I wish Second Life was Deeper!

I want some sims under the earth's crust. Yes..in huge vaulting caverns, connected by tunnels that serve as roadways. Caverns branching off from the main travel tunnels would be sold, much like plots of land on the world's surface, with the added benefit if having built in barriers (solid rock) between some of the plots. Other plots could fill huge caverns, with many intersecting tunnels, and could be developed as business areas with malls, shops, apartments, clubs, etc...

A vast network of caverns and tunnels, with underwater lakes, or even seas, all for sale.

I know the mole people would put up a fight, but I would love to have some subterrainian land. Perhaps under the ocean floor, or just make some big craters here and there for those that don't wish to teleport into the central cavern, but instead wish to explore on foot.

It's time for LL and SL to sink to an all-time low! Pleeeease..?

I couldnt agree more.

OMG!!!

Chris is a Sleestak! RUN!!!!



Bye bye for now,
Alexis

David, cool concept. I wasn't sure whether you meant physically or metaphysically deeper at first... maybe it could use a touch of both!

How about this for a new advertising campaign:

SECOND LIFE...

Our grid keeps getting BIGGER!
Our caverns go DEEPER!
Our avatars can fly FASTER!
Our push guns push HARDER!
You'll want to play LONGER!

SECOND LIFE.

BIGGER!
DEEPER!
FASTER!
HARDER!
LONGER!



-Flip

LOL! Bet it would sell lots of subscriptions.

And yes, I made the title so folks would think I was bitching about them and actually read this.

I really do want deep caves.

I want to ride the Subway

Ok i was skimming and had to go back and read the whole thread when i saw this My filthy mind just couldn't pass it up. *grins*

Actually... our grid is one heck of a lot more shallow ever since the stupid terraforming limits popped up, and our avs were made to fly slower in an attempt to mitigate border crossing problems. llPushObject has also been nerfed at least twice

I kinda think this is a neat idea. I'm envisioning a world where Telehubs have been converted to subway stations - linked to sprawling subterrainian bullet-trains

Yeah, I know it'll never happen. But its fun to dream

In the interest of efficiency, let's combine David's idea with another, common one:

Underground lava tube networks beneath Olympus Mons, the big volcano on Mars. Leading, of course, to that lost Martian city....

Naturally, there'd be a working Martian transport system.

Other planets and subterrain, all in one.

Well, I don't see that this would be much more difficult than building normal sims. Well, I guess maybe it might be. But a variety of environments will keep interest flowing. I agree with the space sim idea as well.

I land of stalagtites and stalagmites and giant mushrooms, and glowing crystal formations for light sources. I know it's possible to simulate this somewhat on the surfuce with time and patience, but not as completely as if the base sim were built with this in mind.

I have a gesture that does it HARDER, BETTER, FASTER, STRONGER!!!!

PUMPING HOT STICKY JOY INTO YOUR.... ahem.

We need an underground function, the ability to dig 'tunnels', the surrounding 'dirt' would be semi-trasparent particles.

While we're at it let's fix water.

*fans self*



Matrix Online used this trick to connect zones. You had to go down into the subway station and wait for a few seconds for the train to arrive, then click on the door and board. You got a fast pop-up map with the destination stations, click one and go.

It might actually solve the problem with flying over aggressive security systems, but I still think P2P TP would be easier and more desirable.

I'd love to be able to build underground - with real terrain above rather than the terrain textures stuck on prims.

I would concur that more diverse sim geology would be very interesting. Caves, caverns, all that good stuff.

I would imagine it'd be a bear to implement, though?

I'm assuming that each polygon of land has to have a row in the land database somewhere.

If a 64sq mi Sim takes up one server, imagine what one would require that had to go deep as well as high?

OR .... here's a thought. Would we be willing to give up a bit of the extreme altitude currently used by aircraft and private sex rooms in order to build subterranean rooms?

I would. I loved the caves I modded in Morrowind.

A "bottom layer", a "top layer" and a "top layer thickness" would be plenty enough to get a cool start. As for the technical possibilities of such an idea, I have no clue how hard this would be. Also, be sure to put this cool idea in the "nice to have / far back burner" pile.

There is actually already a subway... the train connecting Purple to Olive runs entirely underground across all of Olive under a quite-beautiful canal that Athos built.

There are also some hidden caves (prim effect, as mentioned before) hidden throughout Indigo and Olive.

Regards,

-Flip

David, if you set the water level to zero on Bliss, and raise your island sim land to the max, you will have a chunk of land 100m deep.

My understanding of the way land works, and someone feel free to correct me if I'm way off...

Basically, the geology in a sim is like a piece of paper. The paper is deformed according to the light and dark spots specified by a "height map". Thus, if we were to perforate the deformed sheet that is the "ground" we would fall off the world? Because nothing is under it? Am I getting this right?

So I guess the whole concept of how the ground works would have to be reworked, from my limited understanding from similar cave discussions in the past.

I was thinking that it could be built modularly(sp?) with prebuilt tunnels and cavern rooms of various sizes, that LL could put together to form systems, and add random rocks, water, flora and fauna to, to give them distinct appearances. Kinda like a hamster habitrail.

You could just have black nothingness outside of the cavern/tunnel walls so when you accidently pan outside of the boundries, it would just be black, like solid rock.

This system could be placed under the main sim layer, in terms of mapping, with it's seperate servers, or even in new sim locations, with a fairly prim-lite upper crust consisting that would be mostly Linden-owned land to keep from overloading the server with earth-side builds.

Started digging already - great ideas.

Alexa

Yep, this is pretty much how it works in similar applications (LL might have some wonky proprietary way). The grayscale values of the height map store one height per pixel and are translated into 3D space as a triangular-face regular network of polygons textured as ground. Doing it this way allows for a reasonably crunchy and detailed terrain with very, very little file sizes needed to be streamed to the client. I'd make a wild guess and postulate that we can upload textures that are larger than the heightmap for a single sim.

Switching to true 3D terrain would mandate much fatter sim topography files needing to be streamed to everyone. Instead of, for example, a 256x256 grayscale heightmap representing 65,536 pixels or grid points, a 256x256x256m matrix of terrain points (maybe stored bitwise as terrain/air?) would be 16,777,216 points to stream for each approaching client, plus surface textures. Of course, that's assuming folks would want the max excavation depth to be 256m. It'd prolly be less if implemented, ya?

EDIT:
Well, I guess clientside permanent storage of the ground textures is pretty likely, eliminating that need.

yay!

That was wildly informative and answered a lot of my questions regarding the challenges involved in such a shift. Thank you!