Residential Zoning

Well, I still need to get in touch with the owner of that club that showed up next to my land. He now set up even more particles, even floating over to my land, dragging the overall SIM fps down below 600 with the scripts and the time dilation keeps falling, too. I'd happily help implement some more sophisticated scripts that are maybe only active when there's really people around and help him fix the overlapping textures. I agree, that's not that bad, still, but the smoother the sim runs, the happier I am, my neighbors are, and, in the end, the happier the club owner should be, too.
And yes, I know, next thing I hear here is that that's another elite speech and how I dare interfer with other people's scripts and such... but, flame me or not, I think we're all responsible to make SL better. And I intend to do my part, and if that means some coaxing of people to create a bit less lag for their neighbors, and putting some hours of scripting into it, so be it.

*meow*
Leopard.

Your idea of a meaningful social interaction is to insult someone based on your narrow subjective tastes? Nice. You'lll make a lot of friends that way. You'll find that most people in the community feel that point of view exceedingly arrogant.

My latest venture may be of interest to some of you in this thread. I am taking a private island and splitting it between four users that desire the same thing in a sim. If this project pans out I will do the same with another island split among 8 users. The details are located here:
/invalid_link.html

On that seemingly tolerant last note, there are alot of people who play SL to get away from conflict, criticism and arguments. Not everyone is interested in recreating an exact replica of real life, unlike yourself. I think alot of people log in to get away from rl and slip into a different place, if only for a while. I think flying around to random places and neg rating builds because they don't fit it with your opinion of "good taste" is completely anti social behaviour and counter productive. Not to mention utterly pretentious. Since when did you corner the market on good taste? Oh wait... you haven't.
As newbie, I would have been crushed if someone flew over to my place I was working on and neg rated it!

If your neighbour builds something montrous that's completely blocking your access to your land, that's a different story.

It would be kind of fascinating to know whom owns malls and clubs in this debate. It looks a lot like the classic one about Federal and whatever club was there. All we need is that weenie guy to start chiming in with "It's over"

That being said, I am a home owner in Io and have seen our cool little residential neighborhood turn into shop/club hell. Wait, I forgot "monolithic". I doubt we will get zoning in public lands, I am sure LL has much better things to do and I like the wide open possibilities of the game in any case.

The only comfort I take from empty clubs, horrid looking "vampire lairs" spewing blood, and the next big thing in retail is that very few of them make it. Down our way things last a month or two, they realize they are almost a K away from a hub and fold their giant slabs and steal away in the night, hotly pursued by a tier bill. At least it drives property values up.

I like the idea of zoning and it's selfish, I freely admit. Maybe the idea of experimental sim's is a good one, but I really think the frustration with the way things are in a lot of cases leads to increased creativity, or at least moving to a better neighborhood and new negihbors are always cool. I think bringing the ideals of land laws in world is really going to throttle people down and lead to a disneyfication of the joint.

Maybe if people would actually talk to each other, ignore the birthday in the constant noob hunt, think about what you are building next to your neighbor, try and blend your club with the area, match your mall to the surroundings, and *laugh* I dunno what you could do with the dripping blood. We need an SL Red Cross blood drive or something. Is that stuff going into the groundwater?

Don't legislate the baby out with the bathwater, thats all I am saying. Gotta go, this fence is giving me a wedgie.

In the future, it might be interesting for the Lindens to sell land that is pre-flagged as commercial or non-commercial, just like adult and non-adult. But it wasn't bought that way.

1) It's "big, ugly, and lag-producing" if it's somebody else's neat effect. Yeah, transparency gets overused a bit. But generally things are either ugly (slab like and fairly quick to rez) or pretty (have lots of moving parts or decor and are laggy). You get a certain number of prims to put on your property and dress up. Using them is presumably within the tolerances for the sim to move at a reasonable speed. If not maybe your prim limit should be cut along with everyone else's. There are only so many objects you can put on a parcel of land.

2) Shopping is one of the things to *DO* in SL. If your point is that you don't want a mall that is laggy next to YOU so that you can teleport to shop in one next to...ME or somebody else..., I am not too thrilled with that. Zoning is mostly a matter of pushing things into areas where people who can't complain very much have to deal with them. Everyone is equal here, so I submit that you can't really make shopping someone else's problem.

