selective invisibility

I'd like it to be possible for a player to specify that certain objects be invisible, only to him or her. Ideally, these objects could be specified on the basis of the owner; you could have an exclusion list, and if a person's name is on your list, that person's builds are invisible to you.

I think this would solve many of the issues we've been having lately. If you don't want to look at your neighbor's building, you don't have to. This would be simpler than implementing an enforcement mechanism for community guidelines or player-governed sims, and cheaper for players than buying up a large buffer zone around your own building.

Some might say that this is a rather immature approach to conflict resolution, and that SL should encourage neighbors to negotiate rather than make it easy for them to ignore each other. But SL is a virtual world, not the real one; this would simply be another way to take advantage of that.

There would be a risk of increasing isolation and reducing shared experience, but I think it's a small one. And just look at all the problems we're running into right now. Selective invisibility of objects would reduce the social strain immensely.

Neat idea, but unfortunately there seems to be a flaw: Are the invisible objects still there, i.e. do you bounce off of them?

If they are, then one would be constantly bumping into invisible objects. This is not good. This also does not prevent the abuser from putting up "shields" or similar around you to wall you in, or shooting bullets at you, or any number of similar abuses.

If they are not, then one could invisible someone's objects, walk through a wall, and then un-invisible the objects. Hey presto, you just bypassed someone's carefully crafted security grid.

I utterly agree with Bob, although your suggestion was a grand original (hehe, id love to mute si's billboards ) , it could eiasily be abused to turn the tables on the 'good guy' (oddly there really isnt one in the scenerio) or the innocent bystander.

The objects would still be there. Yes, you might bump into them, but I don't think that would be a big problem.

This isn't a way of protecting yourself from behavior like attacks and so forth; it's just a way to avoid having to look at things you consider eyesores, things that ruin your view. Think of it as a visual mute button. Muting a person's IMs doesn't prevent him/her from coming over and throwing rocks at you, or from putting up transparent shields around you (which people can do right now), but that doesn't mean that muting isn't useful. We file abuse reports for abusive behavior, we mute people we don't want to hear from, and we could selectively make certain people's builds transparent to us. These features serve different, but complementary, functions.

I'm going to break with the tradition of contrariety in the SL forum and not disagree just for the sake of disagreeing. I think it's a pretty good idea. Basically, if I were sitting somewhere, like on my porch, I could just "turn off" the giant mega-mall that stands between me and an unobstructed view of the lovely billboards on the other side. No harm done to anyone. It would also reduce demands on the server and my video card. When I am ready to go flying around, I just turn the objects back on, maybe by selecting the land that they reside on, or by selecting the owner, and then just click a single button.

LOL, gotta love those billboards ;-P

JV

I think I have the solution do the issues Bob brought up. When you get within a 5 meter radius of the invisible object, it becomes visibile until you leave the 5 meter radius. Therefore, if you are flying and you come across one, this should give you enough time to see the object and change your course. Also, this prevents anyone from walking through walls.

If you are just looking out your apartment building window, you won't see the builing, and everyone is happy

You guys do know you can make things invisble already right?
Just use a blank Alpha Channel texture, only caviate is you cannot use it on an avatar.


I think a great use of invisibility would be while someone is in Away Mode, or Busy Mode

yes the point was to make someone elses stuff inivisible to you.....

JV

yeah i like this idea. i had mentioned something like this where you could 'ignore' someone, and basically this person would be like dead to you. them and their objects would not show up to you.

but Bob pointed out the problem with it. also this doesn't account for annoying sounds that people make among other things.

DOH!!! I'm a moron!

Works for me. Also, would sounds triggered by the invisible objects not be played, unless you're within the visible radius? That would help quite a bit as well.

I didn't mention the muting of sounds because I believe that's been requested a number of times before, but yes, that would also be valuable. I think a LOT of neighbor conflicts could be avoided with these features.

I tend to agree that the ability to turn off objects would be convenient, since often too much stuff just slows my client down to a crawl. I also like the 5 meter idea, since that would help the "crash" problem. Good idea.

I totally want this, some newb plunked a horrible build next to my place, now I know how bad builds affect people next to them... I want this soooo bad...