What will the grid look like in 6 months?

Up until recently, the content guys at LL were in charge of terraforming and planning the sims they rolled out. Consequently, we had some great looking geography in sl. Winding rivers, mountains, roads and infrastructure that "made sense" in relation to the rest of grid. Their efforts made for a grid that was continuous and flowing. Entire regions were created like the snow sims, the lake sims, the tropical sims and the northern continent - huge areas with matching ground textures, trees and identifiable characteristics. To me, this made for a grid with a sence of place.

We now have huge areas of sims bought in bulk and left to the buyer to terraform. Logically, they will terraform according to what sells. Which is fine, except that it doesn't seem to "fit in" with how the rest of the grid looks. That flow is gone.

I think the grid is going to look quite different and maybe really odd in 6 months time. Anyone have any predictions?

Edit: A tentative prediction...

Ooh, ooh, let me try:

FLAT AS A BOARD


amirite?

What does the web look like? Why should we impose RL notions on an abstract content distribution system?
Really, if this was ever supposed to be a world, why did LL never bother to give it any background or flavor or something that would make it a bit more like a game?
The "world" approach simply does not scale, and LL is already forced to hire armies of useless people when they could spend that money on development and marketing.
If you want a world, then you can buy enough servers to make it.
I hate to agree with Prok here but the dream of one single world is dead, and was always a bit silly in the first place.
SL is the ultimate freeform "world", in that we have the freedom to make our own world inside it, possibly even bigger and better than the original one.
When I came to this world, it had a grand total of 50 sims and less than 1000 people, and now there's already a few people who own more than that on their own.
Today we are 100,000, and I have no doubt that one day we could very well see a corporate project buy enough sims to hold 100,000 people.

I remember one time, seeing Xenon up there in Heterocera Atoll, shaping the land... was just beautiful to see all the touches. And then of course, with 1.7, the map looks ever-so-more-pronounced and colorful from above.

Something I'll point to, is when I was first in SL and private islands were beginning to emerge, as time went on, it looked more and more like the mainland "blew chunks" to the west. This is not meant to be an insult, merely a gut observation with such a big hunk of mainland, and all these islands as if an asteroid had fractured the gridverse.

Now, there are just so many islands! It reminds me of the Grinch's dog getting those big horns attached and falling over--that the balance will have to be made up in some way. And so, naturally, we've had bulk land expanding the mainland to the east with its own flavor.

I do think--maybe further than 6 months, but eventually--there'll be more extensions of the mainland or estates made out of private islands into their own "continents" that emerge with their own cohesive themes. Terraforming would prolly be done with .RAW files as to provide more "natural" topography, but we might get some really wild-colored experiments on the map too. (I.e. I remember Nomine's red-purple ground.)

Maybe in a scifi sort of way, what was known as the mainland will be like the central core of our "galaxy", with many "outer worlds" being colonized and reaching further still.

We have a lot of great Resis making houses, but not a lot who specialize in terraforming and this sort of geographic surveillance beauty on a large scale. I think this will be an avenue to fulfill in the future, a skill that becomes in demand. "TERRAFORMER WANTED!"

I see your point and with many people owning and developing small chunks of it at a time, who can possibly predict? But I have to admit that today, it's the left side of the map you've put up that looks funky.

I would like to see more coalescence, but I'm afraid that you charge around $50(i think?) just to move an island to a different place and most people probably don't even know they can do it.
Even for the main grid, it's nearly impossible to move somewhere because you have to wait for your land to sell before getting a new place.
I've said it many times before, LL needs to make it easier for people to move around, so that they can form sub-communities.

Specifically, we need a feature to let us atomically swap parcels with someone, without requiring trust from either party, and with the possibility of negotiating an additional fee to be given or received, so as to allow differently valued parcels to be fairly traded.

Additionally, we need the ability to backup an entire parcel as an inventory object. We can already store multiple unlinked objects as an object, but it's very difficult to select things that are scattered over large distances. I imagine that rezzing a lot of objects would be taxing on the simulator and asset server, so you could label it as a special type of object that would rez more slowly.

On top of that, we should explicitly implement the notion of "community" inworld and encourage users to join one rather than drop down a prefab at random. Communities should be visible on the map, and LL should make it easy for them to expand, by adding more sims along the outer mainland border for instance, or allowing them to directly purchase reverted land before putting it up for auction. These days people have to pay through the nose to buy a 16sqm parcel in the middle of their community, on the off chance someone might use it for a bush sign.

IMHO this "emergent" zoning is more attuned to the core LL philosophies and usual modus operandi. It has always been fairly obvious, and the new ResMod thing just further demonstrates it, that establishing hierarchies within the community serves only to generate drama.

Possibly there would be a nice result if Island sim owners could move their sims with no hassle and no or a very very low fee.

They might find a person they felt would be a compatible sim owning neighbor, move their sims adjacent to each other, adjust their terrain to match a larger plan to the degree they can agree on.

It order to get much use it would need to something people could do without extra Linden involvement, just as one can move their avatar without Linden involvement.

Not only would it be nice to be able to move my estate myself, I would cry tears of joy to be able to apply a .RAW file to it myself without LL intervention.

I'd love to play around more with terraforming, but the current land tools for it suck.

Heh, you know, you can actually sort of do that with scripting, and a friend of mine had a script like that, but it takes a WHILE to finish
IIRC he could copy the terrain from any sim to his sim in 3-4 hours.

I very much like the sound of Residents being able to move their own islands around and configure them like Tetris blocks fitting snugly into place. Currently, the charge to move is US$150 as stated in the Private Island FAQ. I don't know the technical details, but we're currently bound to something like Cartesian coordinates on the map.

I do recall watching some of the Gorean islands reconfigure and gather together into a clustered continent, with some separating over time--I don't know all the details but I'd like to hear from anyone firsthand involved in it.

