Linked Worlds

Ever wander about a specific island, look out at the sea, and wonder... WHY IN GOD'S NAME CAN I NOT FLY OVER IT OR TO ANOTHER SERVER ??

Yes its pretty straightforward. True realism would allow for the whole world to be traversed, which could possibly be accomplished by creating "bridge" or "leaf" connections between the various nodes on the Linden Network.

All these islands that exist, could be given geographic coordinates, and have actual "seas" between them, allowing for many things, including the use of large ships, hosting of large nautical battles, the use of planes and helicopters, etc.


The biggest thing about SL that dissapoints me, is that the airways, and the waterways are not open to travel via vehicles, between islands and continents. Think about it. How cool would it be if you could make port at an islands edge, and then take off, sailing over the seas, in "safe" and "anarchy" zones ? Safe zones meaning no attacks, specifc rules.... anarchy zones being open to massive battles, spell effects, weaponry, raids, etc.... RP and the SL Economy could thrive from such things !

At the very least social mixing could increase, as being transported between islands would allow residents of different social castes and interests to mingle.... "nothing works better to bring out the talkative side of ones nature than being trapped on a boat" LOL

When you see the SL's map, each sim is a server and if sim A is next to B, server A is next to server B.

Considering the big problems that everyone has crossing from a sim/server next to each other I don't see that possible now.

Also void spaces will be sims in the future. Also you have protected oceans: full sims of water owned by Governor Linden, a good example of a lot of them together are corsica_reg sims.

Void water (void sims are actually called "openspace sims" to remove some confusion) doesn't actually exist in any way. The water is just an illusion for continuity's sake.

Even if it was possible to have a single sim simulate a dozen openspace sims grouped together, that would still be a massive cost to LL to convert all the void for something that would get virtually no use.

I'm not sure that's right. The location of where the physical servers are in RL doesn't have much to do with where sims are on the SL map.

1. Void is not equivalent to "openspace". Void is the area beyond the edge of a sim that LOOKS like empty ocean, but is, in reality, NOTHING. You can't go there. It doesn't exist. If you click on a void space on the Map, it will say "Invalid Location". An openspace sim (usually) looks like ocean, and actually IS ocean. You can go there. Openspace sims support fewer prims than "normal" sims.

2. You CAN sail or fly from place to place...just not as much as the sailors and the OP would like. There are Linden protected waters in many areas, and some of the larger island chains allow for travel from isle to isle. It's possible to take some quite lengthy voyages, including circumnavigating some of the continents.

3. Regions that are adjacent on the map may or may not be hosted on the same server, or the next server in the rack. In fact, you can't even be sure that a given region will always be hosted on a particular set of hardware. It could change with the next rolling restart. Also, as many as four regions may be hosted on a single Class 5 server.

4. To the OP: Yes, it would be wonderful if everything we see on the map was "live" virtual world. However, even openspace sims require hardware and bandwidth to run. It would be prohibitively expensive for LL to devote that much hardware and upkeep expense for large expanses of nearly empty space. The alternative would be to shrink the world...compress it so that all the live regions were jammed up against one another. This would make for a much more crowded world map, and any future expansion could only be done at the edges. I think it's preferable to have empty space in the middle that can be filled in as SL grows.

To the OP I say "Keep Exploring"

Yes you can travel between sims and even continents in at least one case. You can travel between Sansara (the old continent, as it is sometimes called) and Heterocera Atoll (the Northern Continent) by boat; passing a full blown Oil Rig along the way... Neat! Travel between sims could be better of course.. but it *can* be done. In fact its done quite often. I do it all the time by driving across Sansara on the Linden roads.

Sailing is yet another way to get around in world. I know of sailing competitions held every Sunday and they pass from sim to sim, every time they race. Look up Keywords in the search bar like Sailing, Driving, Cars, Boats, Planes or Racing to find out the many ways to get around the Grid.

Flying in helicopters or planes is yet another great way to get around. I recommend Abbotts Aerodrome, which has regular flights (run by autopilot) across large portions of the mainland just like a real airport would.

Philip Rosedale said that in a conference: http://fora.tv/2006/11/30/Philip_Rosedale

The whole thing seems to be about an hour & 1/2 long.. I watched the section that the URL above points to but didn't hear him say anything about server locations vs sim locations..

Got a time stamp where he mentions it?

...and then there are the hidden servers...ones who have location on the map, but don't want to be connected to anything...not even the map.

Do you want to be able to fly to those too? Do you think that the owners would appreciate it if you could? Stop thinking about yourself for once.

If you're referring to the teen estate (aka teen "grid", even if it were possible to fly up to the next sim over, I don't think you'd see anything since the parent estate IDs are what keeps everyone from mingling or knowing that the other exists.

If you're referring to private sims, at one point not having access to a non-public estate meant that even if you were standing right next to it, all you'd see was "void" ocean (although I think we might have lost that feature when LL disabled being able to hide sims from the map?).

I think they should show giant elephants or turtles under the grid instead of water.

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I'm sure plenty of people would like being able to customize the void surroundings of their sim, even if it's restricted to a simple repeated land mesh.

It'd be pretty nice if there were some easy options for island/estate owners to link to each other. The main issue I see at the moment is that everyone is being forced onto the same 2d mesh, and if you've ever looked at the map where private-islands are; it is a disgusting mess!

Really it would be good if estate owners appeared on their own private map or sub-grid, and could voluntarily have their island(s) appear on the main-grid. This would reduce clutter significantly, but would require a slightly different (but not necessarily much more complex) way of linking simulators to nearby simulators; you'd have to do it as links, opposed to just assuming a sim at grid 4,4 is next to 3,4 etc.

This way you could easily link two 'private' maps together to create bigger areas. I'm not suggesting that they'd be completely private, but if you TPed to one of the islands, then opened your map, you'd see the map for the area you're in (with a tab to view the main map again).

Currently it costs, what, $100 to move a single island? This rather inhibits private-island owners from being able to just say "Hey, if you put down some open-space sims at the bottom of your estate, and I put some at the top of mine, we could link them together!", as it gets very expensive to perform the actual joining.

A more fluid system would be a great benefit in general, I for one do not like the idea that sims are only aware of where they are, and locate other simulators using this information. Simulators should KNOW which simulators they are next to directly. Okay, so it wouldn't strictly be a grid anymore, but it'd be a lot more flexible for this kind of stuff

But if you can travel through open void, and you're looking at open void where a sim is and you travel through it....what do the non-friend people on the island see of the traveler? What do friends on the island (who can see the island for what is is) see of the traveler? What do other travelers (friend and non-friend) see of the traveler?

It's THIS VERY ISSUE that prevents LL from implementing a "Hide my g*d d*mn*d parcel from people not on my access list."