Remember, you saw it here first

What "makes sense" depends largely on the question which "senses" you are talking about.

For my esthetic senses you can't spend enough time with it, planning, trying, doing, testing, polishing etc. I guess I would reserve much more than a day's work for doing "my sim".

From a business point of view it depends largely on the difference between cost (price + estimated tier) and estimated earnings (sales or rents). And a little safety margin would be nice too.

Taking into account that I don't want to earn minimum wage when "working" in SL, I would estimate that it rarely "makes sense" to spend much more than 4 - 6 hours with setting up a sim for sale. That includes not only terraforming, but cutting it up, pricing it, adjusting names, pictures and descriptions, placing sales signs, inserting the data into a sales system etc.

I sincerely hope that customers are willing to pay a premium for better landscaping ( = more time spend). I am not sure of that. The market will tell.

From experience, it varies between half a day, and three days, depending on the complexity of the design, how much modelling and texturing work is required.

Uploading RAW's alone doesnt work; not unless you want jagged edges showing up. While it can speed things up a bit; it still needs a good going over with the existing terraforming tools.

Speaking of which - they need an upgrade. The current ones are horrid for trying to do whole-sim sized work, we need finer granuality (like being able to 'drag' individual heightmap points up and down.), and more terraforming tools.

Don't rule out other people' s thinking too fast, Sam. I bet Anshe and other developers are thinking a lot about about questions like these.

One problem, while you don't see landscapes like the ones you mentioned here in SL might not be an unwillingness to think, but the fact that this type of landscape looks nice but probably won't sell. The great planes, the australian outback or the african bushland may "look nice", but how many people will want to place their homes there? And after the first did, what will this land look like? The beauty of the terrains you are describing is often dependend on no signs of civilisation being visible there.

I agree with Adam. To get it right, they're probably going to need alot more than a week with this huge numbers of sims.



This is all too true. For a very clear example of this, look at that new cluster of sims to the far south east. When they were brand-new and unbuilt-upon, it was clearly designed with one huge image chunked up into individual .RAW files. The edges were/are very poorly matched, with strange 'spikes' of land sticking out all over the place at sim junctions, and it very badly needs smoothing... you can see the elevation marks both on the map, and when you actually get there and look around, it looked like waves in the terrain it was so clear. It looked like someone went 90% of the way with the design and then gave up before finishing. My fingers itched to run a combination of smooth/rough tools over the whole thing

That is just for basic terrain, too. I would really really hope that given the opportunity some of the landbarons would want to have some specialty terraforming done as well... maybe a river and waterfalls traveling through many sims, snaking through an entire continent, or mountains with canyons to explore. Those sorts of details would take time to get in place... but then maybe I'm dreaming, thinking about these sorts of details, if its true that 'all people want is flat sandy beach'. Personally, I feel the mainland terrain should be held to a higher standard than 'lowest common denominator'.

All that said, I think the idea of giving the residents the ability to shape the world in this way is AWESOME. They just need more time to do it right, and maybe some poking with sharp sticks to prevent all of it from looking like some hokey Gilligan's Island Subdivision.



AMEN to that!! I would love to have more refined terraforming tools. 'Small' is too big.

-Ghoti

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I must say I am inclined to agree with this post.

I know I am still new here but one of the major selling points of SL is to give individuals the chance to play around with their VR and create what they want themselves.

It is extremly time consuming to develop land, so why do it (from a business view) unless there is a proven market for it. Better to sell the pre built houses people may well need (smile)

Actaully, wouldn't LL be the best source for the answer to this question? Since the whole point of this exercise, purportedly, is to end up with a large number of sims with a cohesive and consistent desigh .... I think its fair to turn the question back to you.

How long did it take LL to plan, design and implement a similar section of the mainland.

For comparison .. how about the time it took early one, when everyone was still learning ... and how much time it took for the most recent batch of sims that arrived in the auction already cut up.

Wouldn't that be a better measure than residents estimating based on their more limited experience?