Being able to easier "pack up and move", certainly a boon. These are some things which should be simpler to do. It's interesting from a philosophical standpoint: we can control the reasonably small (prims), and our own avatar bodies, yes... but what about manipulating the very large? Large linksets are still challenging, and whole islands--another unit still!--it does open it up to some wild possibilities, like a mobile island that you see coming towards you in void.

Finished what I think it will look like. Posted it back up at the top.

I must say that is the next macrostep up from map art!

Dude, dont give her ideas

...

Let me throw some idea out.


People build "flat" because it gives them teh most effecient building room.

Well think of this.. *but not to hard or you'll see I"m kidding.


20m long plot of land




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but built on an angle

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WOW look at all that room.... get some mountains people!

Let me throw some idea out.


People build "flat" because it gives them teh most effecient building room.

Well think of this.. *but not to hard or you'll see I"m kidding.

20m long plot of land




                        ------------



but built on an angle

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WOW look at all that room.... get some mountains people!

Perhaps some coordination between island owners and repositioning of islands could result in some continent scale map spamming.

I agree with this in that it seems to be the vision the Lindens have as well.

In the recent discussion on covenants Daniel Linden explicitly stated that this kind of vision was the future of SL. They see people eventually even owning the servers and other hardware to support their own individual worlds completely separate from the main grid and with (although this wasn't explicitly stated), rules that may have nothing to do with the TOS.

However, in response to Proks question about the future of the mainland grid, Daniel stated that LL was to retain control of that and that they had no intention of ever letting that go. So given that state of affairs, and that one might expect that places like Anshe Chung land will eventually break off from the main grid leaving the main grid back in LL's hands isn't it still their responsibility to landscape it in the way that residents have become accustomed to?

It seems to me that it is a mistake to allow the kind of "non-terraforming" sims in large blocks that they are currently allowing when they are connected to the mainland or to any "Linden" continent. Perhaps they should stay with the established precedent of leaving this kind of ugliness to separate continents that are already disconnected from SL through separate covenants and slated to be physically separated further in the future.

Goddamn that made my day. You are hilarious.

I'll let that stand as anything I could say would diminish it.

So LL is out of the infrastructure biz now too? Well they certainly ain't doing forward development that anyone has seen. They're ditching the community gig too.

What will SL look like in 6 months? At the current rate of progress, an infinite stretch of grey squares with white outlines.

What a waste of potential. I dearly hope they have something truly nifty up their sleeve.

The question is an easy one: the grid in 6 months will look like what the residents make of it!

Ok, Ok, I admit, not a very useful answer. But a true one. What we are witnissing currently are the next steps in giving the residents more say in the creation and management of Second Life, a process that has been going on since Beta. The obvious consequence of this movement is that the responsibility for the development of Second Life shifts from the Lindens to the Residents too. Looking at some results of "residents land creation", I admit that this is not a perfectly pleasing outlook for me, too.

But it is much to early to see all gloom and doom. When I look at some of the developments done by the Land Barons on their own islands I can see many cooky cutter islands, palms and beaches, yes. But I can see some attempts to create landscape in a grand style too. Look at (I know this will be heavily denied) Dreamland for example: at least some areas are terraformed for style and beauty, not just for easy selling. (On the Azure islands there is even some infrastructure: roads, bridges.) And this from Anshe; who - according to the opinions stated on the forums - is only "after the money". So, either she likes to create something beautiful too or real terraforming is worth the investment.

So, I bet that in 6 months we will see more of

1. some quality terraformed areas on the grid, developed by residents, that don't look that much different from a "Linden product" - and
   
2. a lot of boring, flat land or little islands with some water around. Because thats what the customer demands.

Those areas "with a concept", a common theme/design might be quite large. Dreamland as of today is more than 50 sims already and some of the medium sized Land Barons own island empires of 20 sims or more, too. That is quite an area to supply you with a feeling of "flow". And - no doubt about it - some of those resident controlled grids will soon be as large as the mainland is today.

And if those areas are connected to the mainland via land or water bridges or not ... is really more of an academic question IMHO. It does not matter much to most residents.

Nice post Dianne. This sounds so much like Active Worlds. The idea doesn't appeal to me at all, I guess I'm just old fashioned but I love the idea of a continuous world, of being able to walk it, or fly it, on drive through sims on Linden roads through the various regions.



I certainly think so.



Good idea.


Oh my god, I just spotted pac man in Jeffrey's map.

ADDENDUM (to my last reply):

Ingrid, after reading your original post again, another detail caught my eye. That made me question if we two are travelling the same grid. What you are describing here is the initial, pristine state of the new sims. After they have been auctioned, cut up and sold, you usually only need to wait a few weeks and these sims look rather differently.

1. The first thing many residents do is to kill any vegetation on their new land.
   
2. Next, a few terraform the land to the max of the +4/-4 limit to get as near to tabletop-flat perfection as possible. Have a look at some of the sims in the north. You will find many pretty steps in the landscape there.
   
3. And if the terrain textures do not fit the new owners taste, some 10x10 prims can go a long way to give you some "lush green grass" around your house.
   
4. Those who want to live by the sea and don't want to pay the high prices for waterfront already have found a solution, too: simply buy some cheap water parcels and build your astroturf island with 10x10 prims - often completely blocking your neighbours access to the open water.

There are some very few area at the core of the grid, where a tightly knit community of residents makes sure that no outsider can own larger areas and preserve the original style of those sims with a kind of informal zoning. But this model - for whatever reasons - rather obviously does not scale.

Residents are already shaping Second Life according to their personal tastes and priorities. If the land below has been terraformed by Linden employees or residents makes only a very small difference with the final result - if at all.