TunnelCreation

Make it so that you can create tunnels underground.
With the landtools thatis.

Now that i've always wanted! I always wanted to make a giant workshop underground.. and only haveing a littel hatch pop out of the ground! But, I don't think this is possible, the way the "land engine thingy" works. I think it would take a total rework! But it still is a good idea!

Yeah... The landscape is described by a table of numbers. You can't dig tunnels under a spreadsheet.

Tell that to the mice we found in the file room at an place I used to work at.

So just let us punch a hole in the ground (like, maybe push a special type of phantom prim through the surface), and we will build the tunnels underground just like we build stuff above.

It would let me have a nice basement on my cottage.

That's actually a really interesting idea. I suggested something similar when SL was back in beta -- that there be a better way to define object material, so you could have a cube made of fog, for instance, or anti-fog, for being placed underwater. I wonder if any of this is actually possible.

What happens in that strange realm under the surface?

If you punch a hole through the ground mesh with a phantom prim, and don't build anything else (like a floor) under it, will you fall through to oblivion? Will you fall through and "land" at 0 m height?


If so, this would allow for some pretty hilarious pranks....Imagine being able to create a "portable hole", and texture it to look just like the ground, except when someone walks on it, they fall through, to......well, I d'on't know what happens to them down there, but it'll still be pretty funny.


I've got L$1 that says they fall through to SL Hell, where Grimmy Moonflower is ruling over an entire community of Banned avs whose souls have been confined there.

I've got another L$1 that says if there is a SL Hell down there, and that's where the banned avs get consigned to, it'll only be a matter of time before someone tries to charge for "adventure tours" to go down and see them.

I can't remember the name for it, but that's the system that Unreal uses for its world creation.


You don't build solid objects in Unreal. You cut open space out of the solid world.

The same thing could apply here: you create "inverted" objects that are phantom in the air, but whem umderground they act like tunnels. The normals are invetered, so the textures appear on the inside of the face instead of the outside.

It woould have to be a special prim flag, separate from the "types" (wood, metal, etc). You;d just check a little box that says "inverted" or "negagive space" or something like that.

Where 2 negative space prims interact, there would be no barrier, and you could pass freely between the two.

It could actually be easy to implement. SL already does collision tests to allow you to bump in to prims. This is just an inversion: instead of not letting you walk INTO a prim, you're not allowing the av to walk OUT of the prim (except when above ground)

Perhaps this could be expanded to allow us to cut out custom shapes from existing prims.

the only problem I can see is that you wouldn't be able to make the tunnels show holes in the ground, because of the nature of OpenGL. You can't "un-draw" a pixel.


Of course, the other way around this is to simply create "fake ground" out of rock-texured prims. I've seen this done very well. We just need the ability to better terraform our lots. Maybe we allow unlimited movement DOWN, but limit upward movement to the current 4m cap??

You bounce around in the void, as your av can't go into a negative height, but have nothing to land on

I've had it happen a few times, I'll look around for some screenshots when i find that HD...

And of course, you have people poking holes in the ground, shoving newbies through it, and removing the hole.

Well, you fall through the geometry in just about every other game and have to get extricated by support staff ... we're missing out!!!! ))) j/k

This is a a seriously good idea, Almarea!

The reason it's so especially good is that it would avoid the need for LL to rework any of their landscaping code, nor their ground-height calculations such as used in hovering etc. It's these suggestions that don't affect existing functionality that have the best hope of succeeding, for obvious business reasons.

Pushing prims into the ground is already possible as long as they don't have physics on, so it's just the entry from the surface that presumably would cause problems at present. How about disguised entry by teleport instead?

It's once we're inside the ground that the problems really start though. We can currently turn off the ground entirely using debug keystrokes, but what we'd need is a prim type that turns off the ground only within its walls. Interesting.

I give the full support of the Alexander Martov Development Corporation to this idea! It would create and wonderous possiblities! I love the idea!

I hate this idea! Leave the Mole People alone, will ya! They are down there for a reason!
Seriously, though, this is a really cool idea. We have been able to build underground since beta, but since the usual crowd of whining noobs kept burying their objects, this was removed

OMG, I didn't know that. Jeez.

That was a pretty hamfisted response by LL though.

I'd have thought that a far more useful solution would have been to make building underground an individual option. If enabled, the distance below the surface that triggers object autoreturn should be configurable per account, and most of the problems would disappear.

While they're at it, the height up in the clouds that triggers autoreturn should be configurable per user's plot as well.

For clarity, I should mention that although we have always been able to build underground, we couldnt actually go through the ground mesh
Unless someone figured out a trick back then and i didnt hear about it.

Ah, lol!

Has anyone scripted up a drilling rig yet? With a megahardinium drill bit, as that dratted ground mesh is going to be really tough.

LOL, Morgaine!

I agree that this would be an incredible feature. In the meantime, there are ways to build "underground" rooms that aren't actually underground. I just so happen to be doing that at my home right now -- building an elevator that goes high up into the sky, but uses a scrolling texture to make it look like you're going down into the ground.