Torus-mapped private sims.

Doesn't matter if the movement is physical, non-physical, or even just optical. Unless there's adjacent sims you can't even see the corner sims.

Go have a look at one. Try the south corners of Tokachi City. There's no connection at all... that's the point.

Ooooh... I'm obviously remembering doing things I've never done then. I stand corrected.

I would think letting the sim owners upload a background horizion texture would be more useful.

Placing super prims on the sim boundrys would allow you to add textures or use the new mirror feature.

The coding work would be about the same as to add underground building and I see that as being much more useful.

Combine that with the fact that a lot of users can't see anything past 96m and the whole vision is lost.

how does doing changing the skybox or putting prims up around the sim let you walk from one side of the sim to the opposite side of the same sim in one step? We're not talking about just optical effects here, we're talking about actually changing the geometry of the world.

Anyone here remember Duke Nukem 3D? That game engine permitted some pretty wild tricks, including a secret level where you could travel 720 degrees around a ring without seeing the same thing twice.

A 3D renderer based on a patchwork quilt of squares is capable of doing the same thing.

.------------.  .------------.  .------------.  .-----------.
|            |  |            |  |  to sim 2  |  |  to sim 5 |
|   SIM    to|  |to    SIM   |  |            |  |           |
|    1    sim|  |sim    2    |  |to          |  |         to|
|           2|  |1           |  |sim    SIM  |  | SIM    sim|
|            |  |            |  |4       3   |  |  4       3|
|  to sim 8  |  |  to sim 3  |  |            |  |           |
`------------'  `------------'  `------------'  '-----------'



.------------.  .------------.  .------------.  .-----------.
|            |  |            |  |  to sim 6  |  |  to sim 1 |
|   SIM    to|  |to    SIM   |  |            |  |           |
|    5    sim|  |sim    6    |  |to          |  |         to|
|           6|  |5           |  |sim    SIM  |  | SIM    sim|
|            |  |            |  |8       7   |  |  8       7|
|  to sim 4  |  |  to sim 7  |  |            |  |           |
`------------'  `------------'  `------------'  '-----------'

So you can walk in a circle rotating 720 degrees, walking through sim 1-8 in sequence. Since you cannot walk straight across a corner, there is no impossible situation. since you must move a little to the side you will always follow a linear path into a valid sim.

To render this space, the sim corner where two opposing sims can be seen occupying the same "space" is simply a knife-edge cutoff between the two. To the left of the corner point you see one sim, and to the right you see another.

.------------.------------.  
|YOU ARE     |            | 
|  HERE    to|to    SIM   | 
|    X    sim|sim    6    | 
|           6|5           | 
|            |            | 
|  to sim 4  |  to sim 7  | 
:------------+------------:
|  to sim 5  |'.          |
|            |  '.   SIM  |
|          to|    '.   7  |    YOU SEE BOTH
| SIM     sim|      '.    | << OVERLAPPING
|  4        3|        '.  |    SIMS
|            | SIM 3    '.|
'------------'------------'

It's easy!


- Scalar, the ASCII-Art Master

Master? There's some pretty nifty stuff out there...
Incuding a short animation from the Matrix.

I made maps in Duke Nukem 3D and even wrote code to make a wire-frame view from the map files.

I made one map where a square building had two hallways intersecting each other. One was north/south and the other was east west.

You could walk threw the hallway and not see the other person standing in your same exact location, BUT you could occasionally kill him!

The rendering engine used frames to decide what to draw, but the PVP system used x,y,z coordinates.



SL does not use relative settings for deciding what the next sim is. It instead uses a X,Y grid where each sim is given a X,Y location on the grid.

Simply put. It's not possible to place two sims in the same location with the current code.

Adding the ability to change the horizon and sky textures would allow for more unique islands. Moonscapes, Space, Mars, ect...

A sim owner can put up prims and texture them, but a horizon texture moves as you move and there is simply no easy way to replicate that.

With a land based llTeleportAgent() you could script it so that they jump to the other corner of the sim and a horizon texture could create an illusion.

The 4D house in "The Future" sim is an example of how scripting can create an interesting illusion.

Not having it yet would have meant that it needed mentioning in your first post.



It's an illusion from a single point of view and can not be adapted to a sim.

That's how the model that's presented to scripts and so on works, but at the sim level it's based entirely on sims sharing information with the sims DIRECTLY adjacent to them. That's why you can't llSetPos diagonally across two adjacent touching sim corners... there's no intervening sims to accept the object and move it across the boundary.

There is almost no difference, as far as the sims are concerned, between teleporting and crossing a sim boundary. There's no reason that region coordinates would have to increase monotonically as you move across the borders.

The original proposal as I understand it didn't involve putting any sims in the same location. It was talking about single isolated private sims, so the geometry was restricted so that overlapping wasn't possible. My followup generalized that to multiple private sims where a perfectly regular layout of multiple private sims restricted the connections such that (again) overlapping was not possible. Discussions of more complex maps (for example, non-orientable maps) are interesting, but (as you say) they wouldn't be possible in SL.

The original proposal, however, would be.

I agree, but that's a completely different concept. Make a separate suggestion for it.

Hmm, now that I think about it, a sim that is edge-linked back onto itself would produce certain other fun aspects.

With a view distance greater than 256 meters on a flat, open sim, if you look to the North, you can see yourself 256 meters away!

