Theme for a residental island

I've been exploring SL for a month and a bit more now and it seems 9 out of 10 residential sims are tropical islands.

While tropical islands are beautiful and make great living quarters, what other themes for residential sims would you like to have more of? And would you move somewhere without the water views?

The Greenies have many islands without the conventional water edge views and they work quite well, whether residents would have a house in those sims is another matter, not that they would have many prims to play with anyway.

Edit: so that kind of answers the questions why so many are tropical islands, they can look attractive with the less usage of prims, therefore more prims for residents to use, which is probably a big reason people live there, not necessarily for the scene but for the prims left over???

There is other type of waterfront or islands.
Snow for one.
I have seen one that has more of northwest us feel lots of Evergreen trees.
There was another with tree houses.
You would think there would be other types of land like Jungles with no Palm trees or Rain forest type islands with huge Evergreen trees.
If I had the means to do so to have several island sims I would have huge gardens and different tree designs that I don't see much around here.
There is some out there but not many.

yes but there are problems with trees, I wanted a forest and although it was on a small parcel, just over 2k sqm, it taught me a lot about their limitations, too many large trees in one area, no pose ball clicking or any other kind of clicking for that matter. If you use good trees and especially the megaprims trees from someone like Heart, they really do eat away the prims much quicker than one would expect, together of course with the ground foliage.

I'd love an Alpine Village theme - with challets and tobogganing and skiing and skating

I have been looking for mountain, rustic landscapes. I haven't found much and what I did find was very high priced.

There are literally hundreds to choose from. My favourites are:

1) Hoini, the 1001 Arabian Nights themed sim

2) Suffuguem, the dark city, where everyone seems to have been killed by robocops, and the survivors form the rebel alliance, living in the sewers and plotting

3) Hanging Gardens of Babylon, simply beautiful

Before I sold my sims due to the 19% VAT problem, I was planning a new sim, which was going to be the surface of a planetoid on the edge of space. The sim would have been set to a permanent starlit night, and other planets and asteroids were to be set in the sky as megaprims. Spacehomes were to be set up for the adventurous few. *Sigh*

Rock

Islands are tough, mostly because, well, it's an island, and in RL there is only so much you can do with a small island and keep it looking "natural".

However, I do think you could do more than tropical. There are some amazing islands out there in the real world that are not tropical. Check out photos in Google of the Orkney Islands (or any of the Scottish islands for that matter) or Lundy Island ( http://www.ewpnet.com/lundy/lundy.jpg ).

And there again, why stick to things possible in the real world? Terraform a realistic-looking fantasy island (and I don't mean that old tacky TV programme!).

But I also think that the theme of the island has as much to do with how you lay out roads, buildings and gardens as it does the beaches and trees. Obviously, due to my job I am biased towards asian-themed things, and I love to see well-done asian-themed islands (there are plenty of real-world examples of japanese islands, after all!), but also think Mediterranean, Celtic, heck you could even head up to the north and do scandinavian. If you don't find the builds in SL that you are looking for, there are a host of talented designers who would probably love the challenge of producing high-quality authentic builds that don't yet exist in SL.

Well, here in NJ, all along the Eastern seaboard, the Carolinas, the natural landscape, is one of scrubby bushes, rocky coasts, evergreens, dunes, sea grass, etc., eventually leveling off into the empty beach area or not - many are on high cliffs overlooking the wild ocean below. Even in California, you have this kind of scenary. Perhaps not "islands" per se, but I have seen outcrops of island-like area, so you could do something along that idea, if you really want to keep to the tree-like theme without being tropical. I struggled with this on my little mini-island too, kind of didn't want to do the typical tropical, but alas, settled into it, nonetheless.

Funny you should say that Kalderi. I was often asked where I got the names for the islands in my estate from, eg Sukka Mire, Swey, Hoini. In fact, they all came from the names of areas within the Scottish island of Fair-Isle, and in fact was the name of the SL Estate.

Rock

I visited a sim like this the other night, "Galactica". WOW. It was hard to tell what was a build, what was a texture, and what (if anything) was actual linden ground.

While we were gawking, a lady came by and told us the place where we were was private property. She was quite nice about it, really. I tried to find out what parts were not private, and apparently some bits are OK for visitors, but her description was confusing, so rather than offend further, we left.

But it was one of the most fantastic places I've seen in SL.

Mountain retreat (snowy, summery, whenever)

Ok, I thought I'd rattle off a dozen, but I can only think of a mountainy place and a wintery place, and you can have wintery in the mountains.

I am so tired of the tropics (and so tired of water . . gasp, I know but . . .)

ooooh...I'd love to see a southern Bayou island...... with the sultry swamps and wooden walkways among the houses....I think that would be sooooo cool. I've seen one swamp in SL that was well designed but it's not an entire sim.....but the people totally had the right idea.....very unique in SL.