Setting aside two pictures of what are otherwise immense land holdings, several people have urged everyone to wait and see, that this is just a starting point.

My reaction to that is not a very hopeful one. After all, if those pictures, and what I saw when I visited, is the /starting/ point, I dont see how that regimented gridwork of sand and canals can evolve into something very different.

Nature is organic .. there aren't any straight lines. If you start with a regimented grid, with nothing but straight lines, those lines will always be visible, no matter what you put on top.

Course, I could be entirely wrong. Time will tell.

Wouldn't that be a better measure than residents estimating based on their more limited experience?

Sure - although we have a small team of designers which I think puts us at an advantage. We have also spent a disproportionate amount of time, perhaps, on coming up with ideas (e.g. the moth atoll) and building infrastructure which is possibly not worth it in terms of returning value for the time spent. I'm sure we'll discover if residents need more time for the design and development of the land. It's all part of what we're trying to learn!

Nice picture of the Castle built by Tessa Harrington and her team. HOWEVER, you didn't include shots of Einstein or Ellis Island...that would be more reflective of what to expect in the future....

As a land developer myself I would like to say that I don't consider the amount of time your team spend "disproportunate"! You build something beautiful there which is an important part of the Second Life experience.

If all of the land in Second Life would be designed by residents which under a tight economic pressure have to "optimize for fast selling", Second Life would not be what it is now!

I have already stated elsewhere that I consider the direction taken by Linden Lab with the "wholesale land" an inevitable one. I am sure residents can play a bigger role in the creation of new land in Second Life. There is a lot of talent and creativity collected here.

Some details of the selling/auction process could profit from a little finetuning, though. Time for development for example. If this is too expensive for Linden Lab, maybe a reduced tier for a limited time is an alternative. Additionally: if a whole area is developed and designed by more than one group, some kind of "zoning rules for land design" will be a good idea. This is no problem now because all of the new subcontinent is owned by ANSHE.com.

I sincerely hope that future changes of the "whole sale land" idea will allow it for other groups to participate in the great challenge of growing Second Life.

I don't think you are being fair to Anshe and her team, Lizbeth.

Einstein and Ellis Island are special sims in the Dreamland project with a special purpose. Presenting them as examples for Anshe's terraforming is a little bit like showing Linden developed First Land sims - two months after they go for sale - as examples of land development by Linden Lab.

Well, there is a big picture issue concerning areas like the atolls. Once Yahoo Avatar dropped his $L on his overpriced plot of land, he proceeded to remove all the atoll builds on his property and drop his booty shakin' cube club. There was no requirement to maintain the theme so before very long the beautiful atoll area looked like any other over-developed cube hatchery. Of course anyone who had been in SL longer than a week knew this was going to happen. It was beautiful while it lasted though but I think Anche has the right idea, flat land that is customizable by the customer is what people want and it maximizes returns. When you start putting in mountains and lakes you reduce the amount of land able to be sold plus you end up with the booty shakin' club or cube store floating mysteriously in the middle of a lake or hovering over a slope.

Exactly. One of the reasons why artisan quality terraforming is so time-consuming is the need to avoid or fix artifacts created by the coarseness of the tools. When deforming the terrain mesh in a rough pass it's easy to get unwanted single-point spikes or depressions. We need a single-point setting in addition to Large, Medium and Small. I'd also recommend adding a larger size for the rough pass stage. That gives five sizes from which to choose, so perhaps a parameter would make more sense than a choice of fixed options.