Actually, you can also see yourself to the South, to the West, and to the East.

If you run after yourself to catch up with yourself, you will note that your four other selves always seem to move away from you such that you are still always 256 meters away from them.

However, if you have a gun and shoot it at one of the others, note that they too will also be holding a gun and the bullet will be fired by all five of you at once. Indeed if you look behind you, you will see that your doppleganger has fired upon you behind your back, and the bullet is about to hit you, too! That jerk.

A PvP hunting game in an edge-wrapped world has some interesting possibilities, since to anyone else in the world they can run and find you in four "different" locations at once. But you also see four of them running around as well so the odds are evened. If someone is running away to the South, it's better to run North to catch them.


A perfect edge-wrapped world permits some bizarre options. You can build anything anywhere without concern for borders or edges. You can build right across the "edge" and you will not notice the edge is there, even though half of the object is sitting on the opposite side of the sim by that edge.

A 10-meter sphere at 0,0 in a sim has a quarter of it in each of the four corners of the square sim, but inside the wrapped space it is seen as a single sphere with no breaks.


C'mon someone hurry up and modify the open-source client to do this. We can experience it right now using the client we've already got.

Designate a certain sim already in-world where this should occur, so that when you visit it with the modified client, it switches to the hacked edge-wrapped mode.

.

Hmm, I see this can go a little further yet as well.

If your view distance increases to about 365 meters in an edge-wrapped sim, you will also be able to see yourself to the NE, SE, NW, and SW, so then there seems to be nine of you in the world at once.

.

Client is not involved.
Or at least to so little a degree that nothing the OS community can do would generate the results.

Nope, Scalar's right; a single, wrapping sim could totally be done on the client.

It just involves subsituting the current sim's data for the sims surrounding it. I'd imagine throwing the avatar to the opposite side of the sim rather than crossing the boundary would be either difficult or ugly though.

The whole concept freaks me out.

That is all.

Yes, a single sim, however, if you wanted the sim to tell the client (modified or otherwise) that it should for that sim, then there is a change needed serverside as well.
Otherwise you'd have an issue of not being able to use other places normally.

Or... you could just have a list of sims to do it for either client-side or on an external server.

Support for this is already built into SL. While in a sim, you can open up the map of the sim you are in, pick a different spot in the same sim and directly teleport to that location.

So a client modded in this fashion would perform a background in-sim teleport to the other side anytime you cross a sim edge.

Rather than hard-coding this functionality, it could be activated by something otherwise unimportant to the operation of the sim. Some special nonsense word or code in a description field or some such.

In truth this functionality could be designed to work with any patch of land inside a sim that has uniformly shaped terrain edges and a rectangular shape. You could make a tiny repeating space out of land on any sim if it has the proper client trigger in the land's description or info pages..


If vertical sim-edge offsets are permitted (as long as the terrain edges align), you could make a virtual skiing hill that climbs forever. Skiing off the bottom edge at 20m above sea level causes you to teleport up to 100m above sea level on the opposing side, and the hacked client properly makes the adjacent mirrored sims be offset up or down to look correct.

One sim, seen from side:

.------------.
|            |
|..          |
|  ''..      |
|      ''..  |
|          ''|
`------------'

Vertically offset mirrored sim, seen from side:

.------------.
|            |
|..          |
|  ''..      |------------.
|      ''..  |            |
|          ''|..          |
`------------|  ''..      |------------.
             |      ''..  |            |
             |          ''|..          |
             '------------|  ''..      |
                          |      ''..  |
                          |          ''|
                          '------------'

So this way you can ski downhill or roll a ball down the hill "virtually" forever.


Sim/Land Description to be read by hacked client:
"MIRRORSIM:W2E,N2S,W2EV:80,N2SV:-80"

- This is a Mirror Sim, enable hacks
- Link West side to East side
- Link North side to South side
- West to East Vertical offset: 80 meters
- North to South Vertical offset: -80 meters

.

Impossible, without support from the sim.

Interesting. Have to be careful: you can't in-sim teleport to arbitrary locations. You would have to make sure no border parcels have landing points set, at least.

There are a lot of other issues you aren't thinking of.

Yeah, you could tp an avatar from one side to another, but what about moving objects, physical or non-physical. If it's a shooting game am I supposed to keep track of where the borders really are, because there are going to be people who look like they're standing 10m to my east when they're really 246m to my west. And if my draw distance was more than 128, there's a possibility I could see them twice, or more than twice. And I won't be able to talk to the person, even though they seem to be standing next to me. Interaction with objects in various ways may be a problem if I don't know exactly where the border is.

It's a lot more than a client problem.

I must be completely misunderstanding your point here. Go to Hanja sim, upper right corner. It's a public rez plaza spanning 4 sims, cenetered at the corners. From any one of the 4, I see all the other 3. You DO see the kitty-corner sims. Perhaps you can't cross into them, so what? The issue isn't just movement. (I don't know whether you hear the conversation kitty-corner, I'll have to check that out.)

Sidney is correct that it's more than just a client issue. Client changes cover rendering, and I think simple interactions like clicking on something. But many other object interactions are done on the server.

No sh*t.

Oh, yeh, those ski's or that snowboard Scalar's riding in that snow sim are going to get left behind when he hits the edge.

Whoops.

Yeh, the sims have to get involved... but the way sim-sim communication works internally that should be possible.

so... like I said not to long ago...