Wilderness Regions

We have plenty of cities. We have plenty of sandboxes and meeting places and private dwellings. There are even finely manicured gardens and small retreats. But what about the WILD?! What about wide open spaces, large forests, and huge mountain ranges? Places to explore. Places to be alone; to dance, to shout, to skinny dip with a lover. Places to have an isolated and secret meeting; not through careful land management and tricky security arrangements, but because there are a few of you with torches in the middle of a dark wood. Places where the only prims to be found are faded and overgrown by the land and plantlife!

There is plenty of map space still, so how about filling some or all of it with a little, "nature." No one wants this in the estate/land they are paying good money for, where they want to implement all their ideas and establish their own themes. But if this land is owned by, "no man," it can still offer plenty of good times!

Reduce the actual hardware/database requirements and maintanence resources by constraining the contents as follows:

-- Fractal generated landscapes - No need for content creators. Maybe don't even save the landscape, but regenerate it each time the sim is restarted (keeps things fresh and new anyway). Instead of tons of terrain data, each region can store a small amount of data: some parameters for the landscape generation algorithm such as whether it is forested, hilly, wet or dry, and maybe a list of objects ('ruins', 'rocks', etc.) that can be chosen from during generation. Neighboring regions may have to store a small amount of data or establish a protocol for agreeing about the appearance of the boundary between them.

-- Low avatar count - Instead of the usual 30-40 maximum avatars, use something like half to a third of this. We don't want it to look like a city anyway, and there should be plenty of regions for everyone. Still, offer a number that allows a decent-sized exploration party.

-- Restricted prims/objects - No building; if you want objects, build them elsewhere and pack them into the Wild. This is not meant as one huge sandbox. Also, all objects left behind are automatically returned to their owner as soon as he or she leaves the region or logs out (if not sooner).

These things should allow multiple regions to be run from a single hardware server, and should help to keep the feel of an untamed and desolate wilderness.

What do you all think?

/signed

I am all for this, it is a splendid idea. There are some parklands now and they're great but more is more.

When a new sim opened up and before it was auctioned off, it was like an open desert with sagebrush and I'd take my horse over and ride. It was peaceful. The sky was huge....

I'd also like to see some serious ocean, 100 meters deep and many sims across, but allowing a small number of people. In this case, it would be for sale with a rule that all building must be on the ocean floor or in a high skybox, thus creating a habitat for mermaids and fishy people, but with hill ranges, large lots and low population densities, creating solitude.

Cthulu will eat me last.

There's no reason really that we couldn't have some void sims like this surely? Ocean isn't the only thing in the world

I've built a little wild area, and I'd love a larger canvas. Void sims are still too expensive, though. What we need are at least 8:1 or even 16:1 sims with a sim prim limit down below 1000, with appropriately scaled tier.

Algorithmic generation isn't necessary, the terrain isn't that much data.

I just thought it might keep things new, since there'd be different features each time, and it means someone doesn't actually have to generate that terrain by hand; work on the algorithm a bit, decide on a few parameters for each region, and let the rest work itself. It also happens that it would keep the storage requirements darn near zero, which could be nice if there are a BUNCH of these regions.

But it isn't really essential for the idea. I could change it to a footnote and leave it up to the designers to decide.

This is a great idea. Sometimes you really need to get away from the chaos of millions of little mismatching houses.

It'd be best if there were cool things in the wilderness to discover, like little hidden caves and pirate lairs and ruins, but that'd be a bit hard to coordinate. Trees and lakes and things would be good enough.

The thing with exploration - there needs to be something to explore. It can't just be a bunch of mountains with trees sprinkled across it. In reality, land isn't empty. There are all kinds of little features like rivers and streams and rock falls that appear over time. You really do need some kind of content generation to make it interesting.

I'd love to make wilderness, but sims are so expensive and they're not big enough to be really wild. You almost need really cheap "public service" sims. Don't allow subdivision, commercial activity, or ugly buildings (yes, that's a tough one). Perhaps only natural building? Caves, rivers, trees, etc.

The prim limit is good for preventing building, but if you're making a dense forest you need a lot of prims. I tried to make a lush tropical cave on my land and ended up deleting a lot of it to keep the prim count down.

It'd be wonderful to have a ecosystem that you could install on a sim and just let it evolve. The Svarga guy has already done it, but his code not for sale at the moment. You might need quite a few prims to do it, but it'd be very alive and wilderness-like.

Variable weather would also add to the "aliveness" of wilderness.

There are existing resident owned forest/wilderness sims. i work in one of them thats called Serenity Woods. It's a furry themed woodland sim attached to the fur valley continent. I helped build it's content, so i know its woody.

I like the idea a lot. I have fond memories wandering through empty board walks on the northern continent and the vast rolling plains of the southern one too, all before the land was auctioned off.

I think having sims like that would add a nice touch to the rest of the gird. As for providing content to "explore" in these sims other than trees, perhaps residents could submit builds for LL to use in conjunction with some of their own. Then, with a good sized list of content, LL could randomly pepper it about.

It would be awesome to be able to walk around in a forest for hours and not see a building, or some abandoned, half done build project. We need wilderness areas!

Pop over to Baffin sim.

You'll appear in the Teen Grid Transfer station (which looks kind of like a Starbucks), but once you get out of there, the islands that it is on (about 5 sims in total) are mostly wilderness forest and plains.... Linden protected land. Baffin itself is mostly build-OK with a short autoreturn, but a good place to rez a touring balloon to just float around lazily over the treetops. It's also a great place to said around with a Flying Tako if you got one.

I like the idea of some area not being developed, but then someone has to be willing to pay for that. My wife and myself own about half of the Namhae region, much of which we hope to leave forest or open, but at times its tempting to build more when we look at that monthly tier fee. It would also be nice if there was a way to edit the ground texture as then we might be able to get a bit more creative with the forest or open space!