Disable Minimap + Name Tags Ability.

Serious RP'ers all over SL will most likely want this feature installed, and so may other private island/estate owners of residential sims, who dont want people when and where their residents are.

I am a Sim Admin for the Sim Midgar, the Final Fantasy VII RP Sim.

Me, the rest of the Admin Team for the sim, and many other RP'ers believe that this will most likely become the most worshipped update on SL for along time.

An option should be added to the Region/Estate tools to disable the Minimap and Nametags.

With no minimap, we can set up RP's with a sense of danger and mystery, where every turn needs to be thought out, and sneakiness is everything!

A Second Life that can be just as unrealistic as Real Life is what I want, we dont have Mini Maps and Name Tags in RL, why here?

Also, many people use Chat Relay scripts to talk under different "character" names in Green Text, I would like a sim without nametags, so we need to ask for peoples names, and stick to the character names given.

This simple feature could add a whole new level to private island RP's!
Please vote!

Please search for prop 2852 on the Feature Voting page, or go here....
http://secure-web2.secondlife.com/vote/vote.php?get_id=2852

This has been requested several times. It remains a good idea, though I'm not sure about how it fares compared to the other tasks LL has.

I know, but every other suggestion like this has pretty much died.
Its something me, and alot of other RP Communities feel very strongly about, and something that LL should atleast Acknowledge as being a good idea.

You got to be kidding... Even Ever Quest 2 doesn't do that and it's a serious role playing game. I am a role player myself, but i don't want this. Especially in SL since I need to know the name of the griefer whose shooting at me so i can abuse report them. If you want this feature I suggest it be client side only. I sure wouldn't want to role play in a sim if that rule was in effect. I would want it in my own personal settings.

Yiffy seems to have pointed out two problems with this feature :
1) Would it prevent landowners getting griefer names during an attack?
2) Given that the client is open source now, if this feature was implemented... then it could be trivially bypassed by client-side hacks.

Perhaps this is one of those feature ideas which is "good in theory, but not so useful in practice"?

Nametags can already be hidden, and the minimap can be closed, but I still can't really imagine how this would work...

If there's a group of three people and I walk up to them and say something my name would show up so they'd still know my name right away. Also, how would you know which one says something back if you eliminate every possible way of identifying someone?

In real life you can orient who says what or where a sound comes from, but you have no of knowing whether something you see in chat is from the group in front of you, or if it's someone inside of that house that's just under 20m away from you.

I have a minimap irl.... Its called a Tomtom... and a name tag.... It says ***** ******** (sensord ) all of my employees have them... and well... every person who works in the office block that my business is based in has name tags...

But thats just being picky...

I RP alot.. andI keep the name tags on... I dont use themini map because thats cheating..... but aslong as you remember that you dont know some one.... which I dont have a problem with... then its fine.... if you have a problem doing that then yes.. turn names off.... but I have a problem with remembering peoples names.... not forgetting them So I need the tags on....

I for one vote No... and will not go on a sim that prevents the use of name tags...

besides.... LL's are trying to cut down on things... not add more coding to cause lag.... so its unlikely to happen because people ask for it.... unless its already on the tables...

In RL you have peripheral vision and binocular vision and binaural hearing and the minimap provides an analogue to all these things.

Hiding the nametags would definitely be a bad idea, but a no-minimap zone, like a no-fly zone, would certainly be good for games. How can you play hide and seek when it's obvious where the hider is?

I can't see it ever happening, though. Yes, you can turn YOUR minimap off, but you can tell whether someone else surreptitiously has theirs on, so it needs to be a parcel option.

You can hear and discern the exact position of a person out to 256 meters? Behind walls?

Being a member of a superheroine group, I would say the answer is probably yes ...

Many people tend to forget the fact this isn't real life, but in fact a second life. a place where you can do things you never could in your first life.

No, but I can hear and discern the position of the people close to me better with my hearing and peripheral vision than with a minimap. Yes, even through many types of walls. It's not an exact correspondence, but it's the same kind of effect, but to really emulate RL limitations you'd be better with a parcel option something like "limit minimap to chat distance" or even "whisper distance".

Heck, I'd like to zoom my minimap in closer myself sometimes.

Then this might be the option for landowners who run games where using the minimap would be cheating? Some kind of line of sight-ish thing than "whole region."



That's new. Used to be that you couldn't zoom in as far as you now can. I like.

Then you are clearly a poor Role Player, in real life you dont know where everyone is, and when you see someone you dont know who it is.
I want this feature for the same reason I like RP's to have no fly, it adds a level of realism.

Countless people cheat in Gor, soon as you enter an area where you can be hunted, 5 green dots start zooming towards you, then you run.
Thats cheating on the ends of the hunters and hunted.
If you was going through the woods on your own you should be able to sneak, and only get hunted if you are caught.

Many serious SL RP'ers want this feature, we are tired of the n00bs using it to cheat.



