Charge for raising/lowering land

Ok I am sure I will get flamed for this, but I have seen too much landscape destroyed by people not particularly adept with the building tools (or just plain careless). Terraforming has too widespread of an effect right now, and is too easy to cause great damage with. While I think flattening land should be left alone (there should be restrictions on the effect of flattening when two pieces of land are at quite different heights, however), I think a charge should be added for raising/lowering land, and it should be substantial enough that the tool is not used as commonly as it is now.

One word: No

I commonly use the terraforming tools to build basements for my builds, Im currently building an underground lab in Olive. Doing anything like this would be otherwise impossible.

No more limits on the building tools, please.

Rather, I'd like for there to be an option of changing the land back to where it was before you bought it, perhaps a set price on keeping the changes you made to the land when you sell it could be added instead.

==Chris
くりす

EDIT: Added suggestion.

This could possibly cause worse problems Cris if u think about it...

Say someone not concerned with the terraforming cost buys a lot and digs a super huge hole and makes a mess out of the land, but puts a floor or house over it and an underground room, etc, like you see many people do. Later they uproot, leaving the huge hole behind or a huge chunk out of the side of a mountain. Now the land is freed up but no one wants to buy it becuse they will get gouged to repair it before it's usable, and now u have this huge deep box cut out of the ground.

As it is you are able to buy a piece, fix it, and release it if u just wanted to put it back how it was when new but not own it. Although I tried to do that in Federal to a hillside and it appears something is bugged that wouldn't allow me to bring it back up to where it was when new now matter how much I 'cooked' it /shrug...

I've bought other land though before while just flying around, fixed it to look nice again, and released it with no charges. I would also fix my own piece so it looks natural again if I moved my house, and I think most people might do that. But if they had to pay to do it they might not want to pay again to fix it before releasing it and you might end up with holes all over the place.

- Tay

I had a different idea for dealing with this: Reverse erosion.

When land is released to public, it slowly reverts to its original, smooth-but-not-flat form, or to some dynamically generated natural-looking form. It would happen a little at a time each night. Pits and trenches slowly undig themselves, sheer cliff faces smooth out, flat areas start to slope, hilltops emerge, etc.

Particularly attractive "land sculpture" could be preserved by suppressing the reverse erosion if anyone dwells on the land, or if the dwell is above a certain threshhold.

Just to add a little controversy (not to say flamebait...): how about applying this also to land owned by players who haven't logged on in, say, a month, and whose land receives no dwell bonus?

If there is a mountain in a sim that was there when the sim opened (in other words, it was made in the Linden labs) and someone digs a big hole in the side... It can not be returned to its prior state with the landscape tools in-game.

Here's a different feature suggestion... A mode in which we can go past the 45 degree slope limitation with the level and raise tools, as long as it is returning the land to it's original contours. So even though a typical mountain has a slope higher than 45 degrees, if it was there to begin with, it can be restored. This would be hard to implement, however, because there is no way to see what the land USED to be.

I know why the 45 degree limit was imposed (no one wants to see SPIKES all over the terrain with plywood castles on top of them), but if there was to be a tax, it shouldn't be on the modification of the land, it should be on the height of the land compared to the surrounding plots. So you can build a mountain and put your castle on it, but you'll have to pay through the nose in taxes. It has to be equal or worse than the equivalent height tax, or players will use it to get around the height tax by building spikes.

Basing it on a comparison to surrounding land lets you restore the side of a mountain cheaply.

Oh cool, Liberty - virtual tectonic plates !! So what happens to those physics-enabled objects when the ground shifts beneath them - do we need earthquake codes for SL?

I'm a-liking this idea. Especially since there are currently land formations which are abandoned by their previous owners - perhaps DEformations is more accurate - which can never be fixed due to the land tools restrictions. I'm stuck with a couple of these myself, due to my early problems with the land tools, and short of Linden involvement, there they will stay... I'd like to see the end of the abandoned pits and sheer walls that can't be fixed.

=SV

To bad there is no easier way to flatten land than using the Flatten Land Tool.

That'd be pretty nifty. (however, we already have bigger problems, like defunct builds that just don't go away. Such as users who were around for a week Way Back When, tossed out some builds, and never renewed their account -- for example, if you look in Rose, there's at least two builds that fit this description. I'd rank the tectonic plates under this problem, personally)

And yes, I agree re: the pits and walls

The problem I've seen with most solutions to the terraforming problem is that they're shotgun approaches. They punish people (like myself) who are intentionally careful about terraforming the same as people who just go around messing stuff up.

