Is the overall geography of SL still meaningful?

I was pondering a few things I'd love to try in SL someday, and many of them are a bit hamstrung by the limited quantity and varieties of space available to do them in. So I got to thinking about the standard grid model as it currently stands.

The original reasoning behind it was to create a contiguous world, that could be explored and traveled across to see the various things people are doing. In the early days of Beta and when we first went public, I did that all the time.

I don't do that anymore. Most of the places I've visited in the past few months have been destinations I knew about ahead of time, or places I received a teleport offer to visit. In the latter case I often had no clue what part of the overall world I was in! I no longer fly between places. This is partly because things take so long to load into view, and partly because the sea of suburbia and clubs and malls has become boring and disheartening.

The nature of the grid means that certain constraints will always exist on how space here is experienced. If we allowed other models, however, a number of possibilities open up. One I've wanted to play with is the creation of a hollow planet, on a large scale for use in racing and battle events. I've always used up far more room than my prim use would require, too. It'd be nice to reapportion my share of a server's resources in creating a much larger area to play in.

Another thing I'd love to be able to do is take the Classic Games Park and give it its own zone. For months it has sat in the shadow of a junkyard next door. Anytime someone teleports into the sim they don't see the park, they see the junkyard, or used-plane dealership or whatever it is.

Another thought I had about space here is to make it more akin to the internet as a whole. You would pay for a certain percentage of a server's resources, but could set the parameters of your space to suit your needs. It could be the size of a gift shop, or could cover square miles of mostly empty territory. Second, you could link spaces together in the manner of a direct teleport. To get people to visit your space, you'd rent space in a "hub" sim, where lots of traffic would pass by and see your entrance teleporter, but your actual space would not suffer the lag of being in the high-traffic zone.

So, I thought I'd ask - do you still find the standardized grid layout essential to your SL experience?

It's a curious thing you bring up.

I was contemplating this briefly... it's funny, you know, because hypertext and URLs you can type in and "go there instantly" helped make the WWW quite nonlinear in its approachability, whilst in SL, we have sort of reverted to a sort of primitive mode of transport in that while we can fly, we still have to go from Point A to Point B linearly when it comes to being dropped off at a TeleHub instead of directly at our desired destination (unless that destination happens to be the TH, of course ).

We know how the standardized grid works by now. If additional modes and paradigms of accessing locations in SL were to be tested, as you have suggested the possibility, I'm very much for seeing what it would actually be like -- in addition to the current, standardized grid.

It's kind of hard to tell until it's put into motion.

I just got back into exploring. Back in the olden days when the grid had 42 sims, I knew who owned all the land. I would spend an hour or more exploring all the bulds in each sim. As the world grew, I lost touch with my explorer roots, just because there is so much to see now.

I been spending most of my time up in the NE Hidden Lakes region (teleport to Waterhead). It has been interesting to see that area being settled. I studied it pretty closely when it was all virgin, so its neat to remember how it was and watch it turn into settled land.

It is hard to just fly across the world now, but exploring regions does have its rewards. As always, I find little nuggets tucked in between the sprawl that renew my spirit and hope for the future. There are lots of great people to meet along the way as well.

You make it sound like such an adventure! Ha ha ha...

I think flying kinda ruined exploration -- and teleporting ruined that. Every time I see a No Fly private sim, my heart skips a beat as I teleport in to explore it. Old London and the Simcast sims are far more interesting then anything around where I stay(Amida). Atop of all this.... there a very few good builders nowadays and even less who build things for the sake of building them. There are 3 types things land is generally used for. Home, store or club -- or some combination of each.

Occasionally the creative will build something for the fun of building it, such as that model Empire State Building, or the always classy W-Hat of Baku(which has seen little additions since I've arrived).

So you can travel too easily over the land for things to seem massive and awe inspiring -- and most things are eye sores. Thats why exploration is a dying passtimes. The roads never see useage and the water only occasionally does. I've never rode around to see another vehicle.

So... yeah. Makes me sad...

A few weeks back, for fun, I walked to (or from) my usual haunts instead of flying or teleporting. I'm glad I did:
It was more interesting than I expected, as I ran into impressive builds and gardens that I'd have never seen otherwise. For every mall and fleamarket, there's something cool waiting to be discoverd.

1. It was interesting. I saw amazing and original homes and gardens that I'd have never seen otherwise. For every mall and fleamarket, there's something cool waiting to be discovered
   
2. Traveling at walk speed gave everything time to rez, so I saw builds and texutes as they were meant to be seen (instead of the crude pieces visible when flying)
   
3. It somehow made the world seem more real. Sure, I could see where my home was in proportion other places on the map, but something about actually walking to each point and taking in the terrain and neigborhoods inbetween made the grid seem more like a connected place (as oppossed to a random jumble of different areas)
   

I'm a big fan of using the first person view when doing such things. I still usually end up feeling less impressed then I feel I should though. =/

Of course what changed over time is the overall size of the world. When I first got here, you could walk from one side of the world to the other in less than an hour. You could fly around and visit every part of the world in the course of a day.

