Second Life World and Beyond

I saw this video today demonstrating ground-to-space technology. Very cool stuff. It would be really neat to something like this at some point or another get implemented into Second Life as massive as Second Life gets and how we can already fly. Anyways, the technology comes from a MMO called "Infinity" which is in development stages.

"Infinity is a massively multiplayer online game set in a futuristic persistent universe."

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3744650885934024232
"This video shows seamless landing and take off from the ground surface of a planet in orbit to a gaz giant with a ring. It also demonstrates the use of atmosphere scattering to enhance the depth feeling, as well as many effects like per-pixel procedural terrain texturing on the graphics card, the clouds layer, the planetary terrain level-of-detail, and much more."

Infinity Site
http://fl-tw.com/

So you want...?
The atmospheric effects?

What you want is for the world not to disappear past the "Draw distance"

This video is a clear example of how pre-baked backgrounds can be used. It's hard to see due to the clouds and the low quality video, but there is a point where it switches from actually rendering the ground and rendering the background as a series of Alpha images.

The implementation in SL would be complex as each sim would have to slowly render an image of itself as seen from the neighboring sims.
The client would then have to download all the items in the sim and then make a series of alpha textures that represent the octagonal view past the draw distance. The frame rate would not decrease as the main drawing would draw the horizon using the sim textures, then the sphere made up of the textures it made, followed by the objects within it's "draw distance"

The result would distort at times, but it would create a much nicer and more complete view of SL.

Ah, got it.

I would like to be able to travel to other worlds from ground to space and back to ground. From one world to the next. Plus, the idea that other worlds exist (plus the existence within space) really gives the feeling that the Second Life world isn't JUST some some large map in one world all by itself and enclosed. The way it seamlessly does this is really cool.

I think that just tiling the default empty ocean skybox floor with the appropriate sim images from the World Map would make a big improvement. Even if they're out of date and low resolution, they're more useful than blue fog.