You can't even see my basement from the surface (now that I've finally been able to get a wide enough plot to do it) and I never go off and leave a huge hole in the ground. Why should I be penalized for other peoples' behavior?

The problem is people who don't take their neighbors feelings into consideration, and the limitations on the land tools.

Corwin,

I have thought a lot about that too. The main problem is for as many people as there are who are careful with it, there seem to be an equal number or larger who don't care and just destroy the landscape to suit whatever they want at that moment, then they move on and leave a hole or reduce a mountain to nothing. I don't know the exact solution - other than better, more precise land tools. The changes in 1.1 were an improvement over the last version, but it is still far too easy to not only destroy your land, but land around you that should not be modifyable.

Cristiano

What is somewhat ironic is most of the problems we have now are DUE to the land editing restrictions.

What I see are...

1. People dig holes that can't be filled.

2. People erode mountains that can't be fixed.

Both of these are due to the 45 degree land raising limit!

Now I agree that keeping people from making huge, obnoxious spikes to avoid taxes or walling off other peoples property is bad.. but the current situation isn't very fun either.

Unfortunately I don't have any suggestions... give us the tools we need and they are abused. Take them away, and we get other forms of abuse, although mostly unintentional.

I live in a small hollowed out mountain. The mountain was there when I bought the land, I hollowed it out. I have filled the entire thing in several times now just because I needed to raise an edge and couldn't do it with the current limitations.

The current limit seems to be pushing land editing in the direction of making everything flat because it's just so hard to make an island or mountain range when you have limited space to work with.

If you people need any help with land editing feel free to IM me. I have built mountains in Blue and Freelon before but they just dont last. The 45 degree limit definitely could us an exception that takes into account the surrounding land. If by raising land you are filling up a hole, then the tools should temporarily ignore all restrictions.

speaking as someone who has used the old terrain editing tools - and somone who has in fact walled off another's land (who wants to look at 30 meter high pink flamingos), I think the restrictings are pretty much bs.

your right - they save from some seriously aweful missues (ie the spikes, the giant cliffs, etc..) but they also rob us of breathtaking mountain ranges, islands, valleys, river beds, all sorts of things... So someone raised a 4 m peice of land out of the water to create a small island for his home - and it's just a pillar.... the rest is under water, yer not seeing it - it's alright. realistic? heck no

ummm but then again - how many things in SL *are* realistic?? I myself havent seen too many flaming demon dwarves at the 7-11 lately

anyway you go your gonna get problems - but riddle me this - isnt it better to have a situation where you have the tools to *fix* the problems, rather than setting up a attempt at a deterrant that may or may not work?

give us the tools and we can fill the holes. yes we can make giant spikes - but when were tired of them - someone can erase them as easily as we made them.

In my opinion that is a much simpler solution.

I like the erosion idea best. I also think having a way to optionally revert a plot to its "factory" state would be great.

Speaking as someone who has also used both the old and new land editing tools (as well as the early beta, late alpha and early alpha editing tools) I was glad to see the current limitations put in place. This does not mean that they are perfect. There ARE after all 90 degree slopes in the real world and if we could count on the average user to *think* about just how realistic they are being we wouldn't need the restrictions at all.

But I'll take issue with previous statements about the real world. Find me a picture of a mountain that slopes up at greater than 45 degree angle. I'm not saying there aren't any, just that they are not typical. Next consider the size of a sim. 512 meters on a side isn't it? How many mountain ranges in the real world fit in a 512 meter square, or 5000 meter square for that matter? The fact is that SL has to grow a bit before the concept of a true mountain range makes sense at all. In the real world you look at mountain ranges from *miles* away, not from the distance of a few hundred meters.

Similarly, rivers, lakes, islands are still in the primitive stage at this point. I hope that the long range goal for SL is to have thousands of sims not just 50 or 100 and as it reaches such numbers there can be a true "geography" imposed on the landscape. In the real world one does not build mountains or rivers at all, instead we work with the existing geographical conditions. Ultimately I'd like to think that this would be the case with SL as well, with new sims representing mountainous areas, water based areas, deserts and grasslands. The building tools should in such an environment allow us to improve on the natural terrain without having to wipe it out entirely.

Actually, that's pretty easy. Any picture of a mountain should do -- mountains tend to slope at around 52 degrees.