Point to Point Teleporting

Personally, I'm against Point-to-Point, but it seems so many people want it that it would be useless to try to shoot it down.

The cons:
Point-to-Point would be greifer's heaven and would be horrible for combat, since people could just TP in behind your back. It would RUIN combat as we know it. The legal type, that is. It'd be horrible for other things, as well. I'm in Second Life Boxing, and it'd be a nightmare having people teleporting in in the middle of our arena during a show. This feature could utterly ruin many great aspects of SL.

An Alternative:
Instead of having all these cons, they could be avoided in some cases by the following... Instead of allowing Point-to-Point all the time, why not just have Point-to-Point with LANDMARKS. If you have a landmark for a place, you can port directly to it. If you DON'T, you still have to go to a telehub. You could also make your own semi-telehub on your land by using the "landing point" and unchecking "Point-to-Point" in the land options. Instead of being able to TP into anywhere on your land, people would have to TP to a certain point you designate... or simply not at all. (Exceptions to "not at all" for group members)

I think my alternative is highly reasonable and adoption of it would make all parties happy. Except greifers. And that's a GOOD thing.

Except, you know, I CAN EXPLORE AROUND WHEN I *DO* GIVE A DAMN.



Which is another way of saying "I am talking out my ass and cannot back up my opinions with any real reason beyond 'I think it's like this', WHY ARE YOU SO MEAN!@?"

I second p2p with landmarks. Free for all p2p would cause arguments and problems (as when people tp into your bedroom).

Telehubs are a pain. 5 minutes standing around to rezz and crashing into buildings all along the way to our final destination is intolerable. Flying 700m with lag is no fun! Not to mention all the advertising and shops being shoved down our throats.

Compensating people with property around telehubs? Bad idea. How about compensating folks that bought a property with a nice view only to have a casino, club or mega-mall built next door? The list of reasons of why people would want to be compensated could go on and on. In the real estate / commercial business you take risks. A booming area today can be a desert town tomorrow and the government has no moral obligation to help business owners recover their investment (especialy after they already made a bunch of it).

I am a newer resident, but telehubs are among the most annoying things in SL.

Personally I am for p2p.


I being a user having a connection that lacks when it comes to great speed often spend my time in less laggy of areas. I cannot stand going throught telehubs just to get to places .It takes me about 4min to just even rez my av when going through a hub. Less lag would be a wonderful thing!

As for the land,I doubt anyone who owns the land around telehubs had any idea this might have happend. It's just a gamble consdering this game is still in ongoing development. Lindens can choose to change things when they see fit for the overall greatness of the game.

Honestly, I donot like having to lag out for a few min just to fly 200m to a shop . It takes away from the game for me and makes me not want to play.

Lief Ming -- the arbitrary P2P about a combat zone could be disabled by specifying TP points for each parcel (spawn points if you will), which would even work for random people who aren't playing the game). The parcel on which the boxing is being held could route TP's to an appropriate landing spot nearby.

Travis,I looked at proposal 244. Some of the items on the wish list are harder than others. Some of the harder ones have significant user interface issues. LL definitely wants to give parcel owners more control over their space, so some of those may eventually be implemented. I wonder what the destiny is for such a proposal that may be partially implemented but never completed.

No Zebedie, teleportation within the same sim will not remain the same -- it will take a shorter path than a regular teleport. In fact, the llTeleportAvatar() call would negate the need for the sit/unsit teleport hack.

KittyKatt, it is not necessarily the case that people would be dropping into the middle of your large parcel if your neighbor's big parcel prevented incomming TP's. The arriving TP's would be routed to the edge of your parcel since the reroutes would be placed at the nearest possible location to their disallowed destination. You could divide your parcel along the edge to specify exactly where those re-routes go while providing a different spot for the rest of your land on that sim. Hrm... I wonder if an 'alternate landing point' should be added for re-routed teleports.

Isablan, there is no technical reason why P2P cannot be tied exclusively to listing in the Find Menu and landmarks, however we think P2P via the map is an important part of the changes, and we would like to keep the TP behavior as consistent as possible. Someone could raise that issue in the upcoming Town Hall.

I may as well post this here too...

Since there's going to be free content at the locations, how about having some kind of mailbox there to accept freebies to be cycled on the vendor at that location. I'm thinking that having changing content will draw more people, and the fact that the hubs are generally surrounded by shops means there will be people wanting to fill them - better content in the vendor at your location means more people visiting means more customers?

why not llTeleportAvatar(string sim, vector local) I would imagine for all parties involved it would be easier to code then a url parser. Also could it be added if the sim field is left blank that the vector can be in global coordinates?

or were you just going to pass the URL to the client and then have the client parse the URL? seems like cheating to me. A height coordinate is needed if you want to replace sit targets.

