Parcel Basements: A Proposal

THE SHORT SELL
For those who are impatient.

What if parcel owners were given a "basement". A 3D space physically disconnected from over-world of Second Life with a very strict set of permission rules. A place where land owners must create an "allowed user/group" list for others to even enter. This would be a closed in space "beneath" their parcel (size of which to be determined) where people could escape with friends from the sometimes hectic over-world into a place of TRUE privacy unseen by the public eye, unheard by the public ear and truly free of the annoyance of griefing. It could be a solution to overly sensitive security systems, parcel barriers, public griefing and private sandboxes

THE LONG SELL
For those who want the whole dirt.

In the real world, our homes are a place where we have control over who can come in. It's our private space where we are free to express ourselves without the worry that public eye is watching and the public ear is listening. We can hold get-togethers with our friends and know that only they will be allowed in and that our conversations at that location are a protected privacy we control.

Since the earliest days of online text chat, private chat rooms have played this role for the virtual world. They are the areas where a few chatters can join up and speak privately to each other without worry of disturbance or eves-dropping from the rest of the chat server's users. These areas are often user-created and controlled, much like our real home, although ultimately owned and run by the chat system.

In Second Life, this concept simply does not exist on the main continent.

While it is true that we can indeed own private land we cannot escape to these areas with any guarantee that we will not be seen or heard by those we do not wish. We can put up blocks to try and keep people away but we are never out of the range from the public eye and public ear.

This is really not all that surprising since the fundamental point of Second Life is to create a fully real-time, shared, 3D experience. Yet as Second Life has evolved and the issues of privacy have grown, the tools available for us to create private areas are really not all that effective in separating us from the rest of the world.

Thus, I'd like to suggest the idea of giving land owners "basements". A 3D space physically disconnected from over-world of Second Life with a very strict set of permission rules. A place where land owners must create an "allowed user/group" list for others to even enter. This would be a closed in space "beneath" their parcel (size of which to be determined) where people could escape from the sometimes hectic over-world into a place of TRUE privacy unseen by the public eye, unheard by the public ear and truely free of the annoyance of griefing. This would be a big change to the scope of what Second Life has been so far, but theoretically, it may not be all that big a step for Linden Labs to implement.

I'm envisioning that whenever you are standing over an area of land with a "basement", you can click right click (or CTRL-Click) on the land and the context menu would give you the option to enter the basement. If you are not the land owner or are not on the allowed list (singularly or as part of a group) this option would be grayed out. If you are, you simply select "Enter basement" and you are transported to the space I described above.

Once in the "basement", you would continue to be able to receive Instant Messages from anyone in Second Life but you would only hear those speaking in the same basement and sounds, textures and chat would not travel beyond that basement. Since this is a closed space, you would not be visible in the over-world of Second Life and your icon on the world and mini-maps would change to a different color (perhaps red) to indicate your location "beneath" the world.

I've certainly not considered every ramification of having a "parcel basement". For example, how big would the physical space be? How does this impact existing land sales? Would you be able to build/store objects there? How would that affect your prim limits? Are basements hosted on the same SIM server as the over-world or on a completely separate server? A lot of these questions I leave open for discussion and some ultimately *must* be the decision of Linden Labs.

So... what do you guys think?

I like this idea, and have even suggested it myself .

I like the idea because you are still present on the grid. However, my chief concern with an idea like this is that people might tend to build underground primarily, and the "over world" might become sparsely populated by both people and builds. Once way to prevent this would be to limit the percentage of prim that could be placed under ground. For example, only 20% of the total prim allocation for a parcel may be placed under ground.

I do think this idea is worthy of discussion.

I'm glad to see that we're on the same page.

I like your idea to set stricter prim limits in the "basement" to encourage above ground builds. That might help. To me though, it's the idea of *requiring* an access list for each parcel basement that is the real key to keeping above ground builds the priority.

For example, why would someone only decorate a hidden away basement room that only a hand-full of people can see when they can also have a fancy house or business above ground that everyone can see?

The same access requirement I suggest to protect your privacy in a basement is the same feature that gives you incentive to build above ground as well.

This was the first thing I wanted to build when I got my First land. Nice small underground spot that no one knew about. But like you said even it my walls are thick people still hear or can get to me to see what Im doing. PLEASE PLEASE no pictures! My S&M room is for me and me only.

