Z coordinate bug ?

what does that mean for people with land in the winter sims where ground height can be well over 200m?

and with the increase in having residents test things in preview grids could building tests at altitudes above 256 be added to vektor's test-o-rama?

or perhaps a better question is there a reason things arent tested above 256m?




and after thinking about it increased visibility may be a negative to current skybuilds, but could foster entirely new ones such as lauk mentioned, even look at the sim gibson, if you can see the stunningly cool builds that need to be in the air why make them, but if a newbie in morris looks around and sees that giant enterprise like build in gibson that is an entirely different thing, high view distances could mean an increase in attractive builds in the sky.



jester


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I always thought it would be nice if I could create and inhabit space *below* the terrain mesh for this sort of thing. But seriously, I think a lot of design choices will need new thinking with a new perspective on the grid. I'm personally excited by it all, but wonder at how it'll play out.

I would definitely love to toss some ideas back and forth; I wonder what sort of changes could be practical... Most of the possible alternatives seem unrealistic. (e.g.: 'subspace pocket volumes existing on sim,' 'under-terrain inhabitation,' etc.)

My mind is getting way off target now. It's fairly obvious that ban lines are a very small piece of the privacy puzzle. Especially if you have draw distances of 512m or more. I mean. I could pan and zoom into someone's house from the other side of the sim potentially. You could put limitations on this, but that wouldn't make people happy either. Privacy is a huge, difficult subject and is only tangentially related to sky building, anyway.



You're right. it will dramatically alter Second Life. But it won't make skybuilding any less desirable. That would require some other advancement such as Chromal just suggested in a parallel post "subspace pockets" or a separate authoring environment for building and scripting. In the end, it might be easier to just tackle the "ultra-high" building problem.

I took a quick look around my home area and immediately found someone who had a home in the sky. And I can tell that there are many reasons that it's there. One is privacy, but another is because this person's land is a small steep island. And I think that person loves the island.

As I've mentioned, builders and scripters often need a workshop space. Not so much for privacy, but kinda like your personal sandbox area that you don't want spoiling everyone's view.

These are real problems that won't be solved easily. I guess my purpose is just to try to emphasize the size and scope of this issue.

I totally agree and I really think this needs another thread of it's own to bring it out into the open. I had no idea my little z coord bug would spark such a controversy





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Troublemaker

But it's really interesting because I hadn't thought very much about what the new renderer will mean. Until recently, my computer wasn't good enough to let me see more than about 100m. But now, I find that I can play with 512m draw distances in some places.

From Arena, I can see clear into Bishop with a low fps of about 5. I just played with it a little bit and the first thing that was immediately clear is that the zoom is limited to 64m. Now, that seems like a lot when your draw distance is 100m, but when you're looking at something that's 250m away, that's almost nothing.

I hope that LL is thinking about this as they roll out the new renderer. Hint...Hint

Shack: Yes, but in the last few posts, someone mentioned the key reason for that: the ability to detach your camera completely and go, well, snooping.

*I* mentioned it. But this is where people's needs just butt heads. I have no need for privacy. And I have no desire to snoop. I do have a need for a highly interactive and immersive virtual environment. 64m just doesn't meet my needs. And there's absolutely no technical reason to tie my hands in this way.

My suggestion is that it doesn't feel bad when the draw distance is 100m, but it will feel incredibly restrictive when the draw distance is 512m.

in this thread /invalid_link.html

Robin Linden states the editor and scripting should allow up 768m. So I maintain that the issue this thread was started to hilite is a bug and needs fixing please!

First of all, thanks for taking the time to get involved with this discussion, Lee, as always. I appreciate the concern over privacy, but I have to agree with Shack on this one. Privacy in SL is non existent, and limiting camera control to accomodate something that doesn't exist seems a bit immaterial. The fact that I can't move my camera across a sim to look in someone's house doesn't stop me from just flying over there and looking in, whether the owner wants me to or not.

So instead of focusing on what further camera detachment would harm, let's talk for a moment about what it would help. As someone who regularly builds very large objects on a 1-1 scale, I am often frustrated by the limited distance the camera can move. Take my USS Defiant for example. It's 123 meters long. In order to work on it as a whole, I have to be standing in the exact center of it, and even then then I barely have room to maneuver when making changes to the nose or the tail. To zoom out to see how changes affect the the overall appearance from a distance, I have to physically get up and fly away, just so I can get a sense of things, and then fly back to continue my work. This is one of the reasons it takes months to build on a large scale in SL when it could just take a few hours or a few days, and I'd wager it's one of the reasons we see so few interesting large builds in SL.

(back to the original subject)
If you try to move (manually or via llSetPos()) an object over ~700m, it 'snaps' down to ~500m (a 'legal' height)

Isn't really a bug, been around since .. well forever. You simply can't manually build up there without some trickery. You can rez (create) up that high, but soon as you try to move something, poof! ~500m.

As to the other topic, I hope skyboxes become a thing of the past. As in it becomes "the norm" to consider said boxes as "pollution" -- which, if you've seen the screenshots of the new engine, is a fitting term.

Privacy, for what? Humping cartoons? :p

Only reason I can see, as stated a few times in previous posts, is the need for higher video FPS, which I'd hope is well addressed by the new engine.

What I'd really like though, are actual line-of-sight type camera controls (so your house actually blocks views/roving cameras (yet your windows don't -- that sorta thing). imho; SL's pretty far down my list of modern graphics engines (aka w/in the past 5 or so years). Hoping the new engine is at least up to par on a variety of needed tweaks, fixes, and improved functionality. The screen shots, albeit totally polluted, give me hope.

Bos
edit: ..typo

That may be true for heights about 768m. 700m has always been ok for up until this version. I've had platforms at around 700m almost since I first started building on my own land and I've not experienced the problem as described at the start of this post until this version (1.6.6). Regardless, I filed a bug report when I started the thread.

Hello (knock, knock) then if you didn't want guests, use land access tools.

I was one of those random flybyers/drop inners in my early days looking for lone green dots to visit.

Nah, it wasn't a problem. And anyway, land access controls don't work at that height and I was building there for a lot of other reasons that have already been stated in this thread.

One can always hope.

But seriously. I always have a sky platform and it isn't for privacy. All of my land has been in PG sims, so the humping thing isn't me. I think it's been expressed pretty well in this thread, but here are the reasons I see that people build in the sky.

1) to have a flat surface when the ground is not flat.
2) to have a workshop where you can experiment with building and not have your clutter in plain view. Kinda like a spare bedroom or garage in RL.
3) to escape other people's clutter who are experimenting on the ground.
4) to get better FPS. This makes building easier and particle effects work better. (This reason will go away maybe with the new renderer).
5) to avoid distractions. This isn't the same as privacy. If I'm building on the ground, then it can be distracting if people are doing something nearby or even just flying through. It isn't that I hate what they're doing, it just breaks my concentration.
6) it's fun. For a newb, it can be a challenge even to get that high.

So, today I'm told it's likely 768m for most purposes. Hopefully, this original bug has been reported?

Thank you Lee, The bug was reported at the at same time as this thread started. Hopefully it will get noticed amongst the 1000s of daily bug reports