Land modification is too limiting

I've been on Second Life for a bit now, and despite all the complaining, griping, and general lack of satisfaction with certain specific things overall the game has been enjoyable enough that I've kept playing and using it over time. However this most recent change is completely and ridiculously unnecessary. I see no reson, no purpose, and no USE for the limitation which has been placed on the users of Second Life.

I am speaking, specifically, of the change to land that makes it so one can only modify land FOUR meters from its current positioning unless you purchase an island for yourself. This. Is. Ludicrous. The modification of land is one of the things that made Second Life such an appealing location for one's creativity, it allowed people to make and shape the areas they were given control of to their will. For example, I myself am creating a 'cave' environment for my Home. However with this new feature placed upon me I'm now incapable of completing the project I started, and left with walls made of the land itself that I can not move, finish, or even undo. Now I am forced to use whatever objects I can create to attempt to simulate the ground of the region, rather than using the land itself to mold the area I was creating.

If a Linden would like to explain to me what purpose this serves I would greatly appreciate the information, but as it stands my eyes see no use for this new restriction except to force those who do not buy individual islands to use more prims in their building of customized environmetns. More money for the Lindens. Now if anyone else can show me a reason for this I would, again, very much love to hear/see it, but otherwise I think this is an addition to Second Life that we can do without.

At this point I ask those of SL who may have stumbled across this to place their words here and state whether or not they think the LIndens would be better served undoing what they've done in this aspect of this game.

My business is in the middle of a job right now that is effected by this new 'feature', real nice that we cannot make a hole the depth we wish.

Further, my own land is mostly on the side of a mountain, sure would be nice to carve a bit of the face of that mountain into a cliff...I've seen cliffs in SL, why not one on my land?

I do believe they need to loosen this 4m restriction at the very least. It's our land, isn't it?

The first time I came across this restriction, while attempting to do a landscaping job for a customer, I was apalled at the lack of foresight.

The limitations made it impossible even to get the ground to fit around the foundation of her new home! I had to place planters and prim flower beds around the house, to fill in the gaps.

I had to leave a 'slough' under her front patio, a shallow strip of water that I simply could not eliminate, nor could I make it deep enough to use as a boat dock!

I was stuck leaving a large lumpy hill on one corner of her land, because I couldn't reduce it any further. I ended up covering it with decorative plantings, but it still looks out of place.

For that reason, I will not purchase any land that has the restrictive +/- 4M limit on terraforming, nor do I recommend such land to my friends and clients.

+/- 10 M is survivable.

+/- 20 M is reasonable.

+/- 100 M is preferred.

On the one hand, I like the freedom of unlimited sims.

On the other hand, I've seen what people do given the freedom of unlimited sims.

On the gripping hand, working with the limits of the land on a parcel can free you from having to deal with the land. I've done builds where I deliberately didn't change the land from reverted state other than applying the "smooth" tool where LL's landscape script (I assume) had made the ground unreasonably rough.

If LL would make the mainland landscape limits more variable, from 1M (yes, really) to 40M... so you'd have some super-naturalistic sims and some that are just haywire... that would allow people to vote with their feet, without abandoning the mainland completely.

Yeah. QFT.

There are some special mainland sims that allow at least +/-10M terraforming.. but you'll find the land holds more worth and will cost you higher per L/sqm than your typical mainland lots.

I thought land modification was always limited that way, except in some really old sims?

I think the reason's quite clear.. it's so that don't wind up with your next door neighbours building 100M high cliffs all around your house.

I wish that LL would look at the madness where you lower a "small" section of land.. a single land vertex that's about 5m away from the edge of the brush goes up, usually through the floor of a structure of course...

Well the SIm which I've been on for all this time wasn't like this until this recent update, which I know because it cut me out of the land molding I was doing. As for chopping through your neighbor's land... all they need do is be civil enough to work their land around others' instead of bisecting it. I'm not saying we need 100+ back. But at least 30+. 5+ is just way, way too small.

I made use of about a 60 meter terraforming variation with one sim that I built, but in most existing sims I could see +/- 30 M as a reasonable limit.