3) If you don't like shopping, fine. Maybe it's all I do, and I don't like people who waste a lot of prims building a big house that slows down my trip to the mall from the Telehub as it starts rezzing under me (or as I bloody fly into it). We're all paying the same rate for land.

The whole zoning thing is an interesting topic, but I just want to comment on this one tangential point. I didn't have time to wade through all of this thread, so I don't know if this has been mentioned.

Anyway, my very unscientific experience is that neighboring sims *can* induce lag on your sim through child agents. An AV in another sim is categorized as a child agent of your sim if they are looking into your sim. Your sim has to do work to provide their "view" into your sim. A few times I have noticed significant lag in my home sim when a large event was being held in a neighboring sim. At these times, my sim had only one or two active agents, but tons of child agents looking in from the other sim.

Just wondering if anyone else has noticed this...

my insignificant take on things: twice now I have moved to a beautiful scenic land, gotten my things set up, and only weeks later I've had massive lag producing buildings put up next to me.. I personally don't care what your place looks like, it could be the ugliest building I've ever seen, but if it doesn't cause me lag, i don't care. Leopard defintiley spoke for me when they posted this - I would love to see a residential area... as far as group purchasing of sims go, while this is a great idea, not everyone can afford this wants to do this.. and as far as malls.. for the most part I don't go into malls.. they're everywhere, they're lag producing, and I can generally find what I want faster and easier in a smaller shop or on SLE.. I'm now looking at moving again because of the lag.. *sigh* It's getting old.. it'd be nice to see some sort of control put on malls/clubs or massive buildings in general - i mean, I live in PG and I'm getting my ass lagged off - so it's not just a problem in mature areas.. bah - as far as being lagged by tons of people in another sim - yes, that happens to me all the time.

I don't mind residential zoning. Problem is, it could be hard to enforce and could lead to favoritism unless it was objective.

Here are the two measurable things that I think would keep out commerce if they were not allowed in some new region:
* Ability to mark items for sale (this is not allowed in sandboxes, so we have some precedent here)
* Ability to hold events (there are posting limits too, so the leap isn't huge. A simple flag to keep residential zones out of the list should do it.)

That would certainly keep out malls (no sales) and without the ability to advertise events, what club would want to open?

Those both sound like reasonable ways to solve the problem, aswell as maybe not too hard to impliment? *sighs*

This wouldn't work by itself, as many/most vending machines don't pay attention to the "for-sale" and "buy" functions; they use various permutations of llGiveObject to drop items on the person who gave it money with the "pay" function.

Mmmm, reading this thread I have to think of this other thread where people pushed for point to point teleport. I wonder how many people realize that whatever little inofficial zoning we now have would even be lost.

Maybe Linden should auction some sims that are no-fly zones (complete no-fly that would immediately get you grounded when crossing the border). I take any bet that in such sim you would not find stores nor malls nor clubs

If we had a way to provide land buyers to search for land that is commercial or residential, based on a poll of what the current land is, would people use it and follow it?

For instance, say a sim has 9 "residential" plots and 1 "commercial", as listed by the residents. A person looking for land would see land in this sim as 90% residential. Would:
a. People looking for land use such a utility?
b. People go with what they find? (Someone who wants residential moves into a residential area, person who wants a shop moves into commercial?)

I'm pretty sure the answer to (b) is no. I think people will put commercial builds where they can regardless of what is already there. That is what s happening now. Even without a poll people can see what kind of builds are already in a particular sim. And people are putting malls and clubs in sims that weren't previously "commerical". Unless it's against a rule that the Lindens will enforce, I don't think people will constrain themselves.

As to (a), I think people looking for residential sims would use this feature if it were integrated into the client. But like I said, I don't think that land would tend to stay residential.

I don't think the zoning problem is mainly about how land is used (i.e. commercial versus residential or perty versus fugly). I think it's about distributing sim resources. It's just that malls and dance clubs tend to use more resources more consistently than personal homes. I think a practical solution has to address the issue of resource distribution and be automated.

