Restore terraforming abilities, add more heightmaps (upper ground/lower ground)

Copied from another thread in the general forum.

The newer terraforming limits are waaay too restrictive. I'm assuming this was put into place in order to prevent people from griefing their neighbors by raising the land, but this didn't solve neighbor griefing; they just use prims now, to build walls, W-Hat signs, billboards, whatever. Also, many people can now not clear a flat piece of ground to put their constructs on. Many people would like basements, tunnels, caves, but they can't now scoop them out of the ground; they're forced to either make HUGE foundations for their buildings, or build up a fake prim-ground ABOVE the real ground in order to accomplish their purpose. Not only does the false-ground use up some of their prim-resources, it NEGATES ENTIRELY the purpose of having a ground to begin with, and it looks nowhere near as good as the regular ground. How many times have you seen houses in the middle of a sim the have rectangular ground-textured prims raised up from the ground exactly at the border of their property, just so that they could have a flat surface to build on? It looks like someone cut out a slice of property-cake of the flat ground that they wanted, and plopped it into the existing land that they own.

-Terraform limits DO NOT stop the griefing by neighbors.

-Terraform limits DO NOT put us into a "neighborhood" type of continuity; many people simply raise up a false-ground made of prims, or build their house floating in midair.

-The limits prevent many people from building ordinary structures, because they cannot get their property flat, which is the first thing they would do on ground in the real world before building most types of housing structures.

-The limits prevent many types of more interesting structures from being built; caves, basements, tunnels.


I therefore suggest/recommend:

-First and foremost, dispel the lower limit on terraforming, even in the newer sims. This would still have the effect of preventing people from making ground-walls next to their neighbors, but would allow them to dig DOWN pretty much as far as they want; lets say to the same limit that the old sims had, 40m from the default heightmap. This would allow people to create flat stretches of ground for the bases of their structures, create basements, create tunnels that only have to be covered over with a prim ceiling.

-I would argue for the ability for land to be raised also be considered for reinstatement.

-Long-term, please find ways to include multiple height-maps in sims, even backwards-engineer existing sims with them. I'm assuming that we currently have two heightmaps, one for ground, and another flat one for water. I'd like to see 1-2 more heightmaps added to each sim, and allow them to have unusual properties, so that you can have a "bottom-ground" that is the TRUE BOTTOM of how deep your avatar can go on the land, walk on, de-rez if you get too far beneath; but also another height-map, that can intersect with this, go above it, and be cut-through IN SELECT PLACES, so that you can have a subterranean area of every sim; an area in which people can construct tunnels, subways, caves, basments, etc. This might require a new prim-type (wood, metal, rubber, etc) called "hole" where, if you set a prim intersecting the ground at a certain point, it creates access through the heightmap that is exactly the size of that prim. So, a prim made phantom, set to alpha textures, and set to material type:hole, placed into the ground, would cut a hole-entrance into the ground exactly the shape of the prim. However, "hole" prims could only cut through the regular-ground, not the underneath, bottom-surface. Once beneath the regular ground, you'd have a good amount of space to work with, to make tunnels, basements, whatever. You just couldn't build beneath the "bottom surface", the true lower limit of construction in SL.

-IF "water" is a height-map just like land, I would also like the ability to "terraform" water by clearing it out (lowering it) beneath land that I own. In this way, I can construct basements on my land that are beneath "water level" without having to actually have them underwater. Currently this doesn't mean much; I mean, it's not like we actually even splash or float when we land in the water, but I'm assuming that's going to change eventually, and I want to be prepared for it. Let's say it's the SL equivalent of watertight compartments or sump pumps.

-If heightmaps/land can be viewed from both sides (above and below), I think that's great; if not, I think it should be implemented. Currently, this isn't very important because we ONLY see the land or water from one side, above, but this will change the moment we start on underground constructions.

-A side benefit of the multiple heightmaps would be some simply AMAZING new builds which could take shape, most likely first in the private sims. Imagine several heightmaps, upper and lower, describing a 3-D shape like a floating asteroid in space, with the constructions plopped onto it, hanging down off of it, etc.

I support this 100%. A side benefit might be to focus builders' attention on landscaping, hopefully encouraging them to allow sufficient space and prim allotment to create attractive buffer areas between their build and the neighboring one. That's one way to cut down on neighborhood friction when people build in different styles.

I've been asking for tunnels and caves since I signed up 8 months ago. I also started a thread about non-water spaces (material of type "air". Both ideas seem pretty popular. The "true baseline" extra grid might be a good solution for tunnels and caves, since it does seem one of the concerns is that if you let people make holes in the land grid, they'll fall through to infinity or something.

What we would probably also need is the ability to change the texture of a given plot by something other than height. We'd also need to be able to set a plot to phantom. Then we could divide off a small plot intended as the cave mouth, set an alpha texture and make it phantom, and start building underground.

I support the increase in flexibility in terraforming too, I think. I've never lived in one of the old +/-100m sims, so I don't know how bad terraform griefing got. (Would you have the "no-render" option, if implemented, show the default land height?) We'd need better terraform access tools, however. This all or nothing business needs fixing, soon.

neko