I probably don't need to ask this, but I guess we can't teleport to a particular z value?

Yes please.

I'm hugely in favor for this mainly becuase when im on a poor connection (aka <40KBps) moving around can be extermely painful, laggy, and crash induceing (ie ping outs 10,000+ ms) having teh ability to move from spot to spot with out haveting to cue up large ammounts of data sounds good to me. Especialy since the bandwidth setting barely works as one would expect.

ruin legal combat as in damage enabled areas? lol no it wouldn't, it takes so long to teleport out you'd be a sitting duck when you triggered your tp. not to mention while you're selecting your destination and clicking buttons. And for other combat systems, it's easy enough to tell when an avatar has teleported in which case you could either teleport them back to their previous position if we get a script function or kill them or penalize them otherwise.

As for teleporting into the arena, well that's already been addressed by the landing point setting in property options. though it was easy to miss, reading long threads takes a while.

That could be useful.

Robin/Andrew...any word on when the Telehub repurposing meeting will be scheduled for?

The z-value of the teleport location is being implemented right now.

I would like to see the current telehub system remain. The telehub could become the default porting point should any issue prevent porting to a particular destination, be it no landing permissions granted by the parcel owner(s) or if the sim is just full at the monent of teleporting.

I still feel that p2p teleporting should be limited to group members and land owners, and that the land owners/officers have sufficient tool to manage p2p landings. I guess, alternatively, the land owners/offciers could have a tool that would allow them to select open teleportings or not.

Andrew, if your still reading this, how about giving us a higher prim limit, LOL.

With P2P teleporting, will SL become a "non-Euclidean space"?
Or what?

Right now, we have a sort of augmented Euclidean space...

In vanilla Euclidean space, you can move around smoothly
in three dimensions; the distance to a point is the length of
a straight line from you to that point. The usual.

In the augmented Euclidean space of SL today, we
can also teleport from any point to (almost) any telehub.
The distance to a point is either:

1) the length of a straight line from the telehub nearest
the point to the point, or

2) the same as before (if this distance is less).

How to think about such a space?

The 3D part is easy: we already live in a 3D world in RL.
(Ignoring relativity, as most people do.)

In addition, you can imagine that there is a string
connecting you to each accesible telehub in SL. You can
jump to the other end of any of those strings.
Those strings are extra, discrete degrees of freedom.
How many telehubs can you go to? That's how many
strings you have - it's a finite number.

With P2P teleporting:

1) the distance to any point becomes zero, and

2) you suddenly have INFINITELY many strings (connecting
you to each accesible point in SL).

(So now would be a good time to invest in string?)

Is there going to be a limit on the z value? Can we teleport people up to 4000+?

Boy, when you guys do an about face, you really do an about face..

Of course, the teleportations could be carried out by Heisenbergian wormholes which make the passage through them go so quickly as to seem instantaneous.

Any teleportation should theoretically be able to be carried out in a universe with ten dimensions, such as were postulated in 1984 with superstring theory.

Bear in mind the other six "unused" dimensions, stuck in a Calabi-Yau manifold, would be the catalysts for the transportation process.

In any case, RL space has never been Euclidean either.

Dear Bertha Horton,

You quoted me as writing:

"Quote:
Originally Posted by Troy McLuhan
Hi, I'm Troy McLuhan. You may remember me from such MMORPGs as WoW, iRO and FFXI."

I never wrote that.

Proof:

I have only posted to the forums once before. This is my second post. Therefore, everything I ever posted before is contained that first post, which you can read above. The quoted statement you attribute to me is nowhere in my first post, and therefore is nowhere in any of my posts. Therefore the quoted statement you attribute to me was not, in fact, written by me.

Furthermore, I have never been involved with WoW, iRO or FFXI. Maybe you were thinking of someone else?

Er. Troy.

I believe that was what is called "a joke". Never watch The Simpsons?

"Hi, I'm actor Troy McClure. You may remember me from such films as..."

Human humor, it is a...difficult...concept.

Aliasi - Thanks for explaining the joke. I've never seen any of The Simpsons episodes with Troy McLure. (I've only seen about 35 of the over 350 episodes.)

Ah. Truly, a pity - it's a role the late actor/comedian Phil Hartman was middling well known for, among many other voice acting roles, although of course his stint on Saturday Night Live is really well-known, to them that care about knowing such things.

