10,000 Meter Skybox??

I'm thinking about finding de facto privacy and buying a chunk of land with an ocean view, building nothing on it--an investment--grabbing all my prims and putting a skybox mansion at 10,000 meters. Besides needing a feather, anybody who wants to go there will have to hold down their Page Up key for 10 minutes, that's IF they could find out where it was. Hey, ten minutes to get home isn't much time.

And then I'll build a small house for kicking-back, underground, with my leftover prims. Maybe the entry to that will be from an underground tunnel some distance away. Then I'll put a For Sale sign on my "empty" lot. When I get triple the price I paid, I'll upgrade to a better chunk of land and take my skybox and underground house with me.

Questions

1. What's the maximum meters of altitude allowed for a skybox?
1.a. I just got this readout from my feather: (115,58,7494). What does it mean XXXX AGL?
2. What's the maximum meters of depth allowed for a structure?

I think the maximum height is 4096M. I seem to recall someone saying that any further than that and avatars tend to disassemble. Ouch.

Things might have changed a little in newer releases though.

And there'd be no need to fly up. If you put a TP port on the ground you could TP both ways.

Maximum build height is 4096.

You can not "tunnel" sideways, only raise or lower land. You can put prims over a depression in the ground and texture it like land.

I can go to any height instantly using the Greenlife viewer by entering "gth 100000" into chat for example.

Maximum depth or height depends on where your land is located.

Most mainland (land you can "buy" has a digging distance of +/- 4m. Meaning 4m up from default, and 4m down. Making the deepest hole you can create about 8m deep.

Some rarer mainland, and land on private estates can have considerably different digging options.

To get a skybox up above 4096, you might need to equip it with a flight script, and pilot the skybox into place. Keep in mind though, the maximum prim limit for a phycisal vehicle is something like 30 prims (plus 1 pilot). And you wouldn't be able to rez any furniture, or move anything with the edit tools.

4096 is a pretty substantial height, and depending on your flight assist it may not result in too many visitors...

But if you want guaranteed privacy in SL, there's only 3 ways to get it.

1. Buy a private island, and lock the doors.
2. Host your own "OpenSim" SL simulator, and only give your friends access..
3. Log off.

Skybox living is nice, and I highly recommend Desperation Isle Productions if you're looking for a skybox prefab ( http://slurl.com/secondlife/Desperation%20Snakebite/182/127/328/ )

I think people put too much emphasis on privacy. It's not like anyone can steal your stuff. And if you own the land, you can eject and ban anyone you like.

isn't land like 250 meters max unless you use like a sculpt ?
i forget how land works..

Edit: sorry i was referring to estates

Estates limit height to 250? That doesn't sound right. I think I'm misreading you but I can't guess what else the number 250 was meant to stand for.

The hard coded limits for land is 0m min 100m max.
The limits for the raise/lower setting is -100/+100.

AGL = Above Ground Level. You have effectively have two heights when flying (sort of like RL). One is the height above grid zero, the other is height about terrain. Terrain rarely goes down to grid zero; even the bottom of the sea is often above grid zero. Useful to know the difference when flying or parachuting to avoid cumulogranite interactions.

4096 metres is pretty high, like just over 4 kilometres up.

I have a sky platform at just 900 metres, above my home. I've only ever seen about two other people when I've been up there, and it's been there over two years!

Even if you were able to put a box at 10,000 metres, you'd still be a green arrow on the mini-map which might make some people want to come and seek you out!!!

not sure where those hardcoded limits come from but I *think* I have seen groundlevels above 256 meter, theoreticly the limit is 0 to 65536 meter because terrain files use 2 8 bit layers for hight, the hightfield itself and a multiplyer offcourse it is hardly usefull to make land that high, you still can not build higher then 4096 meter nomatter how high the land is

personaly if you are going to get your own sim and lock it down I would not bother with a skybox, nobody is going to visit or cam in unless you invite them in.

I tested it in my sim to double check before I posted in this thread. If you would like to check it out for yourself please IM me in the next ten or so minutes.

I have designed and built sims with terrain well over 100 Meters height. There are some mainland sims on the old continent that have terrain that is up in the cloud layer, well over 120 Meters, and peeks out above the cloud layer, at over 150 M up.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Jaffee/96/201/218

The above is a SLURL to a Mainland location with terrain at 218 Meters altitude! It's on the old Southern Continent. There's probably higher points. I didn't search very hard.

Using the in-world editing tools,There is a limit of +/- 100 M change at a time for editing terrain, calculated from the existing terrain height saved in the last sim "re-bake". Most Mainland is, as mentioned, set to no more than +/- 4 M change. Private sims default to the full +/- 100 M range. For Mainland, the value of the terrain heightfield that is saved will never change, as Linden Lab never does a sim re-bake on their sims once they finish making them. "Revert" always returns a Mainland parcel to the heights that Linden Lab designed for that sim.

