"Portals" proposal - Discuss

As it's not actually been proposed yet ( at least I think not ) I thought I might as well start believing pigs can fly ...

Proposal 907

Portals could be a method to enable disconnection of land parcels from the main grid while at the same time maintaining the current grid system for those that like it. It is not a new idea but I believe SL sadly lacks this feature and providing it will create a more immersive experience, add another dimension to a very 2D, 3D world and also incidentally solve many of the social problems that plague the main grid...

Obviously the chances of this happening would require a paradigm shift and a good deal of work on the part of Linden Lab and couldn't possibly happen overnight, but it is technically possible, requiring more additions to than rewrites of the current code.

Portals will:-
* create like minded communities and "chains of interest".
* eliminate prim and script based lag from neighbouring plots. - ( more of a could than a will ?)
* reduce network traffic between neighbouring sims. - ( experts to discuss this ? )
* prevent light and sound pollution from spreading to neighbouring builds
* provide risk free "value for money" for residents who dislike the current "ant hill" approach.
* enable total privacy.
* enable clubs, malls or any other build to exist without bothering neighbours.
* enable the creation of "Outer Space" builds or other fantasy environments currently not possible.
* and lots more.

SL's main grid will work exactly as it does currently, I stress with no change apart from one major addition...

Each grid parcel will have an option to create a "portal" from the main grid to another space ( hereafter called "Land" ). The "Land" becomes an entity in it's own right, disconnected from 2D grid, it will occupy the same area as the grid parcel. The main grid parcel cannot be built on or contain prims or scripts while the portal option is enabled, instead, at the centre of the parcel something will represent a "portal" to the "Land".

Each "Land" can have several "portals" to other peoples "Lands", creating links or chains of interest given that each landowner is likely to share at least one thing in common with a linked owner.

A "Land" owner could specify textures to use for horizon and skydome.

A "Land" owner can reshape/terraform the land and build to hearts content with no fear of offending neighbours or having neighbouring builds offend them.

SL residents can teleport ( landowners option ) or be teleported directly to any portal space.

Interesting that it hasn't been proposed yet, since I'm sure that lots of people have been thinking about it.

It's an important proposal that deserves equal consideration with other pig-flying phenomena such as mono, 2.0 renderer, group tools, and HAVOC 2.

However, I don't think I'd necessarilly link Portals with "Land". They're distinct concepts that are useful in their own right.

When we get llTeleportAgent() (which seems like an inevitability now, I hope ), we'll be able to implement something like a portal fairly easily by script. You could walk through a doorway and trigger a teleport through the collision event.

"Land" is a holy grail, but the devil is in the details.

It would do wonders for light, sound, and chat pollution, as well as, reduce prim and texture-based lag, but I doubt that it would reduce script load on the server or lag from scripts

It would reduce network traffic between sims (no child agents when in the "Land" as well as load within the sim (since people in the "Land" would not have to be streamed the content of surrounding parcels).

You could get complete privacy in the "Land", which might mean that LL would drop the 64m restriction on detatched camera movement. Thus, "Land" could be a huge boon to privacy and building alike. A boon to building because it's extremely difficult to build big things with the 64m restriction. Also, most skyboxes would probably migrate to the "Land" which would be a great thing if the renderer pig ever flies.

Client FPS in the "Land" would be like it is at high altitudes now, which is *incredible*.

You could eliminate terraforming constraints in the "Land". People could terraform their "Land" however they want without disrupting the terrain of the mainland. You could give people some of the Estate management tools in the "Land" so that they could fix the sun and change the terrain texture, for example.

I am a little concerned about the suggestion that building and scripts on the mainland parcel be disabled while the "Land" is enabled. That means there can be no landscaping, which seems bad. At least, I'd allow building and share the prim allocation between the parcel and the "Land".

Well, these are just some thoughts that immediately come to mind.

Definitely worth discussing.

yep! add that to the list




I guess there's no harm in that at all, except I figured it adds to the traffic between sims.
Strike that from the list.

I have always believed that there were portals. The Lindens should change The Grid to allow us to find them and use them. Even make them ourselves if possible.

Indeed there are portals. Unfortunately there is only one map showing all of their locations, and this was recently pilfered by a group of vertically challenged linden elves.

I believe it looked a bit like this:
http://www.roboterkampf.com/roboterpics/picsprop/timebandmap/tbmap7.jpg

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Aye, Patch. I think you speak truth here. Those Lindelves seem to pop in and out at the most inopportune times. I will try and set a trap for them in the forest and see if they bite.

I have it! Snagged a copy from Pathfinder's desk a while back!

Ok, haha can we stop trolling and at least try to respect the topic

sorry. much chastened now

An interesting idea, but doesnt get my vote.. yet.

