Ban Lines and Sim Crossing

Well, not if they did it right. I was thinking they were solid, through the whole structure.



True, true. But sometimes there's no more effective way to keep people out than a strongly-worded barrier and a tough bouncer. It does tend to be ugly as sin, though.

OMG!! The neighbors with the ban lines are so desperate for their own private little world that they lined their property with a "fence". It's this nasty repeating texture of grass and trees, no attempt at seamlessness at all. The silliest thing is that the land in front of them slopes down to the water anyway. They can't see anything on my land except some trees and rocks, and ditto for the guy beside me, who has dug deep into the hillside.

Now I'm going to have to hide it with trees or something. Please, give these people an invisibility barrier!

In the world of 3D modeling there is no such thing as "solid."
Heck, try aly panning inside a solid cube. It disapears. Why?
Because polygons are one-sided.

I was originally thinking this would be easy to do. However, upon further reflection, I concluded this was wrong, and that it (and similar variants, like showing ban lines out to draw distance) is an unrealistic idea.

The ban lines appear only very rarely: when you are aimed directly at a banned parcel and just about to enter it.

The access list calculation is moderately complicated. There's payment status, is your name on this list, is it not on that list, are you a member of such-and-so-group, etc. Doing this calculation every now and then (when collision appears imminent) between one avatar and one plot is probably not a big deal.

However, to show this info in any kind of large-scale way, you would end up constantly performing (or storing) this for every avatar against every visible property. This would be a great deal of extra server-side work, and would slow everything down. Personally, I am fully stocked on SL slowness already and would prefer to avoid engendering any more.

So, I think last-minute ban lines are probably here to stay.

As for the minimap, I routinely outfly the servers' ability to deliver the data needed to rez my environment. (In fact I gave up driving and took up flying because I kept crashing into things by not finding out the road turned before I drove past it.) Without the minimap, stale as its contents may be, I'd have no idea where I was going. Plus it provides a handy compass without wasting a script or requiring a HUD slot.

If this is so flying on a vehicle is a thing of the past. It is hard enough to fly on a vehicle without the pesky lines.
With all of the problems am droping back to basic on next renewal. Second Life is just not worth it. Children, griefers, perverts, long down times, massive lag, missing inventory and no flight why bother paying them? OH yes the privacy jerks, why dont they buy an island and set their lots to group access and the island set to just the people who have lots?

This could be done on the client, since it's only informational. The server downloads almost all the information that the client needs to know to implement this anyway, because it's the same information it needs to render the "landowner" information to color the ground and parcel boundaries when you have that turned on.

...and it would only have to do it once and then remember (hopefull NOT in the cache).

I checked my neighbor (who has both "allow only" and "don't allow" set) and you're right, I was indeed able to retrieve that info, despite not being on either list. (Meaning I get ban lines from that property.)

However, that's quite a bit more info than just the landowner/group/for-sale-status needed for Show Landowner / Show Property Lines. (Potentially several lists of potentially 300 members/groups each.) If that data is sent to the client automatically rather than on-demand (and if it's not, it could be) then such a feature would be possible.

Might also help with the "invisible ban lines on sim borders" problem, as the client is a lot less likely to care where the sim border is since it just draws stuff.

Let's see.

Worst case: a first land sim with 300 avatar ban lists on every parcel. You could do worse than this, theoretically, but in practice you'd never get within several decimal orders of magnitude of even this... so let's call it the "worst case".

The sim would need to send 128 bits for each list element.

That's about 2.5 megabytes, worst case.

Let's put that into perspective.

A 1k by 1k texture at 75% compression is 1MB. An avatar has 3 or 4 textures (depending on whether they have a skirt) at 512x512 each. So if there's 3 avatars with skirts in the sim that's more data that has to be downloaded to the client than this super-pathological example. And that doesn't include all those freebies with unnecessarily hi-rez textures that every one of the first-landers has rezzed..., let alone the bling and chichi hair

And this is not rapidly changing data. It can be efficiently cached. And it won't open up any security holes if it's late loading because it's informational.

So I think this is not a problem.