of the hole-plugging problem. That's part of why I thought setting land to phantom would be best, rather than removing it. I figured if someone released or sold the land, it should revert to its original texture. The other necessary feature would be to make all land phantom from the underside, so if you fell through a hole you could fly out.

Actually, I ended up doing that even with my surface dome cave. People would teleport in to see me and get stuck in the roof (and sometimes could'nt walk in the doorway, depending on their av height). Now I can't walk on my own roof, but at least people don't keep getting stuck.

One really valuable thing about caves is that if you want to set up a sort of game with any kind of limited access (i.e. you must solve this before you can go there), you're pretty much restricted to things indoors. People can just fly around and get everywhere else (unless you turn off flight, but what fun would that be?) But if you want a natural looking landscape, that leaves out buildings. Caves are the answer.

While we're talking about interior spaces, I'd like to be able to make bigger prims. Ten by ten sounds big until you want to make a round room. I've seen the excellent curved wall builder scripts, but they use up a bunch of prims, and I'm always on a prim diet. I guess I'll look for another thread to go on about that in, though.

Neko

Anyone remember the cave in Darkwood? It was quite extensive and very cool. From the outside it looked like a moderate sized pile of rocks. The inside was all prims. The land must have been sunk quite a bit. Darkwood is one of the oldest sims so the land can be sunk a lot more than most of them. It was around three levels deep complete with bats and a wild watery moving texture area at one end.

I would love the ability to build underground. I kinda doubt we'll ever get it, but it would be seriously cool! You can still do nice caves though

Here's my cave in Freelon...

OMG... I forgot about your cave... complete with the nature ambient sounds when I visited last... and the cave paintings and the shallow pools of water I think. What a grotto, I dig, Chip!

It's a good place to sit in the back of and recite poetry.

Or something.

Feel free to hang out there any time Torley It's a nice private place to just chill out.

if you look in the library/textures folder we have access to all the linden terrain textures. using those and prims you should be able to make a surface that looks like normal land on the outside allowing you to make a cave under it



jester

Maybe if we could just shear a raised land mass, or extrude a raised land mass to the sides a bit. You could bottom out your land to just above water (or some below it to make cave pools), raise two or three walls with the littlest land control, shear them inwards, and extrude a little to connect on top. You can sort of do this now, but you need to add prims for the roof.

Here's a pic of the cave behind my waterfall in Clementina.

I want to build underground as well. We could just sithack our way down there...

Yeah, I suggested that earlier (either in this thread or the Tunnels thread), and someone said they'd had trouble getting it to work. Plus, you wouldn't be able to see in or out through doors or windows (if you want something like a "hobbit hole".

With the land structure the way it is (elevation map), I don't think we'll be able to get the sides of a hole to lean in any. I think the easiest mod they could make would be to allow one to set the texture, alpha, and phantom of a parcel, so you could effectively cut a hole. You could then build in from there.

I've made a small cave in Arena, with a dent in the hillside, a stone circular floor, and a dome. A cut on one end forms the opening. I then added a torus segment at the back to help patch the area between the dome and the hillside, and added a few rocks and plants to further obscure the boundary area. I used the same land texture as the surrounding land when they became available (I had started by making my own). I think it worked fairly well, and it's very economical in terms of prims (always a factor in my builds), but I can't make it any bigger than 10x10, or at least not easily, because I have a steep hillside and that helps tremendously for the cave I have, but makes it very difficult to add to the back (I can't dig a hole deep enough), and I'm limited in where I can put the openings in the dome so I can't just grow sideways-- not by much, anyway. Might be able to fiddle with a matching dome with cuts, then put another chunk of torus over the middle to help it merge more smoothly. I'll have to try that tonight.

I've seen a lot of "caves" with flat roofs that just didn't look right from above. I think one of the toughest things is to get an irregular texture like the original land. Otherwise the roof of the cave really sticks out.

Neko

Tcoz -

The terrain doesn't work like Prims. You can't "Shear" it over, because each data-point (small "chunk" of terrain is at a fixed position in the X & Y coordinates. By making the terrain data a simple "grid" and having a regular spacing between each point, you form a simple and reliable way to store & render terrain. Say for example you have data-points every 1 meter. You could then store ALL of the terrain data for an SL sim/region by having an array of 256 entries x 256 entries. Each entry is simply the "height" (or Z coordinate) of the land at that location. X & Y coordinates are not stored at all in this format - but because you know the spacing, you can calculate the location based on where you are in the array. For example, if the element in the 2nd row, 5th column is "15", then I know that in the Sim/Region, the ground is 15 meters high at a point 2 meters North of the southern edge, and 5 meters West of the eastern edge of the area (SecondLife uses the South-West corner of the Sim for its base location).

As you can see, this system is simple and effective - and stores a minimal amount of data; which means its faster to retrieve and send to your machine across the 'net, and results in less lag for the user. Its also "easier" for your computer to calculate and render, in this format.

Allowing "shearing" or anything else that would change the X and/or Y coordinates of a terrain data-point would require re-working the ENTIRE terrain system; and require much more data to be stored and transmitted to the user's computers every time they visited the area.

Take care,

--Noel "HB" Wade
(Tread Whiplash)

P.S. Just for a size comparison: A 32-bit value like that used to store terrain-height is 4 bytes long. A 256 x 256 array uses 65536 entries; for a total of 262kb. That amount would be transferred to your machine every time you flew across that piece of terrain! Now, if we changed the system to have irregular spacing and store X & Y coordinates, that triples the data-storage to 786k... Almost a megabyte, just for terrain-data!

Meh, storage is hardly the issue.. I mean 1MB is nothing
You could optimize it in all sorts of ways - have a bitfield, one bit for each point on the terrain, if it's 0 its normal terrain (1 value in the array), if its 1 it's a two-tiered terrain point (3 values in the array)..

I saw an awesome mining tunnel in the dark life sim. It was fairly huge, too!

We have underwater caverns on FairChang Island. Garth terraformed it and then placed the ceiling prims. Right now the sim is snow so it does look a tad odd, it looked better when we had the beach texture. But soon spring will come and the beach will return. heh

But it is quite extensive and fun to explore so feel free to come on over and take a look. I put in a lot of underwater plants and a few creatures too.

Uhm, YES it is! If you have 30 Av's in a region, that's 30MB of data to transfer! And now multiply that by the number of sims in SL (40, 50, ??). And that's just to enter the region/sim ONCE for those 30 Av's... What if they TP or fly out and back in after a short time? Data-size optimization is IMPORTANT - even on broadband. It costs LindenLab $$ in Bandwidth costs, and bogs the servers down with more data to dish out to every user. You can't think in terms of "just one person" when designing an MMO - you have to think in terms of "What would it be like with 1,000 people in this area at the same time?"

A bitfield gives you the ability to detect the terrain-type, sure - but that does nothing for storing the data itself about that terrain. How would you calculate "walls" of a cave? You're at least doubling (if not tripling) the size of the data compared to its current format.

I'm not saying that caves wouldn't be cool - I'm all for 'em! But I just don't see it happening anytime soon, because of the techincal limitations of the current system. I'd much rather have LL working on higher-priority improvements and bug-fixes and things, than spending all their time re-doing the terrain-system.

Take care,

--Noel "HB" Wade
(Tread Whiplash)

They could give members the ability to make their own heightfeilds, like as a new prim type. Creatively placing those ontop of the regular SL terrains can make caves, I do it all the time in Bryce.

Just a thought,

-Zac Bunderfeld