Reduced Terraforming Sims - Your Thoughts?

Hi all:

I've noticed that every time a new batch of sims roll out, a sizeable portion of the population takes in the beauty of the untouched landscape, then comments about how it'll never look that good again, myself included. Would restricting Terraforming even more on a few select sims be a potential solution, or just make things worse? Also, would you prefer to live in a sim where your build had to fit the landscape, or would you rather have the landscape fit your build? I'm not sure what the proper solution is on this, but it was a thought that crossed my mind as I read through the hotline posts and thought I'd see what others thought.

Edit: Just realized I should clarify and say that this would not be every new sim, but there would be some that had this limited or terraforming, perhaps around specific land features.

--Brian Livingston

It's been done ;0 didn't last as far as I know.

This has been done, all sims (apart from old central sims and private ones) are limited to 4m raise or lower of land level. This was done around a year ago.

The city sims near Luna are no land edit sims, frustrating, but it has kept them stable but reasonably unused.

Could not answer the vote as there was no Leave it as it is as we already have this option.

Nice biased poll. 3 Yes answers, 2 No answers
The thing that people most complain about isn't even the terraforming, since it's already way too limited. It's all the clutter. Most builds are pretty close to each other. There are no roads, no parks, there is no coherent community structure.
Then again, do we need it?
People don't use their houses. They never have. For each person that actually spends most of the time at his or her place, there's 5 other people who rez some crappy prefab and then spend the rest of their lives clubbing, exploring, shopping, playing tringo...

Hmm, there was no inteded bias when it came to the choices, as I personally would not want to live in a fully restricted sim when it comes to terraforming. I tried to make them as neutral as possible, but apparently missed the mark. I just figured that if you were not in favor of restricted terraforming, than you'd probably not want to live in a sim that had such restrictions. Thus, the second "No" answer wasn't added. Lastly, in retrospect, I realize that I managed to forget put in a "Leave it as it is" option. Eh, well now I can't say that I've never conducted a poll before. I'll just leave it to the pros for now on though

--Brian

Perhaps there should be some sims that do not allow terraforming at all. That way, it increases to the diversity and the landscape is preserved -- a veritable challenge for those who want to buy land there. It would, at the least, be an interesting experiment.

eggy's right. we made the mistake of thinking that limited terraforming was the problem and begged and begged for limitations until ll complied. we were so happy. we were so wrong.

the problem is actually that we can rent less than an entire sim from ll. then we have to share resources with each other and that inevitably leads to ugly builds, laggy scripts and outright war zones when people try to host events.

if ll had been thinking in host mode, rather than world mode, lo these many months, they'd've made a sim the smallest available land unit and forced people that could afford them to accomodate everybody else with zoned rental spaces. sims would also each have a telepoint and would not be connected unless so desired by the owners. that's what i mean by host mode.

can you imagine renting web space from a host and being told "but the upper right hand third of every page will have content provided by someone else. you have no control over what they display or what download codes they push as long as it's all contained in their table cell." ha ha ha what a mess. well you don't have to imagine it. log in and look around.

anyway, back to the point, we were desperately wrong. terraforming limits have practically no effect on the beauty of sims or the social fabric of their inhabitants. textures, scripts and the number of guests are far more important. granted, there's nothing they can do now except wait for everybody to get fed up enough to spread out into their own sims or learn to cooperate well enough to group with people to own a sim they can control. but terraforming limits should just be chucked in the trash along with telehubs.

WE WERE WRONG. HEAR US OH LINDENS.

I see no problem with some sims being reduced or no terraforming...I think boardman is a great example of this type of sim.

I bought in an older sim precisely for the +40/-40 terraforming ability and really would like to see some newer sims have it.

Someone in an earlier thread remarked that people fail to put trees and lanscaping out because they are already at their prim limits. I fully agree with the proposal that trees and plants should not count towards prim allocations. This would mean people wouldn't have to sacrifice aesthetics because of limited prims available.

I also find that a lot of people don't know that they already have cache of Linden 1 prim trees in their "library" folder in inventory. 5 trees at 1 prim each can make a huge difference in making a parcel more attractive.

As Eggy remarked, most people don't use their houses....precisely why I didn't build one

I hate restricted terraforming. While I love the challenge of building on the natural terrain, such as hills, valleys and mountains, I also like to dig really deep basements...and hide things in them.

I just wanna cut sideways into a hill Tunnels would be sooooo much fun..