Personally I love the idea of having water around......but folks seem to be stuck in doing things a particular way in SL....The trick is to come up with a newer concept.....like the rocky cliffs at Algeron sim....OMG that beach is the most beautiful I've seen in SL!! I'd just go on the web and start looking at images of different areas of the world for inspiration~!!

I had a strange idea, let's see if I can describe it.

Have a SIM with the world Sun turned off... no land, just a grid at the bottom.

The sim would simulate outer space. You would still purchase land but your structure would be suspended some where in your "land column". You could travel around the sim by flying, either in your own vehicle or using the fly command we are all equiped with. Because of flying altitude limits in SL you would need a vehicle to access certain altitudes.

I think people would come up with all kinds of cool shuttles and space craft (flying Winnebagos).

Each structure would have to resemble some kind of real or imagined space habitat. 512 Prim would get enough room to create a floating airstream trailer. Central structures could resemble the 2001 Odyessy ring type space station.

Avatars could be wearing space suits while outside of a habitat. Sounds like a great role playing spot I would like to visit.

There is probably a gazillion reasons why this won't work or maybe I haven't described it properly.

"G"

The island Maggie and I live on has been iced over for the winter, and using Torley's most excellent skies and water, it's quite easy to give yourself the illusion of living in a small settlement (of sorts) out in the middle of the Tundra. Once I get in world and have the chance to take a pic, I'll upload it and show you what I mean.

Back on topic though, back when I was pondering buying an island to open for residential use....A few of the ideas I was tossing around were....

1) Completely water with no land....having everyone live either in houseboats, Sky boxes, or homes suspended above the water on stilts, or those large tree houses .

2) Completely green, with no waterways. Everyone's house would be sectioned off either by fences or hedges, with small public walkways where most islands have waterways.

3) Snow themed, with everyone asked to live in an appropriate theme home. Cabin, Lodge, Yurt, whatever. So long as it looked warm.

4) Green isle again, but with more of a "tree hugging hippie" type of feel. Lots of trees and greenery and whatnot. A small communal area for hackey sack. Hybrids in driveways. A statue of Al Gore somewhere near the center of the isle.

I may have had a few more....but I can't remember them right now.

There is a island that I rented on that was a Bayou island. Junkyard Jazz . . Junkyard . . something. I'm still a member of the group, so I could look whenever it is I am able to get home.

Something like the New England coast would be cool - Nantucket/Martha's Vinyard/Cape Cod/Newport....

Yes, one of the sims I rent on went wintery. Not a mountain retreat though




There is a Nantucket out there somewhere with Cape Cod like housing. Found it a long time ago while Live Music hopping. Not sure if it is still there. Think it had Nantucket in the name.

Here's a shot looking out over the isle. I don't have one looking out over the "Water" though. May take one later when I'm up to using windlight again.

Wolf Mountain had that, with skiing, at least in September, and had some rentals.


Salzburg also had skiing and a nice city, but not sure if they had rentals, and not an Alpine Village, but a city. - also September

Wow there're some great ideas out there. Probably there're a lot more varied sims but the grid is too large.

I would like to know if anyone is interested living in a desert theme sim? Would you prefer renting or paying upfront cost to lease the land?

Back before our isle got iced over and was all sand and beach...we did the arabian/desert theme on our parcel. Built us a tent, had a few posts out front for the horses, erected a little lean to to keep the sun and sand off out backs, etc. I think it turned out quite well.

I've been shopping for island land to "buy," and I'm so disappointed in the sameness of SL everywhere. I'm sick of sand too.

There are so many great ideas in this thread - I especially like the zero-g space theme and the tree hugger theme. I have wanted to do an alien world theme with completely weird plant-things, and I've read someone else's posts who want to do a Jurassic theme. I'd also like to do an archeology theme and reproduce Angkor or Machu Picchu.

I wonder why these are not being done more? I only have the budget for about 4096m and, alas, you can only do so much with that and still make it fit in with the surroundings. Sigh . . .so little time, so few prims.

I have often fantasized what I could do if I could do anything and had virtual canvas to do it.
One ideal I had involved mountain ranges with built in catacomb like caves with largest a magical looking city with ocean and forest in huge cavern like space.
On the surface there would either unusual rock formations along with the mountains over vast sandy, rocky areas the ground would appear to be unusual color almost alien like. The shore areas would have odd looking grass like plant life with faces that look animal life and trees that roots seems to curled into every thing.
The island or islands would have river and big lake in the center with lots of tall grasses, flowers and trees on paths on side of the water.
The ocean would be shallow with lots of plant and sea life.

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Same here. I was actually pondering getting myself one for/around Christmas, just so I would have the canvas to play around on. But as I also wanted to make it a residential sim, I shelved the idea until I was certain I'd come up with an idea that would appeal my sense of orchestrated lunacy, while at the same time providing other residents an appealing place to live.

Well...that plus I'm cheap.