a different kind of grid

personally, i think the enforced geography of sl is a problem... that is to say, being locked in place. maybe if people could own land and make it adjacent to whoever they wanted, this would solve the "ugly neighbor" problem. at the moment, only people who are willing to buy a sim can do this. it would be nice if smaller landholders could determine the shape and location of their land in the grid - instead of being stuck with where ll put their land. it is virtual space... the geography doesn't need to be limited to fixed locality like in first life.

I'm puzzled by how differently sized and shaped parcels would fit together.

treat them like minisims maybe

dunno how the tech would work. just one of my wild ideas.

The whole point of SL is that sense of place. If you want to remove it, try an experience like Guild Wars and see the results.

Over time, I'm banking on sim borders being more ephemeral and user-defined, though.

but you could have place as defined by the landowners. look at the island sims. i think it would be cool if the smaller land owners could do something similar.

Could. Hold that thought, because it's precisely the point.

Preserving the sense of "place" is also one of the reasons island sims are not allowed to be connected to the mainland grid. Island sims are a good analogy of what is to come - over time, I see them resembling more static areas than the constant flux they're in now.

Counterpoint, if there really is drive to move an island sim somewhere else, that'll probably happen.

However, it's a current mission statement of LL to make the experience as "familiar" and "tangible" as possible - and that's the drive for the way things work now. Changes as they progress is anyone's guess.

island sims move all the time
nowal and backstage became part of a hidden island. oceania (athena, montmarte, farichang island and project currently) have been reconfigured a few times. and there is ansheland to the north, and a few other island groups.

but that most islands stand alone is a good point of evidence that people might not choose to have neighbors.

My point is this is the short term. Long term, I expect many continents will solidify beyond simply Ansheland.

Ansheland actually illustrates the advantages to this - none in the least of which being the sense of continuity I mentioned above.

This begins to feel like a wicked game of Whack-a-Mole. Perhaps one thread would be better?

Sorry Stone, I was trying to piece together a clever response to your thoughts on a different kind of grid. I guess I ended up puzzling you instead.

In all seriousness, I'm sure we will see arrangements of this type in the years to come, when Lindens aren't the only ones with a grid. When the Lindens have reached a point where they feel they can successfully license their technology to others I think we'll see arrangements like you have described and many many more that we haven't even imagined yet.

The Lindens can run four separate void water sims on one server, so there is some flexibility in how they run the current Grid. Most regions are one server for one sim. Setting up a grid like you describe seems like it would be more work than the Lindens would want. It would have to be micromanaged by someone. I could see this being set up and maintained by us residents when we have the ability to license the Second Life technology for our own servers. Perhaps the different-sized parcels would have to be square/rectangular. Maybe not. Perhaps they wouldn't require the current metaphor of land and water like the current Grid. Who knows.

I have read some threads here that propose a much different way to handle sim resource allocation. To the point where boundaries between sim regions become completely transparent to us. Not even detectable.

The current Grid has a very flat feel to it. I don't think even Christopher Columbus would have thought that The Grid was round. But then again... we've only seen a very small part of this world so far. Who knows what it will look like in another five years. Does it have to be round...no. I guess I just like to think of it that way...

This would be cool to me...

An empty void full of stars. I start pulling together some of the local galactic matter and form a small asteroid that I set up home on. A friend arrives in a spaceship running on fumes and decides to put down some roots too. They gather more of the material floating in space and make thier own space rock. Soon more friends show up and pretty soon we've created a small planetoid. You can walk all they way around it. There are a few other planets close by in our system that we can travel to via ships. Planet = sim. Space = water. Space Travel = teleporting.

That would just be one way to form a local land network/grid. I would imagine there would be countless others. Hopefully the limit would be our imagination.

Stoneself, this is precisely where it's all heading.

We need better tools for Zoning (the PC term).

I also agree that people like Anshe do a far better job of terraforming than LindenLabs.

What's funny is that you're all reaching for fancy technological solutions to what is basically a people problem.

You want to move away from an ugly build.

What that amounts to is having a certain taste, and wanting to be in a niche with others of the same taste. Well, this is now possiblr by moving to Ansheland and other private island sims....where people brought the same problems with them, only now in perhaps a more concentrated form LOL.

It's funny how most people want to insist on the value "I do WTF I want on my land" uber alles.