I agree that SL is too constrained into 3D (for the most part 2D even)...

I like the idea of being able to create 'pockets' of SL that are disconnected - but the single pocket (I'm not going to call it 'Land' cos that is too confusing for me!) per parcel with no build on parcel seems odd to me. You are asking in effect to divert the land prim allocation to the build in pocket space, and not sure I'd like the effect that could have on main grid.

Pockets would certainly be great privacy tools... and allow clubs to operate without lagging their home sims.

If your proposal dropped a lot of the restrictions and specifics and simply called for pocket spaces (with ability to set access via portal or teep, and control access and indeed link to other pockets) then I'd consider it.

How these should be paid for and resourced is another matter for debate...

:igh::

Restrictions what restrictions ?

The only restriction I suggested was to restrict building on the main grid parcel while the portal to pocketland was enabled. Shack suggested this wasn't required, I agreed. There are no other restrictions, and indeed I DO AND DID suggest links between lands!







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Yes, here is a good place to debate it. I personally don't think there's any need to use a different payment scheme. Most probably a " pocketed" parcel will require less resources than one on the main grid, which was another reason why I thought buildling on the main grid parcel could be limited while the portal is active. The owners tier remains the same as the area of a pocketland ( for want of a better word ) would be the same as the area you are paying in your tier.

hi Laukosargas,

I think you read that last sentence too closely
I knew part of it was simply in agreement with your propsal.. just wanted to end on a note of agreement.

I guess you have a particular idea of how you want the system to work - to try and use the same resource as the sim the original land is on, and no extra. Which is a noble thought. I think however it would only be truly useful to reduce lag/dilation if such spaces exist on seperate servers.

If pocket space existed, why restrict it like that? Why not allow pockets to use up any amount of area that the owner is prepared to pay tier for?

Dr. Who fans would finally be able to build proper Tardii (is that the correct plural?).

Though Im thinking of the effect of thousands downsizing to 16m2 plots with doors. hmmm.

meanwhile, keep looking for them pigs swooping by

Sort of what I was thinking, but it's not necessarily engraved in stone. That's what this discussion is meant to flesh out hopefully.




I'm pretty sure my proposal covers that in many ways. Any parcel could be set up as described. I figured by keeping the link with the main map, it would reduce the clutter on the grid and make the place look less like a sardine tin and it would possibly enable the developers to share the resources more efficiently.

But I would be equally happy to see it implemented as extra tier in it's own space, I've no problem with that at all.

As far as I'm concerned the proposal details are here in this thread as it evolves, if needs be I'll put in an ammended proposal at some point.

If you mean what i think you mean, this is possibly another reason to keep the area relationship equal between pocket and grid parcel ?



Well I do live in hope, mostly I'm optimistic, genetics is a wonderful science

I'm sure Lauk will respond, but I'll chime in here since SL is down.

I think it's useful to separate functionality from performance and implementation details.

So, while lag reduction might be a side-effect and maybe even a goal, it shouldn't be what drives the discussion. It may be that pockets will put more stress on the system because of the need to create multiple separated mini-worlds. Anyway, at this point most of the talk about performance is just wishful thinking and speculation.

Your point about the size of pocket space is well-taken, but not prohibited by Lauk's proposal.

For example, if you wanted to create a TARDIS. A very noble endeavor, I might add, being a huge Tom Baker fan. You could buy a 512m2 lot in one sim and a 4096 lot in another sim. Put the TARDIS on the 512 lot in real space and create a portal to the pocket space of the 4096 lot. So, functionally, there's nothing in Lauk's proposal that would prevent this.

It does bring up an interesting point, however, in regard to the shape of pocket space. I had been thinking that the pocket space would be shaped the same as the real space, but there's no reason to have this restriction. If the real space is a 512m2 strip 16m wide, then there's no reason why the pocket space couldn't be more square. And in fact, if I had a bunch of smaller lots all over the sim, then I should probably be able to create one large pocket space for all of them. This raises some interesting implementation challenges. And maybe in the end, it would just be easier to completely separate pocket space from real space and allow you to purchase them independently.

But that's really an implementation issue, not a requirement. There are a million different ways to implement this.

Thinking about this from a different angle. You might also want to take a square lot in real space and make a not square lot in pocket space. The degenerate case would be an entire sim in pocket space represented as an incredibly long hall 4m wide.

It's very possible that oddly shaped pocket space or even pocket space less than a sim in size might be problematic for the current software. 256x256 might be hardwired into the code everywhere. Or maybe that is just a hint of pessimism in my otherwise rosy disposition.

heh! synchronous posting

Yep it should be as flexible as possible about letting you reshape and terraform. It should even let you make the land invisible, then you'd be able to do outer-space builds.