If this capability were available it would speed up terraforming at every level of quality. Here are my rough estimates:

1. bulk quality terraforming -- speed up by 15%
   
2. average quality terraforming -- speed up by 30%
   
3. artisan quality terraforming -- speed up by 50%
   

Here's the rationale for the differences in efficiency:

I'm assuming that bulk terraforming is just a process of smoothing the RAW file heightmap, then flattening and cutting water channels. Nothing intricate; no infrastructure. I'm further assuming that average terraforming would look like a typical inland main grid sim with some lakeshore or other terrain feature that is not particularly intricate, and perhaps flat land provided for the intended infrastructure. I've terraformed three PI sims so far, and each has been an intricate custom job in which the terraforming and the infrastructure were developed together to give the desired functionalty and esthetic effect. A fine-grained setting would reduce the time required for the terraforming aspect of that prcess by about 50%, since much detail work is needed to integrate prim infrastructure with interesting terrain. For those who have not attempted this sort of work, think of it as analogous to 'fit and finish' used as one criterion of quality in the automotive industry.


We also need the ability to save our work in a RAW file. For example, the owner of UNLIMITED sim wanted a new look for the holidays. She knew that it was possible to get a database rollback to an earlier image of the sim in case of emergency, so she asked to have an image of her intricate Elven terraforming saved, but that was not possible.

This owner is a good example of someone whose enjoyment of her PI depends on being able to change the entire look of the island every so often. I think that's a valuable creative use of a PI. She should be able to have a 'wardrobe of looks' for her island.

Similarly the contractor who creates the terrain would benefit from being able to save his work in the form of a RAW file obtained from the heightmap of the completed sim. This is analogous to a builder or architect being able to save his work to inventory, perhaps to use later as the starting point for a new custom job.

In both cases the new capability adds value to SL.

There are levels of detail between 'all for profit' and 'all for beauty'. There has got to be a balance, and I think one could be found with careful terraforming.

Nature abhors the straight line. Even a little bit of chaos thrown into that arrangement would add to the realism.

What is shown in that first picture in this thread is the sort of terraforming that belongs in private islands, where the standard can be relaxed. IMO the mainland terrain aught to be held to a standard of being more realistic, else the illusion of a real world is lost. Imagine that whole area looking like that... it is not a continent, it is a mashed together collection of suburban waterworlds.

IMO, LL would be wise to watch closely these initial experiments and decide if its worth making the mainland into unrealistic 'Flatland With Waterfront', or should impose some body of standards for sims connected to the mainland.

Profits over beauty. It's too bad really, but inevitable, I s'pose.

-Ghoti

Hello? It surprises me a bit that that's so hard to grasp. I mean, it's called capitalism. It happens all around you, day by day.

If you look around the world, it's happening day by day in RL. Around me, new real life land plots are bought, cleared, then a new house is born. A house that contains as much levels as possible, as much apartments as possible. Prettyness is the last on the list, though of course, the real estate investor has to keep it on the 'habitable, okay' side, but I think not a cent will go to extra details or niceness. That would just take from the profit.

What is the goal of a businessman in capitalism? To maximize profit.

How can someone maximize profit? He/she has to try to get the cost of the thing being sold down as low as possible, but still keeping it attractive enough for some people to buy.

If there are 500 people who are willing to buy 'ugly' parcels, that means up to 500 ugly parcels can exist -- and still make a profit.

Do I feel sad when I see these all new ugly crowded houses in rl? Yes. Can I do much about it? No, not really. Except trying to NEVER buy an apartment in such one.

It is not so hard to grasp, but as I said, there needs to be a balance.

There are people who fight against the ugliness of suburban sprawl in RL. Those damn hippies. Der. In RL we have groups like ELF torching housing developments in misguided attempts to express their rage against the suburban sprawl machine. 'Urban sprawl' vs 'back to nature', 'profits vs beauty', same difference. It is narrow-minded to focus like a laser only on one view. It is a matter of working together to strike a balance. The mainland sims are part of OUR collective world. They are not private sims.

In SL, we do not have wetlands and rainforests to preserve. With this experiment we (well, the landbarons) have been given a tabula rosa upon which to imprint a lasting vision. Once the time is up these sims will be locked down to the +/- 4m range of the other mainland sims. At that point, it will be too late to add details like those that were shown in some of the screenies of Ansheland sims. It will be a suburban waterworld +/- 4m forever.

-Ghoti

I agree with your aims, Ghoti, but that body of standards would be hard to use in practice.

