Privacy sphere

With the camera constraints that can now be easily disable, and the ban/access line system that is either a hindrance, ugly, or ineffective, I'd like to suggest what I call a privacy sphere that could replace the parcel ban lines. This is how it could work:

- You set a point anywhere on your land, typically in the middle of your skyhome or house ("Set privacy sphere center" maybe like you would set a teleport point in your Land tools)

- You specify a radius around that point, or you could stretch a sphere in the build tools, but of course, it wouldn't be limited to 10m. Maybe 50m or 100m would be reasonable. The sphere would be cut with flat sides at the parcel limits though.

- Anyone not on the access list cannot fly through that sphere, but can fly around it. It could be visible too with a toggle (like View property lines => View privacy spheres). If it's on, you see all privacy spheres, including your own. This allows easy navigation for aircraft.

- Of course, if you are banned or not on the access list, you can't get inside the sphere.

- And the main thing: the sphere catches the Alt-click camera focus, just like a big huge solid prim, and you cannot move your camera inside the sphere.

I think this would work well. The whole sphere could be treated like a huge solid transparent prim (because you can't see inside solid prims). It would provide legitimate privacy either on the ground or in the sky, but not both, allowing a right of passage where privacy is not required.

What do you think?

Look in the Feature Voting section for a feature called "Privacy in a Pocket". It already is collecting votes for something very much like what you are suggesting.

http://secondlife.com/vote/vote.php?get_id=1609

This doesn't actually help. You can alt-click on yourself or a prim just outside a sphere and use that to pivot your camera inside. Once inside, you can alt-click on objects inside it.

(privacy pockets proposal)

The only problem with this is that it puts the "privacy zone" in a part of the sim where physics and editing is already beginning to suffer from roundoff errors, and would make these "privacy zones" act as a hazard to navigation.

There are alternate approaches that don't have the same problems.

1. Use a negative offset to indicate you're in a privacy pocket. Placing the pocket at -512 to -768 meters would place it outside even relaxed camera ranges, while leaving it within the building zone.

2. Pick a relatively inaccessible virtual offset (<0 or >4096) for the privacy zone, and use Region Corner to distinguish it. that is, when you're in the pocket your local coordinates would remain based at zero, but your global coordinates would put you at -1km or +10km. This would require a separate sim for the pockets, but it would be a *very* lightweight one, and even running on the same core as the "normal" sim it wouldn't be likely to use as much CPU time as all the security scripts it would replace.

3. Make the parcel access controls actually operate on a client-server basis. That is, when you have no access to a parcel, the server doesn't bother downloading any of the content in that parcel to you, nor any of your content to people in the parcel. You don't see anything but the terrain, and they don't see you. This would have the advantage over anything like "privacy spheres" that it wouldn't be able to use client hacks to bypass it... because the client wouldn't actually have access to any of the content!

Personally, I never got the point of privacy spheres.
Why not just make one very simple rule that if you cannot access a parcel (say, due to being banned, or it being group-only) then nothing in the parcel will rez for you and you can't interact with anything in it?
Remove ban lines, and just have you 'ghost' through the parcel - so you can't stay on the parcel or interact with anything in it, but you can move straight through it.

It'd be simple... you could then have privacy areas at any height... ban/access lines would disappear... it'd be prettier AND more secure AND more flexible.

Earlier it was proposed to add manually set Zones on a parcel which would remove objects from the pipeline based on your avatar position.
The idea is that anyone out side the zone could not see inside since they would not even have the objects in there cache.

The idea is that you would set the zone inside of your building since the walls would have to be on the outside of the zone. A zone would also act as a manually set oct-tree box for object occlusion and thus you would have to ensure that they can’t see the zone from outside of your property. Invisi prims would work well to seal up windows and doors.

In a way this is how the games increase performance by carefully controlling what is visible. This method would cause some strange image effects for a few seconds as you walk in and out, but that would be the price you pay for increased security.

Setting it up would be tricky unless done using a script, but I am sure that people would get it set up most of the time. I would also limit it to one zone per parcel so in a way it’s the same as your suggestion except that it could be placed at any height or size.

Edit: Thinking about how land works in SL it might be easier for LL to impliment Zone start and zone stop for each 16Sq piece of land. The land editing tools would then let you enter a zone box and it would round it to the nearest square.

That's basically what *parcels* are, they're chunks of space (zones) rounded down to each 16sq piece of land. You could split parcels to create zones, without splitting the prim quota of the parcels into two chunks... all parcels with the same owner on a sim share the quota.

The problem isn't that you can't designate zones, its that the access controls are so primitive and based so solidly around limiting access to physical avatars rather than limiting access to the client software behind them. And that's really more important than the culling now... you can use opaque prims (or invisiprims behind alpha prims) to create quite complete culling zones. On one parcel I was able to almost double my FPS by stting up a "forest" with invisiprims behind it to cull a particularly busy area of the next sim.

That would actually be [relatively] easy for them to implement. Just don't send any data for those areas, all the user will see is water/land. It will also encourage those that have beautiful builds but for some bizarre reason only allow their group in to rethink their access settings

That is the perfect simple solution. Well done Angel

it is time consuming, the camera is client side mostly you can't block it , also making object culling based on an access list is a waste of precious resources to me, comparing each prim with the ban/allowed list and decide on a per client basis if we send it to the client or not.

silly and the use is really minor

There is also the one I keep bringing up, namely this, as it uses a type of prim to define boundaries or 'zones' to which rules are applied differently.
With occlussion culling these could now additionally have an option "Always cull contents for outsiders". This, combined with the camera blocking would prevent people seeing inside at all

Hahaha, think about it a bit more... it is pretty simple to do and would actually Free Up Resources and Decrease Lag due to so many objects not having to travel down the wire.



Hahaha... It's the least silly thing talked about here, in fact it is genius in its simplicity.

just more database work for the sim, not what i call efficiency

The sim determines on a per-client basis whether an object will be downloaded already, and deciding to download it is a small part of the per-client work that the sim has to do... in fact, determining what objects an avatar sees and offering them to the client is probably the biggest part of sim lag. They've gotten better since the days when a Camping Club anywhere in a sim would render it unusable, but you'll notice they haven't increased the per-sim avatar limits as a result. Being able to flag whole swatches of the sim as "ignored" for a client would actually reduce the sim's workload, if LL implemented the scheme efficiently.

[Edit:]

Haravikk: with the current culling scheme you pretty much get a lot of your boundary boxes capability, except using more prims. I've been using invisiprim walls behind alpha trees to hide ban lines and the like for a while now, and when object culling came in I started being able to use them to increase FPS by masking busy builds. You could use opaque or invisiprim boxes to test your scheme out... see if it's worth the extra complexity.

it should be moved /merged in feature suggestion anyway, wrong place