Estate Owners and .raw files

I have purchased a region from an Estate owner.

I wish to upload a .raw file to the region to create the island terrain I want without the hours of groueling terraforming.

As the region owner this is the one right I do not have. As far as I can tell the Estate Owner is the only one with the power to upload and bake a .raw file.

However here I hit a huge roadblock. She is very tech illiterate, and fearful. She will not load it as she fears it will harm her computer or do something evil to her account.

She would have no problem letting me load the file myself to the land. She just doesn't want to do it herself.

Is there anyway someone else could upland the file, so I can spare myself countless hours of labor creating the mountainous island terrain I want and she doesn't have to fear having her computer explode?

Sincere thanks,
Wren

Tell your estate owner that she can back up the existing terrain first with the 'download raw file' option before uploading the new one. I personally work exclusively with RAWs when terraforming new regions and have never had any sort of a problem with it.

Sorry, but that is ridiculous. How can someone be a landlord renting out full islands and not do something as simple as this?

The answer to your question in the here and now is no, only the estate owner can upload, download, and apply RAW terrain files. With any luck, this will become a non-issue sooner or later, as LL is well aware that estate managers, not just estate owners, need these abilities. Why they haven't implemented it yet it is anyone's guess, but I don't think anyone disagrees about the need.

In the mean time, I'd suggest you direct your estate owner to this thread, as I'm sure a few dozen people will probably chime in to state just how laughable it is that she should think a RAW terrain file could in any way harm her computer or her SL account. Maybe if she reads the same thing a hundred times, she'll get the message.

I hate to sound rude, but frankly, if she's so tech illiterate, she should not be an SL landlord. No one should ever venture into a business he or she does not understand. If she wants to be in the business of renting land in SL, she absolutely must educate herself on how this stuff works. If she chooses to remain ignorant, I'd highly recommend you rent from someone else. Otherwise, I'm sure this incident will be just the tip of the iceberg, and you'll only continue to have more and more headaches in dealing with her.

If I recall, the historic reason estate managers lost terrain upload control was due to the fact that one bad upload could mess up the objects in a region - and this happened enough times that it was a problem.

Objects don't like being far underground, and tend to return in that case. This was in the age prior to easy rollback requests and concierge level access - the 'write an email and pray' days to get something fixed... so a much bigger deal then than now.

This would have been around mid 2004 or so.

I never had a problem with the upload of a terrainfile.

Don't understand why she does not want to do it.

This was still true as of 2007 - I did that on my own island the first time I created my own RAW file and uploaded it. It was very peaky and a lot of stuff ended up underground and returned. If you have the whole region, and it's blank, there is absolutely no reason she can't load it for you. As noted, she can save off the original terrain just in case.

Get your cash back
Get your own sime without passing by an incompetent middleman

As a real estate officer and sim owner in SL I got to agree with this guy. Dealing with this is a problem of renting or "land ownership." However the only way around it is to get your own sim.

I don't know LL's reasons for not allowing Estate managers to use the RAW uploads and bakes but I'm pretty glad they don't have the option to. I've found through experience its real easy to completely bone your sim with a slight mess up in the file and I wouldnt want managers with that.

A possible fix I could see implemented is LL setting it as a check on the estate tools "allow estate managers to _____" but doubtful it would happen.

Also with your landlord being fearful, tell her if she needs the security to get a virus scanner, then if shes worried about the sim she can always get a rollback. There really shouldn't be a reason if your renting or in possession of a full sim that she shouldn't offer to do that for you. I wouldn't have a problem doing that for my renters. Best of luck with the issues though.

Ouch, tend to agree, move along. Landlords are a dime a dozen lately. Rentals are slow to non existant. Mine would bend over backwards for something as simple as that. And consider, if she is totally useless with understanding how a sim runs, and she is the only one who can call a concierge for you, fix some big nasty, why are you locking yourself into that situation. I would move on, I would think with flatlining rentals you can find a far superior landlord who actually survived this land liquidation because they actually like their job, not because they read it was a quick buck on some magazine article.

