Can I have a Mountain Range in empty grid-void, costing only 1 prim? (hint: YES!!!!!)

Major, major and totally cool Scientific Research by Caledon Scientist CoyoteAngel 'Hand of God!' Dimsum was conducted last night in the wilds of Primverness.

Using an aetherial mix of megaprims, sculptie technology, advanced texture-fu and just plain ol' determination and imagination, a GIGANTIC MOUNTAIN RANGE was created OUTSIDE the region of Primverness, creating its own chain of dramatic offshore isles with towering peaks.

Yeap, you read that right. OUTSIDE the sim. As in: in the empty void. Colossal, sim-sized mountains!

Cost: one itty bitty prim.

Alright, cool, you say... that's neat... but... okay it's just something you can look at, yeah?

Wrong-o!

As a large crowd of onlookers pressed their perky Caledon noses against the Invisible Aetheric Wall that separates us from... well, whatever it is out there, some brave souls decided to risk it all and Set Forth, if they could, into the Unknown.

Which had we punched through far enough, would either be in the IBM sims, or downtown San Francisco, California. Either way, a jarring experience for a pixelated NeoVictorian... but that didn't stop us.

With some feigned regret, it was decided that thrusting my avatar into possible oblivion miiight not quite be the smartest thing, tied as it is to Caledon's survival.

Others were not so restrained. Many of us bounced, poked, and tried to crack the Invisible Wall, to no avail, UNTIL...

Viderian Vollmar, apparently our first Aethonaut, managed to sit himself upon a megaprim and somehow... MOVE HIS AVATAR out into the Void itself! We aren't talking .01m or something here, we are talking several meters, actually, a lot more than several.

Mindblowing enough... first Coyoteangel's mountain range in nothingness, then Viderian Out There... when the third stunning thing happened.

Viderian was able to create a Prim out there. No joke. Negative Y axis value was reported for position!

At last it was time for the final test - none of us knew what would happen, but Viderian unsat himself from the megaprim... and he came back. Considering possible outcomes (avatar coming back, avatar stuck forever, avatar landing on floor of Dallas colocation facility) that was a pretty good result, I thought!



For those interested, I believe the Caledon Forbidden Isles are still to be found off the east coast of region Caledon Primverness, if anyone wants to see them.

Please note, we are not responsible for anything that happens to you, should you manage to reach their craggy shores, or gods forbid, cross over...

Is this the same technique Chaos describes in his tip #5?

/8/d3/210251/1.html

Same method I'm sure, just slightly different purpose. Even from waay back one could always shove a prim partly into the void, but the size, scale and use of sculpties really made this a spectacular thing to behold.

How thrilling, Des!

My heart goes out to Viderian Vollmar for his brave exploit, and to his family and friends, who doubtless experienced a great deal of anxiety on his behalf.

I'm elated to hear of his safe return, and of this major advancement in Aetheric Science.

(And they say nothing exciting ever happens in Caledon. Wait till I tell the gang at the disco about this! Kind of puts their little antics and contests in proper perspective, what? I am REALLY going to have to go shopping for some Victorian dresses and come for an extended visit.)

All hail the savants of Caledon!

woooow, sooo much better than a crappy flat backdrop really magnificent!! i wonder of texturing in treelines and snocaps and all that, would really cap off the effect nicely...

and wonders about all the other non-naturalistic possibilities for vista-scaping... fantastic!!

ok, a bunch of 256m spheres set as sculptie with the center in the sim

but Des, this is old news

These blasphemies will bring down the Lindens' wrath on us all!

/me makes note to go see mountains this weekend...

Those Victorians are a brave and clever lot. Long live Caledon and all its fine residents.

The mountains will live in my memory as being always..out there..somewhere!

Can it be... the Negative Zone?

Gee Des, no pictures? Not even a single daguerreotype?

I got called away to fill a hole in Kittiwickshire.

This was indeed an exciting exploration into the limits of SL, pushing the envelope forward. I went to Caledon Primverness to see this for myself and did admire the sculpty mountains well off beyond the range of the sim limits itself. Bumped repeatedly against the edges before my bruised avatar came to belive what I was seeing was real.