The newer terraforming limits are waaay too restrictive. I'm assuming this was put into place in order to prevent people from griefing their neighbors by raising the land, but this didn't solve neighbor griefing; they just use prims now, to build walls, W-Hat signs, billboards, whatever. Also, many people can now not clear a flat piece of ground to put their constructs on. Many people would like basements, tunnels, caves, but they can't now scoop them out of the ground; they're forced to either make HUGE foundations for their buildings, or build up a fake prim-ground ABOVE the real ground in order to accomplish their purpose. Not only does the false-ground use up some of their prim-resources, it NEGATES ENTIRELY the purpose of having a ground to begin with, and it looks nowhere near as good as the regular ground. How many times have you seen houses in the middle of a sim the have rectangular ground-textured prims raised up from the ground exactly at the border of their property, just so that they could have a flat surface to build on? It looks like someone cut out a slice of property-cake of the flat ground that they wanted, and plopped it into the existing land that they own.

-Terraform limits DO NOT stop the griefing by neighbors.

-Terraform limits DO NOT put us into a "neighborhood" type of continuity; many people simply raise up a false-ground made of prims, or build their house floating in midair.

-The limits prevent many people from building ordinary structures, because they cannot get their property flat, which is the first thing they would do on ground in the real world before building most types of housing structures.

-The limits prevent many types of more interesting structures from being built; caves, basements, tunnels.


I therefore suggest/recommend:

-First and foremost, dispel the lower limit on terraforming, even in the newer sims. This would still have the effect of preventing people from making ground-walls next to their neighbors, but would allow them to dig DOWN pretty much as far as they want; lets say to the same limit that the old sims had, 40m from the default heightmap. This would allow people to create flat stretches of ground for the bases of their structures, create basements, create tunnels that only have to be covered over with a prim ceiling.

-I would argue for the ability for land to be raised also be considered for reinstatement.

-Long-term, please find ways to include multiple height-maps in sims, even backwards-engineer existing sims with them. I'm assuming that we currently have two heightmaps, one for ground, and another flat one for water. I'd like to see 1-2 more heightmaps added to each sim, and allow them to have unusual properties, so that you can have a "bottom-ground" that is the TRUE BOTTOM of how deep your avatar can go on the land, walk on, de-rez if you get too far beneath; but also another height-map, that can intersect with this, go above it, and be cut-through IN SELECT PLACES, so that you can have a subterranean area of every sim; an area in which people can construct tunnels, subways, caves, basments, etc. This might require a new prim-type (wood, metal, rubber, etc) called "hole" where, if you set a prim intersecting the ground at a certain point, it creates access through the heightmap that is exactly the size of that prim. So, a prim made phantom, set to alpha textures, and set to material type:hole, placed into the ground, would cut a hole-entrance into the ground exactly the shape of the prim. However, "hole" prims could only cut through the regular-ground, not the underneath, bottom-surface. Once beneath the regular ground, you'd have a good amount of space to work with, to make tunnels, basements, whatever. You just couldn't build beneath the "bottom surface", the true lower limit of construction in SL.

-IF "water" is a height-map just like land, I would also like the ability to "terraform" water by clearing it out (lowering it) beneath land that I own. In this way, I can construct basements on my land that are beneath "water level" without having to actually have them underwater. Currently this doesn't mean much; I mean, it's not like we actually even splash or float when we land in the water, but I'm assuming that's going to change eventually, and I want to be prepared for it. Let's say it's the SL equivalent of watertight compartments or sump pumps.

-If heightmaps/land can be viewed from both sides (above and below), I think that's great; if not, I think it should be implemented. Currently, this isn't very important because we ONLY see the land or water from one side, above, but this will change the moment we start on underground constructions.

-A side benefit of the multiple heightmaps would be some simply AMAZING new builds which could take shape, most likely first in the private sims. Imagine several heightmaps, upper and lower, describing a 3-D shape like a floating asteroid in space, with the constructions plopped onto it, hanging down off of it, etc.

This is longer than I originally intended to post in this thread, but is something I've been thinking about for awhile, so I'll CC it over to Feature Suggestions. Feel free to yea or nay it as you see fit.

-I don't know if heightmaps/terrain can be seen from both

Non terraformed land looks definately better than badly terraformed land. 95% of terraformed land is badly terraformed land. ALL terraformed land that needs more than 1 meter of variation from the original is badly terraformed land (and textures will be horribly stretched anyway). If you want a flat surface to build on, build a platform.

Shiryu, that's what I'm currently doing. Across an entire sim, because I cannot the ground the way that I want due to the terraforming limits. Not only will I be using up a significant chunk of prim resources in doing so, it begs the question of WHAT USE the default ground is, when I am so encumbered by it that I simply bury it beneath a false-ground made of prims?

Land with no builds looks better than land with bad builds. Let's all live on no-build sims.