I'm glad to have enlightened you, because the similarity is close enough it actually looks kind of intentional.

In any case, what Troy was talking about is something very pertinent, and it relates directly to the way SL should be "experienced".

Eggy Lippmann speaks about the "topology vs. topography" issue in SL. To most, they should be disconnected and unrelated to each other, ie. what will happen with point-to-point teleport. What this means is that any place is equal to each other, and navigation is done not in relation to proximity in 3D space, but in relation to interests (mostly).

Science Fiction authors describe this sort of environment as a house, where each room is located on different planets; distance is unimportant, what matters are the "teleporting doors" that define the topology, ie. the way you navigate across rooms.

In RL, we have something similar: the Web. With Google and similar search engines, you go directly to the place where the content is; you don't bother with homepages, or portals, as "traffic aggregators". Every page is at the same standing, from Google's point of view. Ever wondered why sites like eBay or Amazon don't really have a "homepage" any more? Well, now you know. In-site navigation gets replaced by good searching tools.

Contrast this to the beginnings of the WWW. You didn't have world-wide search facilities, so you'd have "portals" as aggregators. MSN, for instance, still builds upon the "portal concept", and it's definitely not the only one — Yahoo and America Online come to mind as well. This "outdated" concept assumed that people would naturally start their navigation beginning at a "portal", a "catalogue", which would point them to other interesting sites to see. So the Web was hierarchical in a way — "nodes" pointing to other, lesser nodes, in an ever-growing topology that encompassed (hopefully) most of the pages in the world. To a degree, sites were built according to that principle as well: people would enter through the homepage and expect navigation bars to "guide" them to the content they were expecting.

So, "getting listed" at one of the portals/catalogues was important. This meant that you could "shape" the Web, and have sites that were more "valuable" than others, in terms of how many people used them to navigate to other sites.

All this was questioned with search engines. They made the Web accessible from everywhere equally. You'll see a big difference between the people that understood the new, non-Euclidean approach to the Web, and the ones still tied to the "old" model of "homepage-directed" search. A Google, Amazon, e-Bay "secondary" page looks like any other — "homepage" or not. You get some minimal tracking features ("breadcrumbs" or similar) just to know where you are, but you don't get much more. There is no need. Search-and-click navigation is so much more efficient.

Back to SL. Organic growth centred on telehubs, for the lack of a better system. Still today, you can go to telehubs and measure traffic there. You'll see how evenly traffic decays from telehubs, radiating into concentric circles around them. Here and there on the landscape, you'll see sudden "peaks" of traffic — popular places, some clubs, one beautiful building. But nearby, traffic drops immediately to zero. So you have one attractor — telehubs — and isolated places that, individually, function as attractors, but that aren't attractive (pun intended) for people to live nearby.

While there are exceptions (ie. telehubs where you don't see the encricling traffic go down smoothly with distance, and "attractions" that tend to spread a bit of traffic around, even dismissing the "travel route" to the nearest telehub), this has been the model of development in the mainland so far. It's not unlike the early, pre-search engine Web, where sites listed at portals would draw the most attention.

The new model will feature isolated spots in a desert (in terms of traffic) wasteland. These isolated spots will not be new attractors, replacing telehubs; I mean, if after two or three years of SL, "interesting buildings" or "popular places" failed to draw people to live by them, why should they suddenly start to replace telehubs in terms of organic, urban development? No, the same thing will happen as on the Web — people will congregate around those spots, but the spot nearby will not benefit at all from them.

What we lack to make SL a non-Euclidean space like the Web is, thus, a good search engine! That will be the crucial next step. I thus hope that the fervent proposers of the reintroduction of point-to-point teleport recognize why the search engines will be fundamental on this next stage of SL's development and clamour with the same enthusiasm for those tools as they did for point-to-point teleport. All discussions I have attended so far in-world have come to the same result: either "wishful thinking" about "perhaps something will replace the telehubs, eventually pretty buildings" or the more reasonable and fundamented thought of "only good search engines for SL's content will replace telehubs". I tend to agree with the latter argument.

BTW, I'm aware that "traffic" as a measure is flawed (it can be gamed, and it's hard to figure the correct formula for it). Sadly, it's the only one we've got which is pretty neutral and not biased towards "popularity choices" or "aesthetical discussions"... and, to a degree, it can at least give us a relative measurement of the "fallout effect" I described (ie. you can measure a direction of that fallout effect, even if the absolute values are hard to measure).

Still, it's no coincidence that the value of land follows the same pattern.