Then I stumbled across the exploration site, with a large prim still extending out into space. From the remains of several dirigibiles I take it there must have been a significant spectator fleet.

Arriving to late to view the experiment as a spectator, I decided to try my own. Rezzing a 40mx.5mx.5m prim on the existing prim that extended out into negative space, I sat on the outboard end and was excited to find that I could extend it, including my avatar 20 meters into the negative space. Standing up I immediatly found my avatar hurtling back into positive space. Repeating the experiment, I tried sitting on the mountainous sculpty prim that was just below the end of my extended prim, and again found my avatar thrown rudely back into positive space.

Still and all it was exciting to find away to intentionally push beyond the normal limits. I have always enjoyed exploring those limits in other 3D simulated environments, prior to discovering SL.

My mind wanders towards my occasionally lag induced earlier trips thousands of meters into SL negative space....

Back to this exploration... I'm wondering if the "Prim Inch-Worm" technique, that I just read about today would allow one to push further horizontally into the negative void.

The "Prim Inch-Worm" technique was described as away to exceed the 756m hieght limit in SL. To use it, you sit on a 10m cube, raise it to the upper limit, then move the bottom edge of the prim up as high as possible, then raise the upper edge up as high as possible, and repeat. Inch worming your prim higher and higher into space.

does this mean the world is not flat? or are we still working on that part?

I'd have to ask Seifert Surface about that one.

There are some crackpots that have said the world is Round and that we orbit the Sun, but it's pretty safe to say such theories are complete balderdash.

It's pretty clear the universe is flat, or... flattish. I'm pretty sure most respected grid scientists agree on that one.

Theoretically, some of our top scientists quietly whisper that it may be possible to create a 'worm hole' in the grid. Something far more exotic than mere garden variety teleportation.

What would lie beyond that is a matter of metaphysical speculation.

Would it be a gateway to an alternate Past? The beta grid? The Future? Or a highly unstable fissure providing direct, walk-on access into a poorly written Star Trek episode?

We don't know for certain.

Some tantalising clues come from dabbling with Media Settings, which imply the existence of a highly textured, complex world somehow beyond our own. Mp3's, photographs of a place called Detroit, and even moving images.

It may even be possible, sometime in the Far Distant Future, to create a vessel of some kind, that would encapulate a few brave Avatars and let them venture forth completely "off grid" to explore.

Such exploration and life support for avatars might be accomplished with mysterious, mythical things such as 'camera phone' and 'wireless connexion' and 'transformer robot toy'.

But as of now, this is simply penny-dreadful Science Fiction. Even if a few brave avatars ever reached it, such a world would probably be too prim-poor and laggy to be of any practical use.

I think the solution is clear. Send Alexandra David-Neel in to have a look

That is very cool! Interesting and creative use of megaprims there, reminds me of the kind of imaginative people that keep me here when I'm burned out from all the instability and such.

Your research sounds interesting and scary all at the same time. I can't wait to see what further technological and scientific finds you come up with. Moving pictures though sounds far fetched..

Something you pay for, but cant really use, could be taken away at any time,and questions one`s stability in SL regarding TOS...

excellent product... is surprised it isnt being marketed yet by Linden.

While I think this is a great idea, it's sad that so much of the genuine creative energy in SL is having to be put into using exploits. Doing this required what? An external 3D modelling package _and_ a hacked SL client? I'm not really complaining, just thinking about how much more could have been achieved if this could have been done without the need to hack things first (especially if the Lindens are going to permit it)

Can I please ask people who supported this build to take a moment to vote for https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-527 - my proposal that, over time, all building/creative functions should be categorised as either a) exploits (that are against the TOS to use), or b) available right there in the standard user interface.

One is, to say the least, confused at the assertions found in your response. I can assure you that the degree of creative force used in the creation of these particular virtuographic features was: Nil.

To wit: 1 month of full-time immersion in Blender + 1 derriere-load of gargantuprims + 1 extended and supremely warm shower = Eureka!

