Property Zones (Privacy and more)

This is me posting a new thread for something I originally posted here. Since no-one seems to want to move it and it's a bit messy.

What is a zone?
A zone is just an area of space in which rules are applied differently. In real-life you get things like 30 mile-an-hour zones on roads, and similar things.
In SL a zone would essentially be a way of applying parcel settings differently to areas within your parcels. The biggest difference with these though is that they are done in 3d, so you could have a zone at any height, or any size (within reason).

What would zones be able to do?
Zones would have a large number of functions, and there are probably more ideas that I will forget to put here or that others may have. I'll try and list them in order of (IMO) importance:

1. Culling - instant privacy, since peeping toms won't receive the objects or avatars they are trying to spy on. Probably wouldn't effect sensors or scripts
   1. Cull inner objects - prevents the simulator sending clients objects in this zone, unless they themselves are also within the zone
      
   2. Cull outer objects - prevents the simulator sending clients objects outside this zone if they are within it (e.g would remove all objects outside your house when you are in it for maximum lag reduction)
      
   
   
2. Access - prevent avatars from entering on several criteria. Identical to the allowed list options for a parcel so you can allow group and specific users, or ban certain users. Zones that require passes are handled by the parcel, so a pass for one parcel is valid for all zones within it.
   
3. Chat
   1. Block inner chat - prevents chat from inside the zone escaping it. Has the following checkboxes:
      1. Whisper - block whispers from escaping
         
      2. Say - block normal messages from escaping
         
      3. Shout - block shouts from escaping
         
      4. Channel zero only - block only channel zero messages (so objects still work)
         
      
      
   2. Block outer chat - prevents chat from outside the zone entering it. See above for options
      
   
   
4. Objects - least importance, basically prevent objects etc. for entering a more specific area, so flight can still work around it but weapons can't be fired inside and such.
   

How would zones work?
In the most general sense I currently envision them working something like:

1. Each zone is a simple primitive, probably cubes, cylinders and spheres, perhaps prisms as well.
   
2. Parcel size determines the number of zones you may place, as with ordinary prims
   
3. Zones can be an unlimited size horizontally (ie width and depth) up to the borders of the parcel they are in
   
4. Zones are restricted in their vertical height, for each 'unit' of height a zone will take up one of your zone allowances. So if your land has 3 zones available, and the height limit is 20m. If you place a zone with a height of 21 to 40m then it will count as two zones against your limit.
   

How would features be implemented?
This is more technical, and obviously not necessarily the way something may be implemented, however I see it being easiest to do it like:

Culling
When an object enters a zone, it is either assigned that zone's ID, or has any appropriate 'culling' bits set. When the object is to be sent; the zone's settings, or the bits applied to the object are checked, if they allow it to be sent to the avatar in question then it will be sent
The zone ID or culling bits are changed on collision with, or exit from a zone.

Access
Same as now really, if you hit the zone, it looks to see if you can get in or not.

Chat
Any object chatting that isn't in a zone chats are normal. If an object sending or receiving chat is inside a zone however then the zone's settings (or any listening bits assigned to an object or it's listens) are checked to see what needs to be done.

Objects
The most difficult category, not sure how anything that falls under there would really be implemented. Also not the most necessary one anyway.

Overlaps
My current favourite for overlapping zones is just to not allow them. If you want overlapping zones, then you have one zone (A) and another zone (B) then a third in between mixing both settings (A & B). As it gets a lot more complicated otherwise.

Conclusion
Yummy. This would allow for privacy, but also for complex builds to be heavily optimised, social areas to perform more logically (e.g I'm on the other side of a wall from you, you shouldn't be able to hear me unless I shout).

Feature Proposal
The original feature proposal was entitled "Boundary Boxes" and can be found at this link (note it only opens the page, you can alternatively go to the front page and enter proposal 767).

We already have this feature, you access it by splitting your parcel. It's not as fine-grained as you want, but it's there.

Not all land lords allow it though. Nor will it give you any way to block incoming/outgoing chat - or do anything for your privacy. I guess the pracel-split is a ,arginally effective replacement, at best.