Oh no, that's still true. Desmond was talking about how the support structure for estate owners is much better than it was before (which is hard to believe considering the 3-week turnaround time that concierge residents who aren't named Desmond Shang have to put up with ), and that maybe we don't need the kid gloves anymore. We can request rollbacks now and have some confidence that there will be a recent backup of our stuff in case something terrible happens. (And rollbacks for private estates usually seem to happen very quickly, esp. if you contact Live Chat or call support.)

I think we should have an 'estate owner's tab' where the owner could set things like 'allow EMs to bake terrain,' 'allow EMs to toggle land resale,' etc.

Laughs - for what it's worth, anything that has a 3 week turnaround takes three weeks for me too.

I've yet to get them to do a "search for Desmond Shang support tickets" every twenty minutes...

And actually, rollbacks aren't that easy - I had to justify the only one I had ever asked for in two and a half years. You can't just get a rollback because you took something back to inventory and are too lazy to set it back out, for instance. Which is a good thing.

Other than that - seriously, if you call in to concierge there is typically someone able to help you within 2 minutes, no matter who you are. Live chat can be slightly slower, but, well, you are typing.

I've dealt with Cyn in the past, she's wonderful and has just about completely turned around 95% of support issues from the tough problems of 2004 - 2007, but the support reputation lives on. Must drive her crazy. It's night and day compared to the old days.

Nowadays, the only serious backup is on things like region transfers / moves / renames / stuff like that, and I think some of the tougher billing issues.

But a lot of that is tech issue stuff; personally I think they need to automate the transfer / move / rename process and the day they do, the delays will drop to 30 seconds like it is for region purchases now.

Oh, yes, this is true. I just meant that the requests seem to get priority consideration assuming you can justify it. A few months ago, a friend accidentally returned all objects on her entire sim, which she had been building for months. She immediately got in touch with Concierge, and her sim was rolled back and ready for business again within 24 hours- so it was definitely handled differently from, say, an island transfer ticket.

Oh god yes. They have the technology and the ability to have an "island transfer wizard" that would handle transfer of funds, debiting move costs, renaming, relocating the island. It's all there. They just need to get someone to write and test the wizard.

What happens when you own a mainland sim - do you get estate powers then too? Can you upload terrain files also?

Unfortunately, no.

Could this be a factor in LL not allowing estate managers to use terrain files then? If the sim software allowed it then mainland sims could be terrained also perhaps?

there is no estate managers on the mainland.

Surely the "owner" of a mainland sim is really just the same as an estate manager in terms of powers? Or am I missing something here?

I am trying to think about this from a sim software point of view. There is only one type of sim using the same sim software.

On an island LL gives full control to the customer - Estate Ownership which includes ability to change terrain using raw files.

On mainland however it sounds like LL retains the overall Estate Ownership which gives the ability to change terrain but gives all other powers to the customer - which is the same level of powers as an estate manager would have on an island sim.

If what I have said is wrong somewhere could someone point out where the logic is faulty please because this is an area I do not have a lot of understanding about but may become important for me sometime soon in the future.

No, we are not. A mainland sim is considered a parcel, and we have no greater powers than any parcel owner. Just because it's a complete sim doesn't make a difference, it is part of the Governor Linden estate, who has to appoint estate managers. You don't become an estate manager by default when you own one, any or all of the sim parcels.

ahh I assumed that when you bought a whole mainland sim you could do restarts and set pg/mature. I just thought that it was the terrain you could not change or the day/night settings as this would produce an inconsistent mainland if allowed.
I also never imagined that if you happened to buy all the parcels in a mainland sim incrementally that you acquire "estate manager" powers either - just if you bought a whole sim at auction or from another whole sim owner.

How does this appointment from Gov. Linden work? - are there non-linden estate managers for mainland out there?
If I owned my own mainland sim - I certainly would be seeking to get as many powers to my sim as possible.

None that I know of. Land changes hands often enough that it does not make sense to appoint non-Linden estate managers. Even so, you have most everything you need - terraforming rights within mainland limits, primarily. You don't have Top Scripts, but you can request a region restart using the region down ticket if you have ghost prims. You just should not expect a rollback unless something realllllly drastically horrible has happened, and even then, that's a roll of the dice depending which Linden you get.

Thanks for the clarification Cristalle