mountains dont make the grade

Yeah, settle down, Darwin. They're just having a nice discussion bout landscaping.

I think there's talk about "Zoning" sims into categories... Perhaps land type could be included in that. Maybe one sim would be "Flat", one could be "Lake", one could be "Hilly", or "Mountainous" or "Canyons", etc. That way they could impose different angle limits on different sims, according to their type. Of course, I'd still like to see restrictions near neighbors, like Aychcee mentioned. Personally, I'd like to see some angles OVER 90 degrees in some cases. Would make for some stunning cliff scenery.

I still disagree with any angle limitations at all. I think we should be able to do what we want with our land, but landscaping shouldn't be free. It should cost a lot of money to make a mountain or a big hole or whatever and free(or almost free) to just flatten some land. Charge by VOLUME. It reflects how much "dirt" would have to be moved.

just my 2 cents, but I've repeated myself so my tab is now:
$0.04

That could be neat in some places, yeah, but I don't think the current graphics engine supports that.

AHAHAHAHAHHA THAT'S GREAT!!!!
But I do agree with you.. it impossible to get land just right.

I had expressed a distaste for "mountains" of land that went almost straight up in one of the threads on economy a while back. The 45 degree limit on slope more or less addresses my concerns, but I can see that it might not only prevent people from doing unrealistic things with land, but also prevent people from doing realistic things with land as well.

While the diversity of nature makes it impossible to say things such as "land never slopes at a greater angle than 45 degrees", you CAN make some generalizations such as "MOST mountains don't slope up at angles greater than 45 degrees" and "MOST mountains with slopes greater than 45 degrees don't have a house on the top with no way to get to the house other than by air".

The dilemma we have is that we would all like to be able to build our "dream house" but if you take all of our dream houses and jam them right up against one another what we have looks less like a dream than a nightmare.

I'm not sure that the design of SL makes it possible for people to spread out enough to solve this problem. A good compromise would be to let people who want to live on mountains share space with other people who want to live on mountains, and let people who want to live near water live near other people who want to do the same. My suggestion has been to have some areas naturally mountainous, other areas naturally flat and still other areas naturally waterbound. This could possibly be enforced on a SIM by SIM basis, with the tendency for these SIMs to be grouped so that "mountain" SIMs would gradually give way to "plain" SIMs and then to "water" SIMs, and there could even be SIMs where water SIMs met mountain SIMs directly for those California cliff situations.

Oh, I left something out... each such SIM would have a "natural" geography to it, so that the bulldozer could be used to build up or level off from that natural altitude, and the cost associated with the terraforming would be based on the magnitude of change. There might also be a VARIABLE slope for each SIM, so that some SIMs would allow 30 degree slopes, others 45 degree and others up to 90 I supposed. Remember that while in real life there are cliffs, you can't "build" a mountain or a cliff out of sand. That way people COULD build a mountain house in the middle of a water area, but they would save HUGE amounts of money by building their mountain house in an area that was already mountainous to begin with. At some point we have to rely on good manners, peer pressure, ratings, etc. to keep people from building things that look horribly out of place, but the system can help a lot by having its own natural geography.

That's where it came from, sorry to confuse you guys, I got to this post rather late so I kinda missed the train there.

i like your idea of sim-based terrain division, mac. anyone who's crossed the sierra nevadas know that a "mountain" that slopes at <= 45° is really just a speed bump.

although i like flat land personally, i can see why some people would like to have their home perched atop an inaccessible (by land) cliff.

I like the idea of local, 'natural' geography, too. I don't do very much exploring anymore because wherever I go, things are pretty much the same -- oh, the individual structures are different, but in a bizarre schizophrenic clash that is, in a way, a uniform kind of chaos. The occasional themed community is nice, but finding large, available plots to start new ones is so difficult as to be prohibitive at the moment.

I'd love to see areas whose natural land featured red clay, dry grass, snow (on the ground; I understand why falling snow isn't feasible), and so on. Maybe I've just been unlucky, but so far, everything has been pretty much the same shade of oversaturated bluish-green. It's pretty, sure, but it's also incredibly boring.

I want my cliff back

Frankly, If you're worried about annoying neighbours doing things like building giant mountains around you, trust me, they'll find something else...

And Tracey, I love ya hun, but some people find radioactive crickets of Doom that can be heard across 2 sims to be just as annoying as the occasional eyesore of a volcano

(Yes, yes, I know the crickets were only radioactive for a short period of time, and I like them when they're quiet now)

The best solution may be to establish different regions in which people have different amounts of control over the land they own. In one region, people would not be able to edit the land at all, in another they could edit it a limited amount (like the 45 degree restriction) and in another they could edit it as much as they wish. When people bought land, they would know what both they and their neighbors would be able to do.

This new limitation has caused me some real pain.

I had staked out a nice little (existing) island behind the ampitheatre when I first joined SL, and had been planning a building project there.

While experimenting the other day, I 'lost' a primitive in the ground, so I decided to 'dig out' the ground to get to it to delete it.

Well, needless to say, once I had dropped the land level down, I could no longer raise it back to the original height. The more I tried, the more land I lost. My island is now a small jut of rock sticking out of the water.

So, I'm releasing my carefully selected land, and starting the search over again

Under current rules, it would not be possible to have a "Grand Canyon" sim, or even a nice cliff near the ocean.

Regarding charging for land changes - its a nice idea, but in reality I usually end up doing a LOT of editing for a minor final effect. (Raise... raise again... no, too much that time... lower... lower a bit more... flatten... etc...)

I don't even use the land editing tools anymore cuz they just mess everything up. They're useless. Boo to land editing as a whole.