Encroachment... does anyone know why...

After a few spectacularly unsuccessful searches...

I'm curious... does anyone know why land owners don't have the power to return objects that partially overlap their land?

Are there non-obvious technical challenges that make granting this power dangerous? Is it a policy/philosophy thing?

I would think the savings in labor costs handling abuse reports for easement violations would more than justify the development effort to give us this ability... there's got to be some reason I'm not aware of.

It's probably just the the situation was not foreseen in the original design.
The code appears to be spaghetti-structure rather than object-oriented, so it's a pain to go back and retro-fit without breaking lots of things.

To do a clean return of an encroaching prim, the code would have be modified to
- check delete(only) permissions on the prim granted to the owner of a parcel being encroached on
- unlink the prim from whatever it is linked to
- return

The downsides of just returning "that thing" would be
- If group-owned, the prims just get deleted as there is no Inventory into which to return it
- If an entire linked build was returned, and the owner was group, that's a lot of asset to lose for 0.01m of encroachment
- If the code could unlink the encroaching prim from a bigger build, the linking of the remainder of the build could fail due to the weird and wonderful way in which linking operates.

It could be done on a software basis to the virtual millimetre or less but all the time I have been within SL there has been a degree of software tolerance on overhanging/overlapping prims, the degree of which depends on prim size and linking.

This has been abused in the past by some people. Technically it is an exploit.

Another exploit is connected with moving objects such as vehicles, ships, or flying things, the prerequisite being a scripted moving device. For example I have an airship in my inventory that enables me to freely walk around on the flight deck and carry up to 4 avatars. I could hover it over your land and have a business meeting in it, even with ban lines, unless perhaps you disable all scripts, all prims moving in from outside, all builds or prim creation, and have ban lines and security devices teleporting out all visitors. Even then you would have issues above a certain height that would cause you problems.

Music, natural speech, and text talk can also be "heard" on your land especially on the mainland although (again) I believe you can prevent sound from outside being heard on your land. But text is almost impossible to stop on your boundary lines as text talk carries for about 30 meters, although you can mute named avatars

Conceivably these could all be resolved by software engineering. But the end result would be a Second Life that would approach a desert, with no communication, no freedom of movement, and no communication at all between casual avatars.

Is that what you want?

I intend no disrespect from asking this question, but am serious in reading other peoples views

Turning on the land options makes a big difference to object entry, at least.

It's an interesting point. If encroachment with mega prims is such a major issue (and I accept it probably is), this wouldn't be the case if we could return _anything_ that overlaps our parcels.

I believe that the OP's question was purely to do with the not uncommon situation of getting rid of prims sticking into one's land from a neighbour's land.

Way back at the start of this year, a Linden appeared to do the necessary for me within minutes of my help request.
That's changed now. I AR'ed an encroachment a few month's ago. The thing is still hanging there. It's not my problem anymore. I sold the land.

If LL can't respond even after months, then they should put the power into our hands.

I can't seem to find it now, but I'm sure I read something about eventually trying to add parcel border collision detection of some kind to Havok4, (a while) after it's pushed to the main grid, with the intention of solving the parcel encroachment problem...

It is useful to be able to temporarily overlap neighbouring land while rezzing and positioning a large structure or placing a tree. I'm only talking about a matter of a minute or two.

So I think the 'no object entry' option should automaticall move overlapping objects back so that they are entirely on their owner's side of the boundary. If the object happens to be a big tree on a 16m plot and has no entry on 2 or more side and can't be moved back, it should just get returned to inventory.

I am sure LL has something planned along these lines to empower people to deal with mega-prim abuse. I suspect the reason we haven't seen it thus far has to do with the handling of sculpties, flexibles & trees.

If we could return prims/bounding boxes that overlap onto our parcels, it would seriously reduce the number of AR's in respect to land management, freeing up land Lindens to do other work, such as building roads. And it would annoy the heck out of the neighbor who keeps doing it, thought they really wouldn't be able to complain to LL about it, because one wouldn't have the ability to return said prim if it didn't encroach.

I'm all for a manual return for the pie menu and a 'return all encroaching' button for land management. The 'return all encroaching' would also list what prims are encroaching and make it easier for those that wish to allow some encroaching prims and not others.

Non-coder I am.. so take this part with a grain of salt or correct me if I'm wrong.. I'm only applying limited logic to this. Doesn't the program already have to track the beginning/ending points of all prims? I would imagine that it wouldn't be any more difficult to track the edges a prim's bounding box than it is to track the center via code and alert the parcel that an object based on another parcel has entered yours.

Only social issue I can think of from this is people claiming you are griefing by returning the encroaching prims... But I covered that already

I agree. That would be cool. I wonder if the reason for this lack of functionality is more technical. For example, if you path cut a prim, its bounding box remains the size of the full prim and the mini map displays the full prim. This is more evident than ever with really large mega prims.

If the existing code was updated to return a prim for even the slightest encroachment, perhaps that would pose a risk for path cut prims. Perhaps this kind of feature demands more of a complete rewrite than a hack, of the code currently responsible for returning prims dropped on our land.