Great idea.

so concerned by peoples peeping in a virtual world where you and your partner are only simulating a sexual position and aren't really doing anything else that keyboard typing?

Was posting that necessary in ANY way? I know we can split parcels, I know we can set access on parcels, but that's a whole bloody 768m vertical chunk of space, it's far too clumsy to be any use for features like these.
It's like posting to say "Why make the netcode better, it already works doesn't it?", this is a bloody suggestions forum so if that's your stance you shouldn't be here =/


And you can just go away period. Not everyone wants privacy for cybersex, it's a narrow-minded and foolish stereotype that's been done to death. I want privacy primarily because my land is my land! If I want to build, or hang out with friends, I should be free from people forcing their way in to disrupt that. If my land is near a club or other building I shouldn't have to build a skybox just to get decent performance in my own home, or to block out the chat noise.
Zones with culling abilities can also be used to heavily optimise complicated builds, or to allow two adjacent rooms to have separate conversations without hearing one another (unless someone shouts for example).

I believe you really need to simplify this to reduce the sim and comms load.

IMHO sim objects should be divided into groups, one each for one of these zones and one for the rest of the sim. Each object would be tagged accordingly. Depending on the position of the observer, they would only see/hear what is in their zone if they in that zone whereas those not in any zone would see the rest of the sim as they do now.

To keep it simple, zones should have box shapes.

If you had two zones in a sim, the sim would really behave as three sims.

This could go a long way to reducing lag, as well as providing total privacy.

Yes, I know, it's annoying that estate owners can prevent this.

That's why I want to be able to expand the things we can do on a parcel... including blocking chat, hiding the contents instead of blocking access, or setting up a "basement" zone. The question of whether this kind of capability is done on a parcel or on a volume basis is separate from what kind of functionality we should have.

The advantage to doing it on a parcel basis is that it doesn't add any new bookkeeping to the sim. It's already tracking just about everything that it would need to do to (for example) block cat or hide objects based on parcel boundaries. Anything more finely grained would be more complex and significantly effect sim performance.

Yes, it was bloody necessary. Because you're combining two completely separate and unrelated concepts into a single proposal:

(1) What kinds of controls should be possible, and
(2) How should space in a sim be divided.

No, it's like posting "Why implement a whole new mechanism to fix packet loss for bulk transfers over UDP instead of bootstrapping from the tools (like TCP and protocols on top of it) that are already available". Which has been another hobbyhorse of mine for the past year...

And, by the way, 1.13.2 introduces a mechanism to allow them to bootstrap from existing tools (like HTTP, on top of TCP) instead of further adding complexity to to increasingly complex bulk transfers over UDP... so not only would a proposal that takes advantage of what they're already doing be more efficient, it's more likely to be adopted.

Argent, I like the direction you are moving to. For LL to do anything about privacy that is doable and does not bork the system for weeks on end, it needs to be simple. Sticking with parcels means that we take out one of the three dimensions - a faster way.

It would be so nice if there were no ban lines and merely empty parcels!

I hope they actually focuse on something more important...

yeah like trying on clothes before buying. =\

I'm surprised they can't make ban lines an option in the client. I'm no programmer but it seems like a logical solution. If you find the appearance of ban lines offensive then simply turn them off in your client.

I think ed44 doesn't mean just visually; turning off the lines just makes them invisible, they'd still be there unfortunately

That's what this proposal is for, to allow us to control parts of our build vertically so that we don't need massive towering acces/ban-lines. Currently if we want to use built-in access functionality we need to have our builds within the 60m 'access wall' height. If our builds are in the sky then there is ZERO way to prevent someone getting in except to use messy scripts, which are often VERY laggy if a good response time is needed. Imagine the systems out there that fire sensors every fraction of a second just to simulate what the access/ban lines do!


No, it's exactly what I said. The problem, that proper 3d zones are a solution to, is that parcels restrictions don't really work in the first place, as you're talking about treating a 768m (or higher) area of space as if it is a piece of paper. Second Life is 3d and it is dynamic. Even parcel limits with a Z height option are ill-suited to this, what if I have a building on the group and a private flying airbase 600m up, how do I block them both? Are you saying that instead of being able to have a single big parcel for my cafe, I have to have ten separate ones for each booth? No thanks.

