Terraforming Makes Choosing Land Difficult

Lately I've gotten really irritated by my inability to tell what can be done with a lot of pieces of land I see for sale. If it's been flattened, I can't tell how high or how low I'll be able to terraform it -- in general, or for things like water features. Islands are the worst of all. It's bad enough that a lot of newly raised "islands" around the northern continent remind me of slots in a trailer park with water between them instead of gravel.

What's worse is that, even when an island looks like an island instead of the rainwater-filled grid in a sandbox where kiddies have been digging canals, I can't tell where the shoreline is at all. I can't tell whether the land is at its maximum height, its minimum height -- whether the island can be roughened up so it doesn't look as flat and square-cornered as a coffee table without sinking beneath the waves like Atlantis.

It'd be great if land sellers could mention in their listings whether the land has been terraformed. At this point, I won't even toy with the idea of buying a piece of land unless I'm pretty sure it hasn't been terraformed.

I would like to see a new map view, in which the land is shaded based upon how much it deviates from the original height.

Maybe before land can be set for sale it would have to be reverted back to its original state.

Cool idea, Ardith. I wonder if the regular map zooms in close enough, though?

ZsuZsanna, I thought about that at first, but then you couldn't sell a parcel with a waterfall included with it, etc.

There is a function in LSL that might possibly be of some value, it is "float llWater(vector offset)". This should return the water level for a sim.

There is a list of high terraformability sims.. At this page it states that most other sims have either 4 +- terraformabilty except for private islands which have 100.

The abilty to see the land in a full lowered and full raised version similar to how we see what would be produced by extreme slider positons in the avatar appearance editor would be useful.

A lot of the new continent is under water, and it has this very flat and rivulated look to it normally, even in its unterraformed state.

Some land dealers are trying to make it into islands or make it look more attractive. They should have that right. You shouldn't force a land to "revert" just to be able to sell it -- what if your neighbour has terraformed way up and to make your land look like something other than a pothole, you have to terraform it up too?

You can always ask a land dealer before sale whether they maxed out the terraform.