And yet all you'd have to do is spread the same valuation that these zoned sims do: they have fairly simply rules, which amount to:

o don't build anything laggy or with excessive particles
o build "normal" i.e. no crashed spaceships or plywood boxes
o build at least X amount of meters away from the property line

The notion of the "crashed spaceship" was taken from the language of the Lindens' own zoning regulations in Brown and Boardman, where they use that image of experimental creativity to signal that in a residential area, they don't want it to look like a sandbox.

The bit about lag and particles seems clear to most people but that's precisely the area where many people start arguing vociferously.

I've tried for months to have a discussion on this very topic of "ugly builds" to see if there could be found some rough consensus.

For even raising it, I've been misrepresented constantly as someone who wants to "control what others do on their land" or "impose my tastes on their build". Of course, if Anshe or Adam write these rules into their private zoned sims, nobody accuses them of imposing taste on others lol.

But I continue to believe that when they write a sentence like "Build normal, no crashed spaceships and no plywood boxes" 97 percent of the people understood EXACTLY what they mean, and the 3 percent who want to taunt and push the limits know too, but are just being facetious.

If a norm or value was disseminated that it just wasn't the right thing to do to slam a build up to the property line, and that if you do that, you can expect a negrate, then the value might take root. You wouldn't have to flee all the time.

Many, many cases of unhappy neighbours could be solved if you just worked at this "people" part of the equation which is finding the common denominator the community is willing to accept, i.e. no builds that block view, build out to the property line, and have ugly spinning cubes on top of them. You'd solve many of the issues right there.

Of course, there are dramatic fights even about a simple principle like "don't build at the property line out of consideration of your neighbour". Formulas like 4 meters or 1.5 times the height of your building or whatever the idea are fought over intensively.

But I continue to believe that you could find a consensus, and enforce it through the negrate, and enhance it and provide incentive for it through the posrate. That doesn't mean you just randomly negrate someone who has an experimental or newbie or less-than-perfect build. It means you work within the framework of that common denominator of "build normal i.e. not a crashed spaceship" and "don't put spinning cubes" and "don't block the view" and you get somewhere with that.

What you have forgotten about with your asteroids is that you might float next to someone and form the star with them, but they might come to hate you in 7 days. Then they'd want you to move. But you being a free being in the cosmos may not like to move off the asteroid. So you have the same problem all over again.

The people part is an insurmountable problem. Consider your own crusades against the frolicking gorillas and cubes of death. You are but one example of a phenomena which pervades Western culture. People are generally unable to pragmatically discuss problems with their neighbors, and instead resort to shouting, bickering, and negrating. The greatest problem is that your zoning criteria rely on a completely subjective interpretation. Is my Corbusier inspired home too interesting for the sim? What about this Gehry ripoff I just built? Where do we draw the line? This doesn't affect me, since I don't want to live in a zoned sim. However, these are the concerns which prevent many people from joining them. They don't want the good taste gestapo to step in and rule with caprice. They want a fair, neutral, systematic solution to the problem.

go start your own thread. don't hijack this one.

it isn't about ugly builds so much as the power to choose.

and a harebrained idea.

or follow stoneself's example and start 50 threads on the same topic.

It isn't a hijack but a legitimate response.

It's the age-old point that you bring your problems with you when you flee somewhere.

You're trying to flee to the suburbs or flee to an asteroid or flee back to the inner city from the suburbs or whatever. There are many RL examples.

And what happens is that you still have people as your neighbours. And then those niche-finds of yours might turn on your. What if you hook up all your asteroids and it turns out one person is a huge pain in the ass and makes a build nobody ever predicted? NOW how will you get away? I already see this happening in the zoned, residential areas everyone went to so much trouble to make. The story is by no means over.

Some people wanted to have mist coming up all around their land that they would turn on and off for privacy and to block out ugly views. Some people envision a world of many layers up to the sky, and have somehow, again, misted out or erased out those in the view corridor.

I find it unsettling to see those unfinished edges staring out into the void on those residential sims. It has a Trumanville feeling to it. Is that really what you like looking at?

slight hijack of my own thread. i think that's quite cool actually, but i like edges and ledges. i like looking out into the unknown and the void.

ok. back to the topic. ok those are good points.

I agree with this.

The short term version of this problem *is* (sort of) to do with ugly builds and unwanted neighbors.

For instance in my sim there is one person that is making everything difficult for eveyone else, squatting on empty land and generaly being aggresive and divisive. Now everyone is moving out or thinking about it just to get away from the person.

Instead of all this moving and destruction and rebuilding of houses and posible break-ups of realtionship or friendships...
how much nicer to simply move that person to another sim with other angry people like his-self that he can argue with. Or better yet to be able to have the rest of us pick up and move (en masse) to another sim and have all our houses and gardens remain the same.