This is no longer possible since the world is so amazingly huge!

Once every couple of weeks I break out the boat and cruise SL coastlines and rivers. It's a good median between flying and walking -- I see a lot of things I wouldn't normally, and I often stop and look, but the time/effort factor is still doable, too. These days I use an airboat, so short excursions overland are possible.

There may come a time when "cruising" is no longer advantageous either -- the world will be too big. So I'd agree with Ananda, Torley, and others -- Between now and then I'd like to see transport and selection options diversified, along with a better way to obtain and parse information about locations, activities, and options -- in nonlinear and subjective ways. I think the latter is as important as the former, as the world grows.

The idea of allocating server resources instead of/in addition to virtual space and prim amounts is something I'd like to see seriously considered.

And I am very much in favor of sim/limited grid designs that go way beyond the "earthly" island/snow/mountain/forest paradigms LL presently uses. Hollow planets, space without gravity, other-world terrains, all of these ideas deserve serious consideration.

With these approaches implemented, SL might have less of a chance of becoming a "boring" sprawl of houses, clubs, and retail businesses.

More ponderings...

Would it be fun to create an actual Metaverse, where one virtual space is connected to another via hyperlinks? The experience could be a bit like the scenes in the Matrix where you open one doorway in a hall and it leads to the kitchen, but if you open the door on the other side you end up in a mountain range hundreds of miles away.

Each person's space, or land, could be linked in this manner and could be any size wanted. Or, if it suits, the land or maybe the "exterior" of a buildling could reside in a larger shared bubble of contiguous space.

I don't know if people would find this fun, or disorienting. Personally I find the set parameters on my personal space rather limiting.

Certainly there are a lot of wonderful things to see and do in SL. But lately I've not had a great deal of interest in it. I think it's because as the world has grown, it has become more and more similar to the real world. I've become more likely to meet people once and never see them again. I'll see the same business franchised in multiple locations, and most of my transactions are business arrangements with strangers. Most parts of the world are inhabited by a medium density collection of builds, all dictated by the same scale and economics. The economics have also become more and more integrated with the real world.

All of these are not bad things, in fact there is more creativity and profit than ever. So why am I not interested? Because I get the same sort of experience walking out the front door of my house or driving down Broadway in my real life. I'd like to see more of what makes SL different from ordinary life, making experiences that can't be duplicated in higher-rez by heading to the mall. I'd like to open my front door into a tight-knit neighborhood where all my friends are in walking distance. I'd like to open my back door onto a beach or a glacier that stretches for miles with no one in sight.

Donovan makes a very good point about the need for better connections in the data sense as well. For instance, wouldn't it be great if you could fluidly pull up an SL directory of clothing stores, browse to the Pixel Dolls website, and jump straight from the website into the store to make a purchase? Links like this will become increasingly important. It would make it a whole new experience if these links could be represented in our virtual space.

Time to stop rambling.

Ananda, you have said exactly what I wanted to, with far more taste than I could ever accomplish. @_o

What I really wish for is a way to go totally wireframe until you slow down to a certain speed. This would be a bit wild, but the digital underpinnings wouldn't detract from experiencing SL, perhaps even enhance it. You know, fly like a banshee at wireframe, drop down and things start to rezz around you.

See something complicated in wireframe? A general outline that catches your eye? Slow down, and blam, instead of waiting for the contrail of sim to rezz around you like usual, you get a more pinpoint experience, probably helping out the sims along the way. Bet it is a lot easier to send a vertex cloud than it is to do all the textures and such.

Or not...just an idea.

I have a way to make SL wireframe now, but since text is part of the overlay I can't see characters, so typing and chatting is out of the question. This doesn't save me bandwidth, as the app sits between SL and the calls to my card, so I still download all the data a normal person would.

What an interesting thread.

Regarding teleportation in particular..
Personally I can see value in the current teleport-nearby concept, but in some respects I do find the act of teleporting to be too jarring somehow. In the back of my mind I know full well that this is an artificial constraint, that the technology could easily allow direct teleportation - which can make a shopping spree somewhat frustrating. Teleport- fly - buy - teleport - fly - buy.

On the other hand, if we were able to teleport anywhere instantly - would we lose that element of world scale, and our position within a larger community that the short flights from telehubs remind us of?

Presumably direct teleportation would lighten the load on some sims, as they would no longer have to stream content to residents flying through who have no interest in anything but their destination.


So broadly I am in favour of allowing free teleportation. It would be interesting to see what changes to the social side this brought about; I suspect that folk would be more likely to pop to an event or to help someone elsewhere if it were less inconvenient to do so. I know that I have thought twice about attending things knowing that I have a 45 second flight time at both ends.

Similar to the post by Maxx above I would like to see a way to allow very rapid movement across the world. From normal flight speed with everything rezzing right up to very high speed indeed where nothing rezzes but the landscape surface. Perhaps the mousewheel can be used to 'dial up' or down the travel speed and therefore the amount of content that your client tries to render - mid flight. Then I could always drop out of warp speed if I spot something interesting.