There was a variation I had similar to this which made me think of the Construct from The Matrix, or even: a wild fantasy running Second Life multithreaded on my dual-core computer, with one core allocated to this "basement" which could also be a meeting room, or a richer superset of the currently boring (and text-only) IM.

Fascinating.

Another thread

Privacy
Performance
Aesthetics
Workshops
Sex Dens
Low Lag Clubs

There are so many reasons to favor something like this.

The devil is in the details and the implementation.

I suggested this too, with the idea that you would use the new llTeleportAgent call (when it arrives) to perform the transition. The "private space" would be accessed by teleporting to a location with a negative Z axis, and only if the script was owned by the landowner or an officer of the landowning group.

The private space would start at -768 and go up to -512 (so you wouldn't have to deal with people trying to "see" it from the land), and would have an area equal to the parcel's area, beyond that you'd just see the void.

This way the landowner could completely control access to the private space on their own terms. If they wanted it to be semi-public, they could just teleport anyone who comes up. They could implement their own script ban lists, they could create pass keys (you could even SELL the pass keys for private events), and so on...

As far as things like prim limits go, this would be treated just like a skybox, it's part of the same land, shares the land's prim limits, groups, landing points, and so on. People in the box are still on the map, they can still IM, and so on. The only difference would be the borders.

I have given some more thought to this idea of underground building. While I like it, I have a feeling that it would be difficult to implement in code. The problem is that everything from the physics engine to camera controls and the in-world editing tools are all coded to understand that the ground is a physical boundary that imposes certain limitations. Moving below the ground would require a lot of code changes, and perhaps some complicated ones that we might not fully appreciate.

So I was thinking ...

Why not propose the same idea, but move the private space high in the air. We have already grown accustomed to building skyboxes because they afford us at least a modest amount of privacy. So why not make that space, up there, truely private. In other words ...

Builds and avatars above a certain height are not rendered for you unless you are on the access list for that parcel. A skybox placed at, 400m (to pull an altitiude out of thin air), would not be visible from the ground. Even if you were to fly up with a jetpack, it would not be visible to you unless you are on the access list for that parcel. Avatars above that height would also not be visible (though you would see them on the map). People flying through your parcel in a jet plane would merely pass through your parcel without crashing into your private love nest.

There are a lot of advantages to this. Firstly, very few, if any, changes would have to be made to the physics engine, camera, editing tools etc. There would not have to be any special means to transport people to an instanced, off-world, or underground location. And, when the 2.0 renderer becomes available we can all look up and see clear skies for miles. In fact, it would probably make the world a much less cluttered place.

Does this idea make sense?

Too many existing builds that are expected to be visible from the air all the way to 768 to put the private space anywhere in the current building zone. And I certainly don't want to abandon my 500 meter airstrip to get my private area.

The camera works fine at negative offsets, ask anyone who's been buried by a sit teleport.

The physics engine has no discontinuity at zero, though it *does* seem to have problems once you get a few hundred million meters up.

Broken joints have put objects at negative offsets, and the editing tools worked on them.

Only an LL Developer can really know what the impact of something like this will be. While it's an interesting exercise to think about how to implement it--underground, in the sky, or in a completely separate space--ultimately we can't know.

As users, our job is to define the requirements, not to specify an implementation that satisfies those requirements.

It's the developer's job to look at those requirements and make an informed decision about how best to implement them given financial and time constraints.

I worry that if we spend too much time thinking about how to make it easy to implement, then we'll neglect to really explore and define the requirements fully.

Probably the most dangerous thing that all users do is to try to describe new functionality in terms of what already exists. Often a user will artificially limit the scope of a problem because they feel that it would be too difficult to solve in the large. In many cases, the user is wrong. And sometimes the things that a user thinks are easy turn out to be harder than the thing that the user really wants.

So I would suggest that we dream big and then prioritize the resulting requirements according to how important they are.

Argent, all valid points, and probably good reasons why the altitude solution isn't the best.

I still see a parcel basement working more like the Matrix "Construct" that Torley described. A totally private and separate chat space, disconnected from the SL over-world simulator.

It's not enough to just create a space below the simulator's ground. The simulator treats distance the same down there too. If your neighbor has a basement too you'd hear them when in yours.