You seem to forget that when RPing you should try to be realistic, and more like a real life.



Yes, but this is client side, we want estate owners to be able to force these settings on their sim.


As for those who think this would allow griefers to not get caught, going to someones profile would show their name, and bumps pushes and hits would still work as it does now.

The problem with this suggestion is that technically it doesn't quite work out.

Well, the server could withhold avatar names it sends to the client. However, all the other features are purely client side, and there is nothing the server could do to inhibit nametags and minimap. It could send the client a hint that these features are disabled by the landowner, but it would be trivial to modify the open-source client to ignore these hints.

In other words, you can make a convention to not use minimap, but you can't enforce it. Totally not possible. The closest you can come is to raise the bar by making it built into the standard client, so that only those clever folks who know how to find the modified client can subvert the landowner's intentions.

My suggestion: just don't open the minimap, and turn off tags in your client. And hope that others do likewise.

That suggestion is pointless, we want to force these settings on everyone, not hope they do it anyway, and it is highly unlikely that someone will create a client just to get round thsoe features, and if they do, oh well, the majority of SL wouldnt be using that client.

Um this is getting a little personal. Your now resorting to insulting my RP quality? I'll have you know that i am highly involved in a RP guild in EQ2 and partake in almost every event. Also like i mentioned in a above post, SL is meant to be a place where you can do things that you can't do IRL. Meaning IRL you can't see a name plate over someones head, but in MMORPG's you can. This is a feature i like. I've never played a MMORPG that doesn't have name plates or some way to identify a pc/npc. If i did, i wouldn't stay long. I like being able to identify things. In fact if it was possible to wear name plates IRL i would be wearing one right now. *looks for a badge*


A lot of people in SL do like to force things on everyone. But most people object to those ideals. Nobody likes to be stripped of their freedom, except gorean slaves, but i won't get into that matter. In this case it's the freedom to identify who were talking to. I doubt that LL could do this in the server side codes. This seams like something that can only be done Client side. I'm not fond of using hacks... However, i would be using one to bypass this.

My point was that you don't need name tags in real life to know who says want, you get visual cues (someone's mouth opening and closing being a good indication ) and audible cues (distant/close, left/right, everyone having a different sounding voice) to keep track of things. Name tags (and to a point, the mini-map I guess) provide that information, and maybe a little more, but you have the option of limiting what your character is and isn't supposed to know.

Note: the following is about the minimap.



Exactly. There's a reason for it. It's the same reason when you play a pen-and-paper RPG game that the GM doesn't tell you everything strait out. There was once a session that turned bad when the players didn't undersand the difference between character knowledge and player knowledge and said "My character knows everything I know, so THEREFORE, any random town NPC knows everything the GM knows (the NPC being the GM's character) and thus knows everything the Evil Overlord knows because the Overlord is also the GM's character and the GM knows what the Overlord is going to do."

Gasp, shock, awe, it don't work that way.

If the creator of a game wishes that the players not have access to some piece of information, then by all means, give them a way to restrict it. If an Open Source client works around it, gasp, shock, awe, we ban them (the player using the OS client) from the game.

This kind of feature is bound to be used in a very limited fassion, as some RP sims wouldn't care. It just makes a big difference in some situations where having it is cheating.

Disabling name tags:
I can see the argument, however, I think we just need a better rendering of them so name tags don't clip through objects. It'd solve everyone's problems.

Oh, and there is an MMO out there that won't have name tags. However, the entire project is a pipe dream (it was called AP, which I forget what it stands for...oh, "The Awakening Project." The idea was that like in RL you don't nessessarily know who everyone is. As you meet people you could assign them whatever name you wanted and over time, if you didn't talk with or see them you'd "forget" and the "entry" would disapear).
Er, Goldy in PA2Land for some reference. The URL that the comic directs me to is broke.

You could impose limits on the data sent to the client, on a per sim or per parcel basis... say, "only display avatars within 20 meters". The downside is you couldn't even SEE them outside that range. For games this could be worked around, say by having a phantom prim following the avatars that you *could* see, or having them riding vehicles.

That's what I mean, I want to zoom in a LOT closer.

I'm sure griefers will love the no-name-tags idea.

As for disabiling mini-maps, it would do nothing unless you disabled the world map as well. And that causes problems in teleporting out, among other things.

not all serious RPers would want these features though, really its the sign of a POOR RPer to recognize that fact

It's not "I disable my nametag, whoohoo!" It's "I own land, and um, yeah, no body on my land can see the nametags of anyone else on my land, and because it's access controlled, what griefers?"

MY suggestion may not help, but you CANNOT enforce it on everyone. You can want whatever you want, but you can only get what is possible: this is reality. Also, folks WILL create a client that ignores these features, if they become at all popular in RP places. We're talking about a truly trivial change here, something the typical gifted high-school kid can do half awake.

However, I bet you're correct that most people probably won't use the modified client, so the feature would be valuable even if it's not enforcable.