I dont htink this is feasible really, but how nice it would be.

This is an interesting topic for me... I don't even know what to call it... the possibilities for other types of environments for being in a virtual space with others. Whew!

I will write more later. But I did want to provide a link to a past thread where I wrote about my first experiences in Second Life and the adventure of working within the current fixed land metaphor that the Lindens' have in place. It has been, and continues to be, a fun challenge.

My tale begins about halfway down the page.

/120/66/27138/1.html

As long as we're just throwing out harebrained ideas.... how about a better system for players to painlessly exchange land, straight across for lots of similar size? With the press of a button, you could move everything on your lot to a lot bordered by people who share your tastes... assuming you can find somebody in that area that likes your region. If not, maybe there's a third party that would be willing to swap round-robin.

There may need to be strict limits, since the process might be comparatively server-intensive, but it would be a welcome alternative to the drudgery of pulling up roots, selling, buying, adjusting, etc, etc.

Alas, we've already discovered that there is no getting away.

Nonsense. A well placed nuclear weapon, at just the right depth, will fragment the densest asteroid.

I've seen it happen.

No, Prokofy. I'm pointing out that as time progresses, the "people problem" will become less of an issue as niches settle near one another.

And for the one peon that gets annoying, I do have an orbital strike...

Jeffrey, I think you will discover that "niches" is a very, very volatile concept. Many people are convinced niches exist. Niches exist when contrasted to other niches in a big soup, niches at first seem like a wonderful idea, but then...you get in them for five minutes...and you start pecking each other's eyes out. You just watch. It's not over til it's over. I'm seeing the first inklings of this in these lovely planned zoned communities already...to be continued...



We used to have this in TSO. If you had a lot you'd built up with builds and lot points and what not and roomies, you could take the entire kit and caboodle and move it over into a neighbourhood established already by someone, or the beginnings of a hood that would then become a hood once it had 60 people.

Will Wright and co. put a lot of thought into how to make neighbourhoods that would not have to be contiguous. He wanted to have a way for people to have a link to each other without being contiguous. They played around with the idea of first rewarding contiguousness then punishing it...at one point they had the sims red out if they traveled too far away from home, forcing them to do business on their own hood so as to not have to waste time and money greening up as much.

There's of derision about TSO because it seems more primitive than SL but in fact, society-wise, and social-wise, it had many of these issues under study long before SL did and was trying to grapple with them in more creative ways sometimes, i.e. the "dwell" system of lot points worked better there, was more understandable, and created cohesion among people better even while it was gamed.

Will and co. wrote essays about how in the modern world, people no longer have contiguous communities as they work and play games over the Internet much more. The fact is, for many cultures, proxmity and the sit-down, face-to-face meeting in the bazaar or central courtyard of the home is the central human experience. I wouldn't be in quite such a hurry to overwrite something so hard-wired.

StoneSelf, your initial thread reminds me of the voting propostion I made a while back, Hyperspace - Replace grid with volumes with choice of resource usage and location and my earlier post Why do a lousy job of duplicating physical reality? and also to Catherine Omega's earlier post .

I'd like to see people's volumes moving around.

I'd like for people to be able to move their land at will, maybe move your volume and enclosed objects adjacent to your partying pal's volumes for a few hours of fun, then back to the usual coordinates for doing business as usual.

Modeling a two and a half dimensional geometry seems exceedingly limited. Those who couldn't deal with a more complex and flexible model for space could just hook themselves together in a fixed flat grid and stay there.

We'll have to agree to disagree Prok, because I feel I have a fair deal of experience in this from other sources (largely, other MMOs with niches that worked). TSO does not a gold standard make, and I feel that has a lot to do with the player base it draws upon.

By contrast, there are several games that exist fairly well in a niche environment, though I will agree that the concept of "feudal guilds" is a little dated against business formats. DAoC is one in particular that I look on with fond memories, and have continued with those same friends here in SL - roughly four years later.

Cooperation, particularly in MMOG environments, is usually offered through incentives for this behavior. A SL parallel that's relevant are the Game Dev Contests, and any other team-building activities.

You would find, I think, that niches work quite well with the right kind of people. A good example is my place in Rose. I have not had to move, nor wish to, for some time simply because the resident landowners are all very nice, cooperative people. As we move from a period of pure land "ownership" to the dawn of the personal sim, friends and niches are becoming more solidified... and as a result, more permanent. This is the turn I expect to see.

You're welcome to your opinion, but I must firmly disagree with it.