Camera angles letting you get through walls

Hi all,

Im new to SL and have noticed that you can get through walls by zomming with the camera backwards... is this normal?

If so is there a way to tell if people are in your house with that feature (if you call it that) and is there a way of keeping them from being able to come on to your space using zoom.

Maybe a wall that they cant get through? the only thing i can think of is having what ever you want private far enough away from where they can get to that they run out of camera zoom.

And who knows, there may be a way to change how far you can zoom from your body...

Thanks !

Nope...they can zoom pretty far too with the "Disable camera constraints" feature.

I was just about to comment with the "Disable Camera Constraints" capability...

If you're curious about using it, open your Client menu (if it's not showing, use Ctrl+Alt+Shift+D) and it will show as a choice - just click next to it, to put an "X" on the item to activate it.

I have kept an eye on my property at "ground" level while building at 500m...just be certain to set your draw distance out far enough to see...otherwise, your "camera" will no longer show anything (it can only "see" what's within your draw distance).

What about those cloaks of invisiblity you can you zoom through them?
I saw something else on someone blog where they used a script to control how others were able to view areas but not sure if it would work or even exactly how it works.
Is it possible to script a area so its unviewable?

I do not think you can make prims invisible with another prim in front of it. Now using the cloak of invisibility (invisiprim) only works so far. If you zoom in you CAN see whos inside it. You could try putting small invisiprims all over you avatar, but that would only cloak you not what's around you and you would not be able to see yourself either.

It would be great if prims had a "solid" feature where you could not use your camera to zoom past them.

One can also turn off the display of objects and see the avatars inside a structure.

Also, one can use the Hide Selected feature to see through things.

Wireframe will also give you a view through things like walls - an abnormal view, but a view nonetheless.

Privacy is available by owning a large parcel and blocking access to it, preferably a private sim all your own. If you let others onto your private sim, their goes your privacy.

There is no privacy in SL. Get used to it.

just to spook you even more

all one has to do is pan a camera into your place, right click and choose sit and they are in there with you

No kidding they stole all of my furniture that way. The land has been changed to "allow" only now, so that wont happen again.

according to LL it isn't a bug it's a feature.... yeah right.

... and this, well, "feature" is exactly the reason why ban lines do not offer any privacy at all (except if you own a full region and limit access to that).

I for one think it is a feature.... There are times when the 'sit teleport' thing can be convenient.

It's not how RL works, but it's not obvious to me that SL should entirely work the way that RL does.

As for privacy... if you want that in SL, it has to be implemented somehow else. Making the kind of changes that would make it impossible to pan the camera as we can now would wreck a lot of stuff in the basic way of how SL works. I'd be careful wishing for that.

-Rob

Exam Time:

a) What is the normal default Draw Distance?
(2 marks)

b) Using the value in (a) what is the default maximum camera distance?
(5 marks)

c) Using the value in (a) AND with Disable Camera Constraints checked, what is the maximum camera distance?
(5 marks)

d) Using the maximum Draw Distance of 512m, what are the values for (b) and (c)
(8 marks)

20marks.

Yup, I can see any point anywhere in all three dimensions on a single private island. With larger landscapes, the slowdown from running huge draw distances would cause it to be unworkable though.

It was handy for doing land maintenance and tracking dubious looking types.

IMs are private, that's about all that is.

As with most things there's a good side and a bad. I was in a slow-loading sim last night and managed to wander right into a mountain just before it appeard on top of me. I tried sitting on bits of it to no avail, so cammed into the nearest building an aimed at a poseball. Just as I flew through the wall I got the message, "I'm sorry but this door is locked". Oops. Luckily there was nobody around and I was able to 'sit' my way out from there, but locked doors aren't a whole lot of help if you want to keep lost travellers out of your living room

At this time, the only way to keep someone from looking into your SL home is to own an entire private island sim, and lock down sim access so no one who is not on your approved list can see the island. People in other sims can't cam in from where they are, if they can't see the sim at all. People who you allow access to still could. But buying a whole private sim is a very expensive way to gain privacy. And there is no way to do this with Mainland, even if you own a whole sim worth of mainland.

Locked doors only keep polite people out, and are easily circumvented. Ban lines or security orbs can prevent someone from entering a space that you wish to lock down (or at least prevent them from remaining for long). But that won't prevent them from looking or from remotely clicking on stuff.

A feature request was approved recently as "Worth implementing", to create a zone up near 700 Meters, where it would be possible to do something similar to "ban lines" but that only affected a space between two specific altitudes (like between 650 and 768 Meters), and within that space, only approved access people would be able to see what was inside. For anyone else, it would be a blank space surrounded by special ban lines. The client would not render it, because the server would not send that information to an unauthorized avatar. Hasn't happened yet though. I'll be happy when it does.

I ws waiting for someone to post this. Didn't want to give that one away myself.



Kira, please explain how someone can steal objects that don't belong to them. I thought this was impossible.

The thing of it is, if you really wanted to spy on someone's naked avatar or pose ball sex animations, you can.

I seriously doubt that there are very many people who actually do that. And of those, I suspect they'd have to get bored with it quickly. Naked Second Life avatars and repetitive, untimed and ill-suited sex animations has to be about the worst quality pornography one can find on the internet.

If you want to simulate these private acts online, you should be able to accept that fact that there is a risk of someone spying on you. It's wrong for someone to spy on you, even though it's easy. It is emotionally unsettling if you think your online sexual activity was only for one particular person, and a stranger spies it. But if it's something from which you aren't going to easily recover, don't do it.

P.S. Let's get scarier. It's not too hard to spy on people's private activities in Real Life anymore. And have it replayed on television on the internet.

zooming in on people doesnt let you read their text if i remember right.

Anyone can correct me if im wrong.

I have heard it will let people listen in to the VOICE chat.

so, even more lack of privacy fun is in our future.

Sometimes when you set furniture or other items out, the For Sale option is checked by default in the edit menu and it sets the price to $10L by default. I've lost furniture this way before I knew about it, and checking the Sheep's search for sales website, I see that several of my friends have objects for sale that they didn't intend to set for sale.

I always keep an eye on the mini-map for my fiancee's sake but the IM's are where the real intimacy is acted out anyway.

Amity, you getting scarier! ... second name isn't Ville by any chance?

I'm as scared as you are. An unfortunate by-product of my profession as a lawyer is that I have had an opportunity to know many highly skilled stalkers and abusers. I try to share what I know, even though it reveals that I know too much.

You can hear people talking in open chat up to 20m away. Camera position doesn't come into in on that one.

It's kind of wierd, spacialized sounds follow the camera position but the chat typing stays with the avatar. When chatting with people and camera-controlling away, you can hear the typing sound fade away as your camera moves off, till very quickly there is no typing sound at all, but you can still chat with them as if standing there.

And if you move your camera to another group of avatars that are chatting, I seem to recall you can hear their typing sounds, although you definately cannot see their chat text.

-Atashi

from what the beta testers say though, you will be able to hear their voice chat zoomed in with the camera.

So this privacy issue I predict will be much huger once that goes live.

I predict they wont even have considered the possibility that it will be an issue ahead of time.