Continent Directory

This mock-up is made like a stand-alone menu, but it could be incorporated into both the Find and the Map windows.

The general idea is to just remove islands from the world map altogether. Since you can't fly between them, their relative positions make no difference. They can be spread out so far that each has all the room it could ever want to expand into.

Finding a single island on the world map is next to impossible right now. Also, multi-sim "continents" need an over-all name, like "Azure Islands" (the only real continent in that list). Having a list by continent name just makes sense.

What do you think?

Makes sense to me.

But then I'm a teck holy wicket or whatever it is he calls us.

Brilliant!


But, a foregone conclusion already.

What continent owner *wouldn't* flee to a far-off location, just to be free of being blocked in?

Pay 150 USD once to move Caledon far out into the Great Western Ocean, or play Reservation-Risk(TM) forever... I did the math in about half a second.



Or, would they *force* us to stay tightly packed and battle each other?

*fist to chest*

We who are about to die, salute you!!!

I feel that this would be a far better solution to the over-crowding of estates than the 'reservation' system which many people whom it actually affects (people looking at estates) have expressed a disinterest in estates as a result of it's addition.

No one wants to pay money in the 'hopes' that they get a spot reserved.

A better solution is this, give them a way to be nagivated to directly through the use of estate names and advertising, This provides a stronger navigation system and a better boost to the economy.

This makes far too much sense, the Lindens will probably never go for it.

If it turns out to be one of the few sensible proposals they do go for, then there will likely be a long thread on the forum about how it sucks and they will get all weak at the knees and pull it from the release the day before they are going to implement it.

This applies especially if the thread is started by scriipters, or by content creators, if it's regular users that think it sucks, then they will go ahead anyway.

All humour aside however, brilliant idea I think.

Darn! I just made a similar suggestion in the other thread... make SL a collection of parallel universes, each having only one owner, be it of 1 sim or a many-sims continent. No more competition for adjacent sims...

Wow, this is a really good idea. It makes much more sense than having them on a map.

It shouldn't replace the map entirely though, rather an addition. First of all, the large "ocean" of islands makes the SL world appear bigger. But also, a lot of people seem to want to browse through the map, look for a sim they like the look of (from the map) and explore. Getting rid of the map would get rid of the fun "moving around the world"-part.

Great - another place to spammed and camped into uselessness.

Seriously, it's a good idea - but without control on names, it'll become a horrid mess. (Another game I play drops you at random locations in the list to stop the proliferation of "AA__" and "~~__" and "!!__" type names.)

There is only one grid. This would not address the same problem that the reservation system attempts to. It would only hide all land masses other than the one selected. Even invisible islands can bump into each other.

Unless the grid is so large that islands can be randomly positioned such that the chances that they ever collide is very small and the only reason it has not been done this way is because of the difficultly finding them.

I think what this is meant to get rid of the grid system all together. Or rather make each land mass/ private island/ continent a grid of its own.

Another way would be to use dynamic grid (Sim allocation) when someone want to expand the next sim available would be use, no matter where it really is. The boundary would join by higher level mapping, hard to explain it in words.

Cross boundary prerformance may take a hit though.

If getting rid of the grid was as simple as an interface change I suspect Linden Labs would have done it when they created the "teen grid."

(It is my understanding that the teen grid is just another land mass. One we cannot see or teleport to but still part of the grid.)

With the new estate stuff in 1.9 (That is, regions being bound into larger estates), this could be quite doable (and I might add, being slightly biased, very cool). LL wouldnt need any 'extra data', although the location of the window itself might be an issue.

There's one problem with this idea.... Linden Labs has historicly been clamped on the idea of SPACE as a metaphor to help us understand this virtual world. This breaks that model.

The problem here is that, while the islands can be mapped out in space, that space is meaningless as long as the voids between them are inaccessable.

This interface suggestion moves away from using relative positions into a more understandable an usefull method of finding and investigating the islands of Second Life.

But we can go in the other direction by making the voids traversable. Of course, that leaves the whole issue of how to allow a penned-in island expand in the future... I think that as long as adding a new island to an estate would allow it to be moved without further cost, any specific solutions (like the Land Store) can still work for a small percentage of the population.

But while special no-build void sims were used to fill in the cracks in the main continent (4 to a CPU), the sheer amount of water between the islands would make this prohibitive. It would take two computers to run the 8 sims of water that surround a single island. Also, if you make the voids traversable, you can also SEE across them to nearby islands.

So this is why I ended up with this simple mock-up of a different interface.

Excellent! Tiger very

I think it will have to go this way at some point in the future, effectively if not actually. Assuming we can eventually put an island at any pair of integers on the grid, searching that gargantuan space by scrolling around a map is not going to work, so something like this system would be necessary.

Neat idea, but it gets away from Philips one universe approach. Things will get way to fragmented.

What "estates" are you talking about?

It's already going that way - it's inevitable.