Why not try to make the land more realistic

Yesterday I took the plunge and bought mainland. One of my biggest concerns was the ugly stairstep effect when each parcel owner feels their plot must be at a different height and most don't bother smoothing the edges. After ad farms, this is the second greatest eyesore inducing mainland feature for me. Land just doesn't do that in real life.

The plot I found had a little of that going on, but the heights weren't too dissimilar. As soon as the land was mine, I edited it with the smoothing tool set at large. Within ten minutes I had gentle slopes that met with all the neighboring parcels at a more realistic smooth angle. Now you can't do anything about two neighbor parcels that meet next to your land when they still have the stair effect. You can only smooth it a little on your side, but I went ahead and did my part.

One of my neighbors is on the opposite side of the globe and, based on his or her profile, speaks a radically different language from me. I had little hope of any connection with this person, yet when I logged in this morning I found their entire build moved a bit farther from my line and their side of the ground had been smoothed to meet mine perfectly in the corner.

I am humbled. My question is, why don't more people just try a little? Sometimes it works.

/me gets down off my high horse now before I fall . . .

Yeah, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't, it takes a little creativity to turn it into a design feature (retaining wall, etc.). But most importantly: Congratulations, new home-owner! When's the housewarming party?

Someone on the other side of the world thought "Phew! What a nice person moving in next door, looks like they might have some appreciation of aesthetics and not make an eyesore".

This common courtesy to people around is still there, in pockets. Taste might not always be, of course

I used to do the same thing back when I used to sell mainland sims - I'd start off with a smoothly sloping sim, but as individual parcels got bought and flattened, I'd try and smooth around them on the land I still had. Hopefully at least a few of them stayed that way after being bought!

You do get the stepped land effect occasionally in RL, like when a developer lays out a new business park with vacant speculative plots. True, you don't get the stretched texture effect.

People can do what they like with their land in SL. I might not be the grid's most talented builder but it never ceases to amaze me how ugly some people can make their properties!

Anything and everything of land and parcel management can be a LOT nicer with good neighbor relations. It's usually when conflicts occur that the view gets ugly. Walls go up, signs go up, groups of trees, riased land, etc etc.

Though the stepped effect can be used to good purposes. Doing this along 16m wide strip, every 16m can make a lovely waterfall over what used to be an ungly ad-farm section

The land doesn't need to be "Realistic", this is SL after all, but I do agree it should be more pleasing to the eye. Of course, one must remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It should jsut be curbed with a dose of common sense and neighborly good will.

~Jessy

To the OP Weston: your story about your neighbor understanding what you were trying to do with the smoothing is really nice.

My plot is one step below the plots to one side, and step above the plot to the other side. It is as if our plots were laid on the side of a great gently sloping hill and each plot is graded to its average level.

We built a little stone wall at the edge of the higher plot, and it looks really snazzy. The other side is less so, just this weird drop-off. Weston's post has given me something to think about for improving that.

The reason this does not happen is the flatter the parcel, the quicker the resale. It happens especially on sloped sims, carved up for flipping. Also people just don't know about "smooth" and many don't know about the "apply to selection" way of editing land. Sarah Nerd always did a great job with sloped land, terracing it with decks instead of flattening it.

Yay Weston, for being and having a good neighbor!

I have nothing of value to add to this thread but since I just woke up I wanted to pop in and say that SL geology drives me nuts. It's completely unrealistic. Just for a lark one day I tried to imagine what SL plate tectonics might be like and I just gave up. I'm a mega-nerd, what can I say?

I only wish my neighbours would do the same. A plot next to mine has been lowered quite drastically in relation to mine. I'd slope that side to match, but when I do, I'm left with a little spike of land separating the two parcels, like a skinny wall of stretched terrain. grrrr, not sure if it's their fault, mine, or LL's.... *wanders off grumbling*

Stepped Mountains are something i grew up with in real life.Its called a Karst topography. and i never once thought that it looked "un-natural or strange".Always remember that what you think is beautiful may no be what your next door neighbor thinks is aesthetically acceptable.

~Lana Tomba

I said this above, but I think one of the main points in SL is that the ground textures "stretch" and "blur". Something that doesn't happen in RL. Though that aspect of aethetics is more on LL and the need for a better ground mesh.

A happy medium is the best ideal.

~Jessy

In the older mainland sims, the terraforming was on a greater scale. Nothing a neighbor can do can ease some of the sights in these sims. In the middle of flat land you can have a small plot that is ten times the height of your avatar.

Except it wasn't all in perfect knife-sharp right angles, I'm certain.

On all the plots for sale surrounding my residential place, the sellers raised the land so high it was like my lil' lot had a "land fence". I know its just to block stuff so the land looks more "sellable", but got annoying, so I raised mine.

All the different plot heights reminded me of the pics I've seen of Asian Rice Paddies.

I used to have my store in the Webworm mainland sim. Now, my store has always been a relatively modest tower, nothing too fancy but IMO not an eye-sore on the landscape. I even have an area of decking around the front which I felt would make a nice social area for other business to hook onto.

However, one day a mall went up beside my tower, this was fine, I even built a ramp on my land going from my decking down to their level and smoothed my land (they had flattened theirs while I'd used prims as a foundation so didn't need to).
One day later on though, and without warning or consulting with me, they redesigned the mall to have walls around the whole thing, the full 10m high on my side, leaving me with a little ramp that led into a wall.

I IMed several times proposing that as neighbouring businesses that catered to similar but different customer bases (They the BDSM crowd, I the furry community) that we could create a simple bridge between our stores so customers from one can explore the other if they are interested. I suggested that if a section of wall were removed or turned into an archway or something then I could rebuild my ramp and put up a sign or something.

I got vague IMs back but nothing ever happened despite repeated attempts. I eventually moved for other reasons (better offer renting on a friend's land) but it was disappointing that another business owner didn't seem interested in working together to create a better little business area. Granted our markets aren't what most people would consider "tasteful", but a tasteful link between the two would have been nice.