Land Textures - Discussion.

This has probably come up before, but I saw some recent discussion on another thread and didnt want to hijack that one, so here it is...


My first thought after seeing Einsman's comment was flying over RL landscapes in a plane. The ground is often a patchwork of different "textures". In SL, I am not sure it would be so weird at ground level and I dont see a huge impact on fly over views. I live in Olive which is mountain rock and fairly drab. It I lived on a mountain in RL, there would be nothing stopping me from planting a grassy lawn, so why not in SL?

Would you want to be able to retexture the land you purchase anywhere on the mainland? How would it effect your neighbors? I think it would be worth exploring, maybe.

If this is doable on a mainland sim, per plot basis, I would only want to see the ability to change the default ground textures from the library. I would not support the ability to change to uploaded textures that are not basic landscaping textures.

What do you think?

I think for sale signs would be replaced w/ for sale textured land.

Sounds like a good idea to me.... when I lived in Minna, it was nothing but sand, which got a bit dreary after a while. I would have liked being able to change some of it to grass. Some additional library textures to help transition between sand and grass, or grass and rock, etc., would be helpful also.

I think what they really need to do for the mainland is just let us choose from a preset list of land textures. They could make them procedural so they blend automatically with surrounding textures. That would maximize choice without adding much to the texture load.

This is the best idea I've heard on the subject. Nobody want's to live next to mister pink lawn.

Do you think they'd go for letting us set our land to light? I'm just kidding stop ow that hurt...

Seriously though, sims are afforded sixteen textures, four per quadrant, with each being assigned a height range. The server then does nothing more than send a raw file, those texures and height settings to our clients when we approach a border or teleport into the sim.

Our video cards do all the work of drawing the ground mesh and blending the proper textures across it. That's one reason we need such powerful graphics hardware in our PCs. The result is that we don't all render the ground the same way. My card may not show as smooth a hill as yours and may start blending the sand texture into the grass five meters lower than yours.

If they're going to grant us the ability to assign ground textures to random parcels, the terrain code will have to be wholly rewritten and I very much doubt that 's a priority right now.

I'd love to have green grass in Boardman. We can't terraform up there to get to the grassy level so we're stuck with BROWN. It would look so much suburban if it was green. You'd swear no one ever waters their lawn if you visited the sim.

Since SL already sets the ground texture based on height of the terrain they should be able to let us override the height setting without having to change much code. Then at least people could have grass instead of dirt if they're close to sea level.

They could just change the Boardman heights. If anyone complained...well I can't post that in the forum for fear of locking the thread. Seriously, that's a Linden sponsered and maintained project sim. They can change those rules without so much as a by your leave.

Hear this woman. End the brown ugliness today.