sound proof walls

It would be nice to be able to define a volume of space as "sound proof", such that chat messages from outside that volume cannot get in, and chat messages from inside that volume cannot get out. This would allow us to create private rooms for talking and suchlike.

I think a better acoustic(sp?) system needs to be implemented into SL. Sound shouldnt be able to travel through concrete walls as if there was nothing there. Also, maybe if you are really far away, the brightness of the text will go in and out, showing your distance from the speaker.

There are two issues here: sounds (audio on your speakers), and message (general channel 0 chatting).
Both have a common problem, they both broadcast to a certain distance based on either Whisper/Say/Shout or volume, regardless of obstructions.
This causes some annoying behavior, such as I hear the music playing in my neighbors house when I'm inside my house. Or the chat channel gets very cluttered when there are a lot of people within the range of Say.

The audio would be a difficult problem to solve, since taking obsructions into account will require a lot more calculations for playing sound files. Distance Fadeout and Doppler effect are already being calculated, obstructions might be too much.

The chat would be a lot easier to solve. Lets say we have a cassino or other large establishment. We may not want the conversation at the poker table crossing over with the black jack table (this is just a made up example). This is easy to fix, we simply assign the different areas different chat channel so that when you are in a particular area you chat and listen on channel 1 or 23 instead of 0.

Almost completely unrelated to this thread, but not quite, is the fact that LIGHT seems to be seeping through walls.

I can stand behind the thick wall at the ampitheatre and I still glow green from the lights on the other side.

It's messing with my island to be glowing like a nuclear waste dump all the time

I don't think the sounds should be too hard. To get it perfect, yes it would be very hard. However a simple 'cheat' way would probably suffice. That is just calculate along direct line from source, reducing the volume each time an object is encountered. You could vary the reduction by the type of material, and at least one material shouldoffer no obstruction.

This wouldn't be perfect by far - opening a window won't suddenly let you hear your neighbors music in your entire house, and small objects could potentially block sound too.

I do like the idea of being to set what channel is the 'talk' channel for a given area.

I would like to see this with light too! But I know.... that you create more lag.. well something to put on the shelf for 1.9!

As far as light goes the idea has been discussed here:
/13/1b/211/1.html

The crux of it is explained by James Linden. In short, the shadows you see in most games are the result of precomputed shadow textures based on a static world. This obviously won't work for the ever changing SL world, and at this point modern hardware simply can't handle dynamicly generating shadows.

-PatMurphy

In AW what we do is play a .mid or .wav of silence at the 4 corners of our property -- it mutes the sounds surrounding you. You can still play sounds within your property. I'm curious about whether/how this would work in SL. When I have some time I'll try it out and let ya know. If anyone else tries it, please let me know.

Thanks -
Kerstin