BUT

If you are the sim owner (or have their active cooperation) and "re-bake" the terrain, saving the current settings, the NEW limits from that moment on are based on that saved terrain height. SO you can continue raising the terrain well above 100 Meters, even with the in-world tools.

Scripted tools also do not enforce the 100M limit. I have seen people use a scripted tool and accidentally add a 200+ M spire to their parcel!

The actual maximum terrain height is limited by the way terrain data is stored in the .raw file for the sim. The terrain heightfield channel has a range of zero to 255 Meters. The height multiplier channel can, at best, double that value. So the absolute maximum is 510 Meters for terrain height. You can get there by applying a .raw file, or by repeatedly using the in-world tools and re-baking.

For practical purposes, terrain heights greater than 128 Meters are impractical, unless you are making a sim in the middle of a large continent. If you're doing a stand-alone island, and you do extreme terrain heights, the terrain texturing gets badly stretched and smeared. While you could elevate everything in your sim to something like 400 M up, and use a 256 x 256 or larger megaprim to create a fake water plane around your floating island, the result will still look very strange, and the area below the "floating terrain layer" won't be accessible unless you make a pit back down to that level in the terrain.

If you are making a huge continent, then you could gradually increase terrain heights to well past the cloud layer, and could even incorporate some high sims with real Linden water at much higher levels, for a high mountain lake effect. But most of us will never get to design a project that huge.

The minimum terrain height is zero Meters, which is 20 M below the typical default water plane in most sims. Remember that if you are below the water plane in your sim, you WILL see the cloudy "water effects", and their is no way to exclude Linden Water from a hole. You can turn off rendering the water effects for your own client, temporarily (which eliminates seeing ALL water), but you can't do it for others and can't do it selectively.

===

Getting back to the OP's queries, it is not practical to build anything habitable above 4096 Meters. Yes, you can build something below 4096 Meters and can then "Push it" higher. BUT, the first time any of those prims move, at all, they will snap back down to 4096 Meters. So if you operated an un-linked door? *Poof!* It zips down to 4096 M. Bump into a wall? The whole linkset, possibly the whole skybox, poofs back to 4096 M.

You also can not rez things above 4096 M, so no pose balls, movable furnishings, or other features can exist above that line, unless created below 4096 and pushed higher.

Why do so many think that you need a flight assist or a special viewer to go above the standard flight limit.

Only if you want to pass the building height limit, you need such a tool.

* Rez a new prim.
* sit on it.
* Right click on it and choose edit.
* Go to object tab and find Z height.
* Change it to desired height.
* Hit tab or enter.
* There you are!

Maybe so. But you'd better be darn sure that you're finished messing with that prim (or a bunch of prims in a build). Select one to edit it, change a texture, or anything...and BAM! It's back down at 4096 m.

Rezzing furniture for your new house? Same problem. Get it all positioned where you want it before you fly the shack up into orbit.

There are ways to get prims and avatars up above 4096 m, but except for freefall competitions and other short-term journeys into the stratosphere, there's little practical reason to do so.

You lose sight of the ocean and the horizon above 1000 m anyway.

Might want to check land trends. Just sayin'.

I think I've seen scripted rocket, which transported to 10k meters as a vehicle. Upon reaching destination, some of the interior modified into a living room of sorts. But I have no idea how that was done in the first place, or whether it's still possible (I saw it pre-havoc4, so the system might've broken down after that).

I think you misunderstood Benski, who was just pointing out that putting the skybox at 1000M wouldn't keep people out.

Any skybox keeps out most of the riff-raff. A security orb, properly configured, helps. If it bothers you that someone *might* be able to peek in, as Winter says, either log out, or get your own isolated island sim and ban everyone by default. (There are caveats to that, too, but let's not get too paranoid.)

Nope. Security wasn't the issue I was addressing. It's the idea of hoiking a skybox up beyond 4096. Putting a home above the build limits is just asking for trouble when you forget and try to move that vase of flowers on the table.

the highest ive flown when i was bored once was 58,000 meters. I got a little shimmery is all. this was with a scripted jet pack. I could have gone more but My ADD kicked in finally so i quit lol.

Yah.. I've been to 60K m myself. It gets pretty boring doesn't it? And there's nothing worth seeing up there. I didn't notice any avatar break apart though.

Haven't tried it under H4, but I know that once you start to get into the six digits, things get really funky.

Texture clash seems to magnify at higher heights as well. Just something else to consider.

Security WAS the subject that Benski was addressing, which made your post non-sequitur.