The only unknown, is how folk would feel when a very high velocity Jai Nomad whooshes through their castle giggling manically to herself.


Jai Nomad

The grid has gotten large enough now for people to be disoriented. It's almost completely unorganized and undifferentiated. You're as likely to see a tropical butterfly zoo in a snow sim as you are in Tan. The road system is shallow and doesn't correspond to the distribution of builds because people fly. There's no clear infrastructure, you can't teleport directly, and the tools don't allow the creation of a search engine like Yahoo or Google.

Personally, I'd like to see something which takes advantage of virtual reality to go beyond the limitations of the physical world rather than adhering to them. For example, a system that allowed as many different ways to arrive at a build as possible. I mean multiple, parallel spatial arrangements of the parcels, based on different indexing or even live searches. So that I could search for "zoo" and literally walk from one zoo into the next because they've been arranged that way. Yeah, I know, SL can't suddenly do that. I don't really know if the Lindens are interested in that kind of thing (not that they should be), SL is so conspicuously designed as a game. But it's that kind of new way to do things that I think will drive the "3D web" or Metaverse or whatever.

One thing that kind of confused me is that in some of the new areas, such as where I live, the roads don't let you rez objects. At the same time, there are NO driveways onto the road. So I never ever see anyone on the road, unless they are touching down.

I know there's a way around it, I did it in fact, but 80% of people will just not use the roads under that condition.

I love the wireframe fly idea. And the directed teleport idea. There must be a way to write a script that will let you go exactly to a certain place. Like, type in (sim name) 150,86 and you go right there, even if it works by moving you from the telehub.

One thing about flying around that's a bit disturbing is that the default flight altitude is low enough to get bounced from places that have an access list. Again, there is a way around this, but it will ground a lot of new people.

One thing to consider also is that now a lot of stuff is on islands. As of now, you can't fly over the ocean areas. I know it would be possible to make a generic "ocean sim" or at most 2, that would cover all that area, given that there's nothing on it.
That would definitely make flying vehicle travel, especially by airship, more fun.

(I love airships. )

I like that wireframe viewing idea, that'd be a nice option to have. And if LL did it, the bandwidth demands and speed of updates should be massively reduced and increased, respectively. But would it make any difference to the current issues with sim-to-sim handoff when moving at high speed? I don't know enough about that to put forward a guess...

Regarding those road-side walls - I've had a support request in for a curb cut for a several weeks now at least. Don't really expect to see it done anytime soon, but at least the ticket is open and in the system, someone's going to have to pay attention at least long enough to close it...

I don't think the void sim practice would be extended to the private islands, unless one or some of those folks would pony up L$ to support it. Which I wouldn't, after spending so much already on the sim(s). OTOH, I've really enjoyed the inland seas, and hopefully enough people are that the practice will spread throughout the grid.

Regarding the world spatial model and alternate forms of linking it all up, I think LL has tried to provide the least jarring layout they can. Unrestricted linking of the virtual space would be cool, but most people would find it horrendously disorienting - depending massively on how it's being done, which hasn't been specified. I'm just thinking of newb's to the concept who are in one place, look over, walk into the "adjacent space," and now there's no sign of the previous space whatsoever. Not difficult to do, not really that difficult a concept, but it depends on who you expect to inhabit your world and how they'll react. For a mass audience at the present time, I'm not sure that'll work that well for them. But I guess the point I wanted to make with all my verbal dribble here is that I think it's got more to do with user experience than "being a game" per se.

And now, since I'm traveling on business and late for work, I'll see y'all later.

I LOVE the empty, water sims that have ben used to fill up the whole ones. They're almost always empty, and they're a great place to meet friends. Please don't sell them.

Hamlet Linden traveled from one end of SL to another in a balloon. Don't quote me on this, but that ain't gonna happen again. And y'know, i really would like to walk around. But SL just seems to get uglier and uglier. I continually see ugly clubs and malls, and, although they may contain great things (SOMETIMES) they are boring. Nope, nothing new or exiting here. The only creative bursts i seem to see are on PIs.

Note: BURSTS.

I don't buy vehicles. Why?? Cos a) they handle terribly and b) some sims have no roads.
There's a new telehub in Georgean!!! I used to love flying to cordova, and flying so fast i couldn't see Abbotts Aerodrome, and crashing into it. RANT OVER

Just to be clear, I didn't mean that SL is "just a game", only that is was designed as a game. If it were designed as a 3D networked computing platform, I think there would have been less emphasis on a vehicle API and clothing, and more emphasis on internet connectivity and databases. I agree about the familiarity for users of the current grid layout as static, contiguous terrain. I was just offering an example of the kinds of innovations I think could be part of the spread of a "Metaverse". On the other hand, you could always have a default spatial arrangement which was like SL's, and other dynamic arrangements on demand. Who knows what people will come up with. I'm glad there's people approaching it from various angles.