Q. How to keep the attraction of owning a private island AND have a portal system at the same time ?

Ahh... portals. Much loved by anyone who ever built in worlds.com (and much reviled because of their implementation of it). In any case, I'm down with the proposal - I mean what was good in 2000 is still good 6 years later

If you have time, it would be great if you could post about what was good and bad about its implementation in worlds.com. We definitely don't want to repeat those mistakes. We want to make totally new ones.

Well Shack, the worlds building paradigm was slightly different. A portal was the only way to connect smaller sub-builds. House has a living room? Want to connect it to a bedroom? gotta use a portal!

The biggest gripe (at least mine was) was the way the portal rendered the view between one connected "land" (worlds called it a "room" and another. Very strange (and annoying) visual effects were easy to accomplish - if the height and width dimensions of the portal were big enough and you angled your camera the right way, you could see portions of both "rooms" in the same location. Their implementation really worked best for smaller door and window sized portals.

Since LL still hasn't figured out the overlapping alpha texture bug, I'm a little skeptical if seamless portal rendering might be a little beyond them as well.

(edit) One nice byproduct of the worlds portal was if you specified the destination coordinates of the portal's view to the space the portal occupies - voila - instant mirror!

This kind of portal would be awesome. But I'll reiterate what I said in an earlier post--that the portal idea and the pocket space idea are really two complimentary, but separate features.

For portals to work seamlessly, LL has some work to do. An inter-sim teleport takes way too much time now. It would really spoil the illusion if you could see through the portal, but then when you walk into it, the screen goes black and you see the progress bar.

But the groundwork for something like portals is already there. Sims are already streaming content to avatars in other sims. The portal could work similarly to the way that video is streamed. You could pick a texture and the texture would be replaced by the portal view.

A setting that might be interesting would be a portal draw distance. Also, would be nice to have the option of a daily snapshot like the way that the big map is updated. So, maybe if you set your portal draw distance to zero, it would just display yesterday's snapshot.

However, as exciting as this is, it is still my opinion that the pocket space idea is more important. All of the really compelling benefits such as privacy derive from pocket space.

And llTeleportAgent() combined with scripting will give us the ability to do something functionally similar to Portals.

as for the general idea:

Two thumbs up, WAY f'n up. :>

Thumbs and toes up This is an excellent idea, technically sound, which has awesome potential.

I think it would be easier for LL to implement a per-parcel private space, reachable by some script-controlled call (presumably llTeleportAgent). The private space would still be "in world", in the global coordinate system, but its location would only be accessable by this call. I've been thinking about this, more since then, and...

The private space would be up to 512m high, and the same shape as the parcel otherwise.

The location of the private space would be generated by a calculation based on some arbitrary coordinate within the parcel. The landing point would be a good one, but a corner could be used as well, so long as it's unique within a 32*32 rectangle. Why 32*32? That way it should be possible to find a valid spot within any First Land.

The Z coordinate would be ignored, and the X and Y coordinates would be used to generate a new Z coordinate:

(((integer)(pos.x / 32)) + ((integer)(pos.y / 32) * )) * -1024

So a parcel at <0,0> would have its "private space" starting at <0,0,-1024> up to <0,0,-512>, the shape of the parcel. The lowest parcel possible would be just shy of a million meters down. That should be high enough to avoid rounding problems, but if not other schemes could be used, so long as no parcel's negative space was within 512m of any others.

This would give every parcel a scripted portal to a private "land" the same size as the parcel, and sharing prims with the parcel, without making Linden Labs have to buy more sims and without changing the "prim" economics.

I want the ability to have portals in the 3d engine sense, specifically for one application. In Unreal, these were called Warp Zones. I know they were also in Serious Sam.

"A Warp Zone is a zone that behaves in a very similar manner to a teleporter. The big difference between the two is that you can see through a warp zone to the other side. This enables sections of a level to be seamlessly joined together even though they are separated in space (or disjoint)."

(from here)

I note that "teleport" as it is used above pretty much meant seamless motion ... the screen didn't go to black; it was exactly like moving around the world normally.

This makes much more realistic TARDISes possible. You can also do Escher-like tricks with space.

The underlying portal technique is also used to render mirrored surfaces, skyboxes (those made from geometry rather than pre-rendered textures), and closed-circuit camera displays. Probably some other things, too.

Edit: To clarify, I think the primary difference between what I said and what was already dicussed here is the ability to see and move through portals seamlessly. But I only really read the OP in detail, and up through the Time Bandits references in lesser detail... and now I see it was touched upon later.

Also, I meant skyboxes in the FPS sense of "This is what the sky looks like", not the SL sense of "something built in the sky".