The fact that I've been putting quotes around the word basement is because it doesn't really have to be underground. The fact that you have to be standing on the parcel to access its basement is just a way to psychologically connecting the two spaces. It has nothing to do with their physical locations in the metaverse or even the server they're hosted on.

Think of the basement as a sort of "mini-sim". Your own personal mini-sim that nobody can access unless you allow them. If LL created a server or set of servers who's only job was to run dozens of virtual mini-sims, it might not be that all difficult to implement.

If they wanted, they could be strict about their size and shape. If making it easier to implement meant that each parcel owner could only have the same sized and shaped basement.. and in doing so meant they could run more virtual sims on the same server... that would still be cool.

Well, at least for the positive altitude. The negative altitude basement should work just fine.

However it's handled, the transition to the private zone must be managed by a script owned by the landowner, not simply restricted to the permissions model the Lindens have set up, or we'll be back with the old ban-lines-versus-security-scripts fiasco again.

Only if LL implements it that way. There's no reason they need to propogate events across parcel boundaries at negative offsets if they don't want to. They already have other parcel-limited effects, they can simply make all effects parcel-limited at negative offsets.

That's an implementation detail. They could implement it by giving each parcel a different negative offset (at least 512m apart), or by creating a separate instance of the simulator with its own region corner and database, or by parcel-limiting all effects. That doesn't matter.

What matters is that EVERY LOCATION IN SL has a unique global coordinate, created by adding the region corner to the position. Any kind of "private area" would have to be given an address in that coordinate system, and if that address is to be "in the same parcel" (which it should for all kinds of social and technical reasons) it has to be at a negative offset. And if it's got the same region corner as the sim then, as far as we are concerned, it's "really" underground.

And BY FAR the most efficient way to do it, for LL, would be to run it in the same sim at a negative offset, whether this is done with parcel restrictions or by giving each parcel its own negative offset within the sim's space.

It's got nothing to do with efficiency. If you could buy a small parcel and have your own virtual sim as big as you wanted, then that hurts the market for land.

But things can still be seen from a distance. I'm proposing a closed off space.. a miniature simulator that can only be viewed by the inhabitants of that simulator.



My point and proposal is the exact opposite of this. If parcel basements were just each a single 512m squared miniature sim that has no global coordinate, then it's all the more private. Global coordinates make sense for the over-world of SL but I don't see any reason for parcel basements to have them what-so-ever. Again, refer to the Matrix Construct analogy. The Construct wasn't a part of the Matrix yet it could be connected to it.



I meant CPU efficiency. If someone has a 1500m squared parcel with a corresponding 1500m squared parcel basement, then it's going to take more computing resources to handle, effectively doubling the amount of real-estate each sim has to manage. On the other hand, if parcel basements were all just a single 512m squared block, you can run a bunch of those on a single CPU with no problem.

Not if they're at least 512m apart. 512m is the maximum draw distance. There's no reason to add the overhead of a simulator (and there IS overhead) when you can solve the problem with geometry.
EVERYTHING in Second Life has a "global coordinate". Changing that would require making every script in the world able to deal with llGetRegionCorner returning a non-meaningful result.
In my scheme it will take no more resources than if they were to put the same build into a skybox... there is no more "real estate" involved, there is a three-hundred-and-something prim limit on that 1500m parcel, and they get to decide how many of those prims exist at ground level, at 512m, and at -1024m.
It doesn't matter whether the "parcel basement" is in the same instance of the sim or not, any avatars, scripts, and prims in that volume will use the same amount of resources. If it's in another sim instance, though, it will have to pay the additional overhead of a sim: global memory, open files, open sockets, database connections, everything. It will require more resources than "hiding" it underground.

Thumbs! up!

I like the idea... but...




... for small land owners, this renders basements moot. If as suggested one could only use 20% of prims underground, for a 512 land owner on the main land, your basement could have a whooping 23 prims... What is the problem if someone lets above ground just be bare and what the local environment is? Open space might decrease performance issues for those above ground.

Regarding size: let the limit be the size of the parcel, or the size of the parcel minus .002m... Otherwise, again, you grant a new feature (private clubhouse) to the wealthy, and again whomp those of us who are non wealthy Premium landowners (who have already paid and pay through the nose in the postFirstLand diminishing-stipends era.

Size of Parcel Basements is meant to mimic the exact shape (and thus size) of the parcel on the surface.