My suggestion would be limiting the number of avatars per meter in (special) sims, similarly to how prims are divided up now. I'm picturing an avatar density that would allow an average sized plot owner to have a few people over at a time, but would not allow a club to succeed unless the club owned all the land in the sim (if then).

I'm probably not the best person to figure out these numbers, but I'll come up with some anyway as an example. Since it's unlikely all the parcel owners will have vistors at the same time, the maximum number of avatars in the sim can be high. Let's say 32. That works out to one avatar for every 2048m2. So a person who owned 2048m2 would have to hang out by himself. A person with 6144m3 could have 2 guests. If you owned half the sim, you could have 16 people over. And if you owned the whole thing, you would be allowed to have 31 friends dance with you at any time.

You can fiddle with the numbers, or even use a more complicated formula. But the basic effect would be to make people pay to have large numbers of avatars using up sim resources.

It's just an idea though. Does anyone see problems with it?

My favorite is when they designate an area new land, then sell the adjacent lots, effectively locking in the new people, and forcing them to pay the large fees to buy the corporate bought land.

I was living in a nice first land spot with nothing but LL reserved land all around us... next thing I know someone from Dreamland bought up all the property around us and charging an insane amount of money for the undev'ed land. That isn't so bad, but its the ugly FOR SALE signs on each seperate fu(&ing lot!

Long storie short, I ended up selling to a first land person, to get away from Dreamlands and Linden Labs land deal. Thanks for screwing up a first land area, that was so beautiful. Land around first land shouldn't be sold to the large corps in LL, thats just my opinion.


-One unhappy Huron ex-resident.

Dreamland = Anshe Chung

If you are first to move into one new sim you should not be surprised if other people move in next to you. You own land you bought, not whole sim.



The going rate for land on the market indeed look insane when compared to 512 L$ Linden subsidized newbie land. But if this was in first land area, rest assured that most of the markup went to whatever newbie (or alt) claimed and resold this land.



I like my sale signs. They look lovely Nothing can beat one innocent green piece of land with one beautiful red oriental sign on it. Then the sun rise above the horizon and you can watch the pituresque reflection of the sign in the water, melting with golden image of the morning sun in one dance of love when nature and commerce embrace each other

Sorry, i just threw up a little and had to swallow it before it splattered on my keyboard.

It wasn't meant as an attack, like I said ITS MY OPINION. You are entitled to yours as I am mine. I'm not going to sit here and have a little flame war. I didn't like it, nough said.


PS
You have the right to buy land I understand that. But that land wasn't for sale (I think they put it up for auction when I was away for a bit), so that really isn't an issue. But having 20 of those for sale signs is just overkill. I respect you on the forums and have read a lot of your threads, but I"m just stating how it made me feel, and it ultimitely made me move.

Edit: I really think there needs to be a buffer between First Land areas and those already established. First land is supposed to give people a chance, its bad enough with the scammers out there, yet alone being forced out by a big company.

*sits back smugly and hopes Anshe is truly listening*

you smoke A LOT of pot don't you?

i think the sea of red signs is kinda silly. how many people impulse buy land for petes sake?

i've been pushing for SOME form of zoning in SL for well over a year now. Not that everyone should be forced to conform to some standard that thry didn have before, but at least *SOME* new sims should come on every so often that someone should be reasonably assured if they buy a plot there to have a home, a club won move in next door, and if they buy a plot to host a club, they won be hurtin alot of nearby homeowners, thats jus common sense

I thought Anshe's description of the sun setting on the lovely combination of nature and commerce was hilarious.

"how many people impulse buy land for petes sake?"

I'm an impulsive land buyer. Also: Anshe, thank you for setting your parcels to allow building and scripts. When I'm away from home and need a place to take out my plane, I just look for one of your signs.

Of course, if people find signs with flowers so offensive, maybe you should consider replacing them with something else . . . a big-box dance club spewing particles on each lot, with a spinny sign! Oh no, wait, that's not considerate at all; SL dance clubs are evil and building one should be a bannable offense. Instead, on each parcel replace your sign with a giant King Kong! Yeah!