Do you feel comfortable in underwater builds?

I just don't like it.

Sure. i don't mind being underwater as such when I'm wandering about, looking at sea life and such like.

But if someone makes a boat with a lower deck under water, or a undersea house or disco/club underwater. I just don't feel comfortable.

Weird huh?

Now if LL gave us the ability to tick a box in a prim to stop water / water colour coing into the prim, I'd feel happy to be there.

Just me?

You can go into 'Advanced Water' in the Environment settings and use the 'glassy' preset. It doesn't take away all the water effects, but it looks a lot less oppressive.

Thanks for the reply. but you're missing the point.

It's not just that I can see the area around me is a bit darker/greener/blue than normal.

It's the fact that I "know" I'm in the water.

Crazy huh !!!

/me checks for evidence of the shotgun trained on Piggie

Pep (forcing them to go underwater . . . .)

Easy enough to turn off water rendering for a short time.

Under-water seems to be lit more brightly near the avatar than it used to be.

I have done a few builds that take people underwater. In most cases, it is intentional and it's set up so that you know you're going underwater - the water is part of the experience. I.e. exploring, diving, etc., and in these areas, being underwater is of course an integral part of the build.

In one case though, water was not part of the desired experience, but an unavoidable fact due to the way SL works. In this case I needed to build a 'basement'... to hide the wateryness as best I could, I set it up so that the actual surface layer of the water is hidden from above and below by prims - you enter / leave the basement via teleporters. So at no time do you see the ripples/reflections of the water. It works 'pretty good' in that when you're in the basement it is naturally dark and gloomy thanks to the way SL renders 'underwater'.

The biggest drawback is when people teleport in while wearing a swim attachment - they shoot up to the ceiling with splashy sounds and flailing animations!

Aside from that minor inconvenience though, I've never had anyone complain or otherwise remark negatively about it being underwater.

-Atashi

I tried making "normal buildings" below the water line, when I was first starting as a serious builder. I quickly determined that I never liked how they worked out.

Since then, I have only seen one build where it was fairly unobtrusive that the room was, in fact, unexpectedly underwater. It was a landing point room, just below the surface, and fairly small, with textures and lighting that looked OK under water. People were expected to spend a minimal amount of time there. Just long enough to read the sim rules, and either move on by the accepted method to an in-sim destination, or leave the sim. You always used a transport chair gadget to leave that room and enter the actual sim, so unless you looked at the coordinates, you wouldn't even realize you were below the water line. (Though yes, many AO's wil detect you are under water and make you 'swim' unexpectedly!)

I've seen one fabulous ship build where they went ahead and detailed the engine rooms, even though they were below the water line. The last unsubmerged deck was right above water level, so to enter the engine room you essentially descended into a flooded compartment. I found it... disturbing, to say the least. But it is a limitation of how water works in SL.

These days, the only things I build under water are stuff that is *supposed* to be wet. Sea caves, sunken ships, submerged ruined cities or temples, and other stuff where the water is an expected part of the experience, and where you would normally be swimming or SCUBA diving to get there. Or I might make swimming pools and hot tubs designed and positioned to be able to fill the pool with real Linden water. I wouldn't ever make a club or some other facility that would normally not be flooded, and place it below the water level.

I've done some below water stuff as well and noticed that the comfort level people experience depends greatly on their ability to suspend the artificial reality of SL even more than we normally do with things like the ability to fly. The more attached you are to the reality that humans are not able to breathe below water, the harder it will be to accept being "underwater" in SL without the builder having created a fake "air pocket."

There is wind underwater in SL so there must be air to breathe, right?

The next time you fly ......


DON'T LOOK DOWN !!!!!!

Keep looking ahead horizontally.
Breathe slowly and evenly.
Focus on your destination.
Just *don't* look down.

I am deathly afraid of heights in RL.So when I joined SL I was actually scared of flying or going up too high. I got over it eventually and now I will only live at 2000m or up.

Underwater doesn't really bother me so much.

You can't tell if you're underwater if the lighting is done correctly. I saw a build recently where the main portion of the house is underwater, but the way it's lit inside felt more like you were inside an observatory rather than with water inside.

I don't mind underwater builds... Just gotta be in character for it. >^_^)<

I like my SL environment to be broadly consistent with RL as far as possible. If I fly, I wear a jetcpack,crash helmet and safety suit. If I go underwater for any length of time I wear my scuba stuff. That's just me!

So if I went to an underwater club I'd be there with my mask, air tank, bikini and flippers. Not easy to dance in! Maybe one day there'll be a way of having an airtight environment underwater. That would be cool.

Don't feel bad I get SL claustrophobic.

Is there a word for being fond of small spaces instead of phobic about them? (I don't mean 'opposite of claustrophobic' in the sense of being afraid of large spaces instead of small, which is 'agoraphobic'. I mean 'opposite' in the sense of actually liking small spaces.)

Anyway: I do like being underwater in SL. But I realize that puts me in a minority.

Claustrophilia?

What I did with my underwater house was to make all the rooms small, and use lighting to reduce the impact of the fog, and set up some particle clouds and rain outside. The only entrance to the house was through a teleporter, and there was a pool around the back of the house. Some visitors never realized it was underwater.
When I was making underwater builds I tried to get the creator of the swim attachment to document his protocol so I could have the "inside" part of my build work with it. He responded as if I was a griefer wanting to turn off people's swimmers by remote control.

That's it!!!

^_^

Isn't that just an unhealthy interest in St Nicholas?

If you're troubled by going through the water level, you could always add a invisiprim at the waterlevel. This will remove all visible water .

But only when viewed from above. Once your camera is below the water plane, an invisiprim will not hide the cloudy effect or the color shift. And if you are looking through the invisiprim from any angle, and there is an avatar on the same line of sight, the invisiprim hides any non-prim avatar parts.

lol Since I live on an island where I swim and sail a lot, I go around with my swimmer permanently on. I was confounded one day to tp into a store and find my camera bouncing around in cement with lots of banging noises. I tp'd home and it took a few minutes before I realized that the store was underwater and my swimmer had been trying to float me through the ceiling!

Nonetheless, I get a little creeped out being underwater too. I have a mermaid av, but even then I will get claustrophobic if the water is really deep and it's dark.

I LOVE underwater builds of all types. I've been to an underwater nightclub (one method of entry was down a slide...wheeeee!), love the mermaid sims, saw a really unique home in Caledon that was a very nice submarine-type build that was partially underwater, etc. But, it has to be "realistic" (ie. bubbles and underwater sounds in deeper water, etc.) not just "be" underwater.

I live on a water sim and have always wanted to do something creative, but I have no clue how to terraform and go about what I would like. (Will have to hire a designer/builder for that someday. )