The other thing that gets me is the odd decision that much of the newly formed land not only has a highly restricive +/- 4M terraform limit, but the land there is also almost entirely just barely above sea level! The block of sims that were added near the SE corner of the Southern continent were hardly more than a shoal of sand bars, barely a meter or so above sea level, with a few completely nonsensical humps and bumps randomly placed in them. As I recall, those were offered as bulk sales, and the buyers were given a VERY restrictive window of time in which to terraform the terrain before the terraform limits were locked down. The result was a completely unnatural and for the most part unattractive collection of sims. Personally, I would have no interest in land there, because it looks so flat and can't be terraformed into anything al all sensible.

Perhaps if you grew up in Florida, or the Great Plains, or some other part of the world where the terrain is largely flat and featureless, this looks fine. But for myself - I grew up in a mountanous part of the world, in a region where steep hills and deep valleys and magnificent mountain vistas were a part of daily life. A flat and featureless sim looks dead to me.

isn't it the group of sims designed by anshechung.com?

she made what would sell the best, waterfront beach

also for the +4-4 limits, we asked for it i am sorry but if you have seen the infamous pankake lands some where doing, if you want to make ugly shit on your land, get a private sim so nobody will have to endure it's sight

I remember when a sim I was in that allowed +/-100m terraforming was "colonized" by about 7 different people in one group. All of them max-raised the land into huge 512sqm columns and build little houses on the top. Totally destroyed the property value of everyone living back down on Earth.

The general concensus is... be careful getting land in those sims unless you can trust your neighbors.

I'm confused. What exactly have LL changed with the recent update?

AFAIK, the situation up till now has been that :
* almost all mainland sims have a +4/-4 m terraform limit.
* a few 'grandfathered' sims have limits ranging from 0/0 to +40/-40.
* islands have whatever limits are set by the island owner.

Have LL changed the limit on the grandfathered sims from +40/-40 to +4/-4?
If not, what *have* they done?
Have they brought online a bunch of flat sims?

Exactly what is the issue here?

I believe we are talking about the Blackstone island here, which is a private island that the island owner has restricted to +/- 4.

SL is curently closed so I can't get a landmark, but there are some really beautiful large-terraform builds out there.

Personally, I think most sims should have a *smaller* limit than +/- 4 unless they're almost completely flat, because people will buy land on a beautiful hillside and immediately turn it into ugly 8m terraces. On the other hand, some people will do amazing things given the freedom of 30, 40, or 100m limits. There's nothing magical about 4m.

Linden Labs generates sims algorithmically anyway, so maybe they could do something like this (except in Perl instead of LSL, of course):

float max_level = 0;
float min_level = 768;
integer i, j;

// sample sim height
for(i = 0; i <= 256; i+=16)
  for(j = 0; j <= 256; j+=16)
  {
    vector v = llGround(<i,j,0>);
    if(v.z < min_level) min_level = v.z;
    if(v.z > max_level) max_level = v.z;
  }

// default to 4m
float terraform_limit = 4;

// gently sloping sims are more restricted
if(max_level - min_level > 10 && max_level - min_level < 40) terraform_limit = 1;

// 10% of the sims are wildcards
if(llFrand(100) < 10) terraform_limit = llList2Integer([10,20,30,40,100], (integer)llFrand(5));

llSecretGodModeSetTerraformLimitCall(terraform_limit);

Run that after they generate the landscape and before they set it for auction, and see what the market does with wildcard sims.

... Well, while I still think the current limit is ridicuous it seems my own problem may be resolved soon enough without the Lindens changing anything.. *goes back to IMs*

Yeah, I'm a dip heh. As for what they did Angel, apparently nothing. I was mistaken since it looks like it was the owner of the land being rented raher than any changes to SL. It just happened to coincide with an update and come with no message so I thought it was through an update patch.

Most LL sims have had a 4m terraforming limit since I joined SL over a year ago. When I logged in one day (still a noob on my tiny firstland plot) all my neighbors had raised the land the full 4m. I couldn't even see out my windows and had my sloped land inside my house. Took me forever to raise my land and all my stuff so I could use my land properly. There does need to be a limit and 4m doesn't seem to be that bad especially in firstland areas.