Tagging things onto parcels leaves us with the same fundamental constraints. I'm sick of LL mostly just tacking things onto the existing system and calling it an improvement when it's almost always just a token gesture at best to try and shut us up; I want them to start re-writing the parts that uneccesarily limit us, and this is one of them!

That hardly begins to solve the problems with the current access controls - I mean simply flying over a parcel can get your plane trashed and force you to relog.

you got something against cats, huh?

I'm doing no such thing. I've made numerous suggestions... some in threads that you were taking part in as well... that current parcel based access controls allow the landowner to set the minimum and maximum level of the limit. That would helpf for *current* access controls as well as the new ones you're proposing. The question isn't 2d versus 3d, or static versus dynamic, it's purely a matter of what information can be efficiently abstracted by the sim. The sim software is optimized for managing controls horizontally on parcel boundaries, and vertically at absolute Z values. This is a MUCH simpler problem to solve than having the sim track arbitrary occlusion volumes. The Lindens have already rejected sim-side occlusion volumes for other functions, they're not going to suddenly decide they can efficiently implement them after all at this point.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.

My decades of programming experience make me doubt that this is an unnecessary limit.

I would like above ground 3D zones, but most users would abuse them and the result would be invisible boxes that people would fly into.

That is why above ground zones would have to be limited to bellow 30m above the ground level.

Underground building would solve a lot more problems as clubs, casinos, ect.. could move underground and therefore not be visible from above ground.

To make things simple, each underground parcel could not be seen from any other underground parcel. if it's "Visible from other parcels" flag is cleared.

Then place a ground and a water line at -700m for those that want there own prim island.

It would take a lot of changes with either method to not just ask the client to not draw the items, but to actualy not send them to the client.

Each PC currently runs four sim programs. They are set up to watch up to 10 m into each of the bordering sims but otherwise control an area 256 x 256 M.

What if the area covered could be varied?

So we could have one very low density sim program cover 1024 x 1024 = 15 x current sim areas. Because of the large area it might only be able to hold 15000/16 or approx 1000 prims. You would have to find space for this on the map somewhere but it would make a great sailing sim.

Going the other way, if a standard sim (65K sq m) can hold 60 agents, then a 1 K sim should just about be able to hold 1 agent, or 8K should be able to hold 7 agents. Prims would be scaled accordingly. This could be a parcel sim.

Once this kind of sim is developed, it should be possible to have one parcel sim fill a void space on another. The parcel sim would ignore the other's area of interest (10 M) and vice versa, so the two sims would be complementary. The main sim might show thick atmospheric mist and ground level water and absolutely no prims, but should allow agents to travel through its parcel(s) allocated to these parcel sims. The agents with parcel sim access would not show up on the main sim.

This is just a dream as I suspect the changing sim constants might be difficult to do, but it might still be easiest to implement and provide the best user experience.

Ed

Uhm, the original post points out that the zones would have a vertical size limit. If the particular zone had access restrictions it would have ban/access lines like parcels do as a 'texture' on the shape of the zone. Instead of 60m to 768m of dirty lines you only have the zone in question highlighted. Other suggestions (such as adding access restricted areas to the mini-map) would cover making this easier, but having zones would greatly reduce the overall quantity of ban lines, as only the areas that NEED them are blocked off.

I don't think there's any question but that per-parcel vertical limit controls are a good idea. You don't need to add the ability to have arbitrary "zones" to enable this... the sim already supports limiting access controls vertically in a parcel, they just don't provide a mechanism for the parcel owner to control it. The user interface need be no more than two numbers on the land window, for the minimum and maximum height of the parcel's access controls.

Except that it's still meagre at best unless you have multiple min/max setting pairs at which point you may as well have zones anyway.
Not every build has only a single chunk to it that needs to be split off, not every build is perfectly 'square'.

I don't think more than one per parcel is likely. Don't forget, you can split parcels up when you need to, and in most cases you won't need to split a parcel into more than two parts (public and private). I'm not sure what difference it makes whether they're "square" or not, unless you're talking about "zones" with a footprint smaller than 16 square meters.