Torus-mapped private sims.

Instead of having private sims connecting to ocean on all four sides, how about having on option where they connect to themselves, N-S, S-N, E-W, W-E, so that from the inside they would seem to tile the plane?

This would allow for "desert" sims that didn't have that pesky water all around them. It would also make flying airplanes and helicopters simpler since you'd never actually have to deal with sim crossings.

Yeah. And you could make the Sonic 3 Special Zones in SL that way, too.

Sounds cool to me.

Someone actually suggested that the entire grid be constructed that way. It's an interesting idea, particularly for vehicle/aircraft enthusiasts.

hmm... it would be called "edge warp" in most common games and platform....but

how would it work when having 2 sims connected while both have edge warp on?

like.. sim A and sim B are connected from their West/East sides, you would warp over and over again in Sim A if going north and south... but you would be sim crossing into Sim B...
but still going that way and ended up warping and sim crossing at the same time at the other end of the Sim B into Sim A. Sound like bug and glitch issues could arise from that point if I were not to trust LL's programing too well on that.

...yet, an interesting concept idea.

Generally there's not much special needed to support this.

It only requires modifying the rendering engine so that there is no edge to the world. When it reaches one edge it simply goes back over to the other side and redraws the world again.




Moving off the edge of the sim simply "teleports" you to the opposite side, and so you can move forever to the north/south/east/west without ever hitting a wall.

Multiple sims can be chained together like this such that they don't even need to be adjacent to each other on the grid. The grid is just a pleasing concept to the human mind but what is actually rendered is up to the engine and the edge-to-edge links.

Simple, the layout looks like:

AB

The layout acts like

AB AB AB
AB AB AB
AB AB AB

It gets interesting when there are three. If you've ever played a game called Wiz War (by Jolly Games) you already understand how it works

AB
C

B-east wraps to A-west
A-north wraps to C-south
(simple enough so far, but what about those 2 pesky B and C sides?)
B-south warps to C-east
C-west wraps to B-north

Basically, it's 3 sides of a cube. As long as the land is keept in a rectangular orrientation, there will always be a way to map the warps.

Easiest solution is... you wouldn't do that. It would only be applied to isolated sims with no neighbors, or to a whole estate, and only if the estate consisted of a single rectangular block of sims. Attach another sim and the warping turns off until it's a complete block again.

Hmmm...

You could have separate estate options for east-west or north-south edge warping.

What do you see if you are in A, looking at the south west corner? What sim do we see diagonally across the corner?

The issue here is that the angles don't add up to 360 degrees. As you rightly say, it's like a corner of a cube, but that's not good for making the grid look like a seamless plane.

I think there might also be issues with connecting a west side of something to the north side of another. As you cross the boundary, the direction that the sun is facing would have to change.

I'm pretty sure that the only layouts that do not have these sorts of problems are rectangular tori.

Well phooey, before I opened the thread I thought someone was suggesting that a private sim actually be in the shape of a torus instead of a flat plane segment.

Hmm, make a sim that's a Möbius strip. Or a Klein bottle.

Good point, I hadn't thought of it in terms of RENDERING said system.
I'm sure there's a way to do it, you just can't use Euclidean Geometry.

You can render the world as a spheroid or as if on a torus, but you are going to have problems with scale and positioning of objects.

For a world with a curvature like the earth, you cannot create a flat, square cube, or anything flat at all. If the curvature is steep you will see a cube as having a domed top and a cupped bottom, curving with the world grid.

Something that is truly flat in this environment will actuall dip downward towards the middle and rise back up again on the far edge.

This is true in real life when roads are built but most people do not notice due to the very subtle curvature of the earth. No road can be perfectly flat (following a laser guide)l for hundreds of miles without the center section of the road eventually cutting deep into a valley and the ends rising up onto steep hills. You cannot square a circle.


And so if you make a world like this you may need to use two different overlapping coordinate systems to have it simple enough for the 3D renderer to understand. The world itself might be rendered using a polar grid while objects aligned on that use their own planar grid.

This way you can walk around the world untill you are upside down, but your world objects can still be perfect cuboids and spheroids aligned on that polar grid..


Also note that positional resolution is lost the higher you go above the polar grid. Near the bottom, just using degrees is precise enough but as the grid gets higher up the degrees move far apart and you need to align stuff by 60 minutes per degreee. Higher yet and the minute marks spread far apart and you need 60 seconds per minute. Ever further grid subdivisions are needed the higher you go away from the polar center of the grid.

But you can easily move 180 degrees around a polar grid and be standing upside down in the environment without the renderer having a heart attack. Though I have no idea if 3D physics engines can handle polar gridspaces.

.

Oh, good point, these are other possibilities for surfaces with zero curvature everywhere. Doing these seems only slightly harder than doing a torus. One would have to be able to render everything reflected in a mirror when you go round once

Klein's Beer anyone?

This is completely ridiculous. The sun and moon in SL are just stupid artistic details slapped onto a perfectly flat gridspace that has no curvature like the Earth and hence cannot have a real "sun" or "moon" anyway.

If the illusory sun is going to cause you problems then simply take it out of the world and don't bother with it.


I can see your next comment.

"Well a mobius strip view of the world is possible, but how will we handle it when the sun is upside down and backwards in relation to the strip?"

.

Couldn't we just let sim owners specify which other sim it's connected to in each of the nine directions?

Nine?

1 2 3
4 # 5
6 7 8

9?

Oh yeah, eight; nine's the number of sims you'd see, innit.

Now that I've had a bit of breakfast (it's noon)....

Eight?

0 1 2
3 # 4
5 6 7

8?

On your chart, 0 2 5 7 are not directions accessible from the center sim. The links are only made along the flat edges of each side.

You cannot cross diagonally directly from 0,0 of the center sim to 255,255 into sim 0. But you can cross briefly into sim 3 and then into sim 0, or cross briefly through sim 1 into sim 0.

In the absolute cuboid sense there are four sides to the cube plus a top and bottom so there's a maximum of six possible sim interconnects.

SL doesn't permit top/bottom sim links so it's really just four interconnections around the sides.

Yes, but there is something visable. If you designate 4 to the east and 6 to the south, and then designate 7 to the south of four...

# > 4
V V
6 7

...and then designate 8 to the east of 6....
What happens?

#...>....4
V..........V
6 > 8 ? 7

Are you saying SL picks up what sim to see diagonally from the vertically/horizontally connected ones? 'Cause that's a well confusing way of saying it if you are.

If that's the case it seems really odd to me; if something's moved directly from a sim to one at one of it's corners it seems silly to have to pass it though another sim first.

Well sure, I agree. I'm just seeing issues with how we might have sims connected in funny ways right now.

The sun issue is less of a deal than seeing across to a corner sim.

I can see some fun ways to connect sims allowing rotation of the sims but not allowing anything other than 4 sims around a corner. Here's an example, with two sims, denoted "" and "[" (that can be rotated to look like "" and "]":

( [ ( [
] ) ] )
( [ ( [
] ) ] )

There's no way to go directly from a sim to one at its corners, so this doesn't come up.

Go to any sim that's only got corner sims around it to see what I mean.

Not with physical movement, no. But what happens when you move to a sim connected at a corner with non-physical movement? Does the hand-off have to go through a sim connected at the side first?

EDIT: Actually, those sims that only have others connected at their corners would indicate there is a connection between sims and those at diagonals to them, wouldn't it?

now if i turned up my visiblity to 512m, would i be able to see myself multiple times?