I suspect that's probably more the case. In building - especially building objects with movement scripts - it's common to use the path or profile cuts in ways to create objects whose "center" in SL terms is not the center of the visible mass. (Because doing this makes it much, much easier to rotate them.) So it would be very awkward if an object could be returned because an invisible part of its bounding box extended across a parcel line. On the other hand, changing the object code to consider an object to be only its visible mass would change the centering rules and break hundreds of objects.

It imost likely just the fact that it was never coded in, but it could be because the coding might add to server load. .

As it is now, a prim is not considered as encroaching until the centerline is on the parcel. This allows a 10 meter prim to be almost 5 meters into another parcel before autoreturn or no object entry will react. To handle fractional encroachment the code would have to check the bounding box of every prim, not just it's centerpoint.

At the very least, it would have to check every prim with a centerpoint within 5 meters of the parcel to determine if any portion of that prim was encroaching. Depending on how this is written, and how often the simulator code scans this it could become a major chore.

I suspect that there are ways that it could be handled that would minimize the load. Maybe only scan for fractional encroachment once per day/hour/etc, or some other solution.

The roughest explanation is that a prim is counted from the center .... NOT the end, so If a prim is less than 50% on your parcel the server side still sees the prim on your parcel. This mentality also applies to builds with linked prims again looking for the center of the build... if its less than 50% its a nightmare to move. i know we have all had troubles with trees where the owner has pushed them to the very END of thier parcel in order to make room for themself as you sit thie with branches blowing into you SL bedroom *grin*

The same applies for other prims in SL, Mega prims are no different and I currently have half a house in my land in Piserchia and the owner is no longer on SL.
Theres no way to "simply" change the physics, prim structure and the way assets are handled without significant recoding. As what you are asking for indirectly is for LL to allow you to remove prims that have there base in a parcel that doesnt belong to you.

Marty

/me starts his chainsaw.

Thank you. I now recall my husband staring blankly at what I was building and asking me how the bounding box deals with half prims. After reading the guides, I think he told me that it doesn't. The bounding box is based on prim base size, not prim apparent shape, so it renders the bounding box as the full prim, rather than half prim. He theorized this was probably due to the physics engine used by SL.. it kinda went over my head at the time.

What we see on the mini-map isn't the prim.. it's the prim's bounding box? That would be why it seems like something is encroaching, but when I go looking for the encroaching (unapproved) item, I never find it. Which is why megaprims are a pain in the behind and part of why LL may be looking to get rid of them.

Hmmm... maybe there's "bounding boxes" and "bounding boxes," to wit:

Take a 2m cube.
llOwnerSay((string)llGetBoundingBox(llGetKey()));
You get <-1, -1, -1><1, 1, 1> [with many digits of precision]
Top Shear X to 0.50
Another llOwnerSay(mumble)
Now it's <-1, -1, -1><2, 1, 1>

And my avatar sure runs into that skewed hunk o' prim, so the physics engine definitely knows where it is.

Effective also if the prim is path-cut, but I focused on Top Shear because that's one way to make a prim encroach much further than half the sheared dimension... and really, even with path-cut prims, I think it would be reasonable if a parcel owner had the ability to return prims even with a *void* space that encroaches (ideally not, but it wouldn't be too great a sacrifice for builders).

I think I'd prefer this enable only manual Return, not Delete nor auto-return... but I can see two sides of the auto-return thing, cuz it might be good to find out early that the neighbor's auto-return parcel is gonna nuke my build, rather than wait for the neighbor to do it just before The Wedding, say.

Poblic service reminder: when you plant Linden trees too close to your neighbor's border, the trees will encroach the first time the wind blows. Keep your branches on your land. ty.

Link to this JIRA issue:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-744

Is the penalty for encroachment still 5 yards and a loss of down?

yes, but convert that to meters.

You and your televised sports.

That is a huge stretch from what the OP was proposing. Neighbors need to respect each others property rights. Prims overhanging property lines are frequently used for griefing. Land Owners need the ability to enforce and protect their rights against encrouchment on their land. Giving them the right to return prims that intrude on their property would do this and take an enourmous load of complaints off of the AR system.

A much simpler solution would be to have the returning of encroaching prims as a *purely manual* operation, and not a 24/7 auto-collision-scanning type of load on the server.
The code would only come into play when a landowner or build-permitted person highlights a prim. If the prim is calculated as encroaching on the agents parcel, then the 'Return' logic gets enabled.
There is of course the social thing, particularly if the prim happens to be part of a linked set. Apart from sheer workload pressure, this could be one factor influencing LL's apparent unwillingness to get involved.
It would be polite to IM the prim owner before returning it. Right now it's both polite and advisable to do so before resorting to AR.

Precisely. This is what I really feel about the idea, myself. It's not just protecting my land rights by myself, (which LL has been shoving more and more onto us anyways); it's about being able to do so and free up the AR resources for the things we can't deal with.

Another suggestion I have is more of a little check box under the about land tools.. and that's one that we can check mark and allow/disallow encroachment. If encroachment's not allowed, the object simply cannot enter if it's anchor is on another parcel and isn't worn/sat on by an avatar. It will be repositioned until the edge is properly on the anchor's parcel. This would actually be better than an auto-return, I think.. or does object entry already cover this?