Who frames the standards, interprets them and ensures that they are being met by the terraformer? It's easy to envision cases in which the framer of standards and the terraformer disagree. This is not necessarily a 'fault' situation, because the perception of esthetics is a matter of individual taste.

However, there are two factors that seem near-universal. A homeowner offered a choice between pristine natural wilderness on the other side of his lot line or somebody else's construct there is more likely to choose the former. A recreational builder, professional builder, architect or terraformer is partial to his own work, whether it's a form of self expression or an interesting experiment or a professional endeavor.

These two factors are so fundamental in SL that they could be incorporated into the decisionmaking process for determining how land destined to be offered for resale can be terraformed. There are plenty of terrain configurations that would allow terrain masking of other peoples' lots, and protected views. Would people pay extra for them? I suspect that those who have been in SL for awhile might.

Yah, I will not deny that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

My first reaction to the question is to say 'Linden Labs'. Whoever is currently in charge of approving the terrains for Linden mainland sims aught to become the 'Terrain Czars'. Of course, there would need to be guidelines drawn up for what is acceptable, and the Terrain Czars could work with the terraformers to make sure those guidelines are met.

Seems to me that option would be less expensive for LL than doing the terraforming themselves, it gives the players a chance to have a permanent effect on the lay of the land, but it also keeps that permanent effect within certain guidelines.

-Ghoti

There is a real problem with a few Groups or individuals defining the shape of SL based on solely economic motives. Yes this is capitalism. Yes it is similar to RL situations. SL is not however RL. Linden Labs MUST be very careful not ot favor the economicly driven few in favor of the experience driven many.
I would mandate a percentage of protected land in each bulk sim, and not just roads and canals, but lakes and parks. This would drive up the cost AND the value of plots sold. So long as LL continued to develope first land areas it would be up to the market to decide.
I do not like the inorganic "cookie cutter" grid I am seeing now, and I don't see how the ultimate owner will be able to deviate very much from that.

Am I missing something or is it her land?

Talk of what is acceptable and what is not - what is ugly and what is beautiful is pretty much idle chat if it is.

If its her land - then she can make it as she wishes -if it sells, good for her, if it doesn't she eats a loss - either way if it is her land... who cares?

The difference is, once this land is sold, it becomes normal land, like any other mainland parcel, correct? Once the terrain is fixed into place, it will always be that way +/- 4m. This is not private island land that goes poof when the owner decides to get rid of thier sim. It is permanent, forever and ever, amen. It deserves to be done in a way that is both pleasing to the eye as well as profitable for the landbaron.

I don't know, maybe I shouldn't care.

-Ghoti

first - LL's baseline price for land was .01 USD/m2. an entire sim could be purchased for as little as 650$, and was several times. this included beautiful terraforming, road building, vegetation and parcelling. because of this land generally sold for twice that, usually 1200 or so USD per sim.

second - LL took out parcelling. to make up for lost revenue from loss of demand (smaller market for entire sims), they increaded the baseline to 1000 USD per sim.

NOW - LL no longer parcels, terraforms, or builds any infrastructure. this work they spent quite a bit of time on, must be taken over by buyers who must also carry the tier cost of the land as they do this. and the baseline is still 1000 USD per sim.

so what is happening? LL is reducing their workload, increasing land prices, and shovelling it on to an unproven group of business people. there are those with capital. there are those with skills. they don't overlap. and they cannot partner until the consumer market slowly becomes accustomed to the overhead cost of making beautiful land.

i would like to hear the answer of ben, eric and other lindens who have developed large swaths of land in the past.

More like nice picture of the castle built by Dook Buckenburger. Tessa Harrington did create the textures and did texture the build, but she did none of the building.

Dook has not ever been part of Unreal Designs. I just wish people would give the proper credit when they rip off others.

Ok I was unaware of that - being stuck on 'Frogger Island' would seriously suck ass.

Wonder if thats the end result then.

Still - I dunno - I wouldn't buy it knowing that - wonder if others will...