In fact, I've been using giant prims in my lab sim, Lovelace, since they emerged, eventually using 65,535x65,535 units to recreate the ambience of a so-called Orbital Habitat as generally described by various creatively uninhibited scientifiction authors such as well-known Miss Julia Verne.

In the so-called Real World, or Big Room, my meat machine avatar plys its trade as an analytical engine smith and finds that your complaint is actually the general nature of soft-wares engineering.

By way of example, just this week, after another long-ish cleansing shower bath, she determined a method to allow the binding of user interface control properties in MicroSoft Windows "programmes" to the values of cells found within MicroSoft Excel spread-sheets by combining it, i.e. Excel's programmable interfaces, with an obscure-yet-not-unknown .NET Collections interface.

Needless to say, this technique has thoroughly engaged my fleshatar's primary client, who while less-than knowledgeable about the methods, understands that the ability to exploit this unusual confluence of technologies will offer them certain leverageable advantages hithertofore unavailable to their Segment o' Industry (TM).

In short, when an entertainment-reception engine tumbles accidentally and fortuitously from a moving transportation device in front of one's eyes, it would be foolish for a brave and aggressive individual to refrain from at least temporarily utilizing it until such as as the owner decides that they do or do not want its return.

This having been said, I must say that I do generally agree with your premise that having our demi-god Linden Overlords rule as to the legality and wisdom of employing certain less-obvious mis-featurettes found in our environment to be a wise and desirable state of affairs. In short, I find myself in general, if not specific agreement with your proposal. Hear, hear and Good Show!

Respectfully yrs, and in service to Caledon and the Grid,
CoyoteAngel Dimsum

I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with people finding out innovative methods, of course not!

I _am_ saying that there's something wrong with a creative platform when the innovative methods in it are starting to, to such a large extent, _bypass_ the creative platform itself. You mention that you discovered an innovative feature in Windows, great, but I presume that in order to do so, you didn't have to reverse engineer Visual Studio - or, whichever programming tool you were using - in order to remove a piece of code which specifically stopped you from programming that particular thing, even though it would work.

That's the kind of thing I really hate to see in Second Life. Mega-prims have always been used carefully on private islands and in certain commissioned builds, even by MDCs - and yet they still can't be created and don't officially exist. Since the viewer software and server both know perfectly well whether you are on a private island or not, why do they still completely stonewall creation of new megaprims, even there? (And let's remember that the code banning mega-prims from being created was _added in_ after they were discovered - essentially handing a monpoly to the people who already made them, grumble grumble!)

How about Legacy Prims? A lot of people, it seems, don't even know about those - but there are as many as 5 "hidden" prim types, with different and in some cases looser restrictions. They're fully supported and they work, but unless you use a particular scripting trick, you can't use them. True, using a scripting trick is much nicer than having to recompile the viewer, but why should a builder have to learn to script - and then build in an incredibly awkward way (even one touch on the regular viewer building controls on a Legacy Prim will revert it back to its non-legacy equivalent) - when there's no earthly reason why they shouldn't have access to them right there?

Even right in the current version of SL, there's an incredibly useful scripting call (llGetObjectDetails) which works fully on the server.. but if you're using the official release of Second Life, you can't use it!

And this is what I'm trying to say. As long as it's such a hassle to use the things people already have innovated, it's much, much harder for anyone to move forward and innovate the next big thing. It also means that the most innovative people will have to engage in "suspicious" behaviour (using untrusted clients, fiddling with the client protocol, searching for exploits, etc) that will make it that much harder to identify the genuine exploiters, griefers and hackers.

Blasphemy!

I too, shall come and visit The Mountains That Don't Exist...

I always thought, the Victorians were the last Great Explorers, and Colonizers, so it makes sense to me that their namesakes in SL would be the ones to Open up new lands off the edge of the known world.

"Here there be Dragons."

Angel.

hehe the naming of the range is an intriguing prospect! i guess they don't have ledzep or rush in the steam age, but i'd still vote for 'fountains of lameth' or something

p.s. wonder if you could put a huge rainbow that ends 'out of reach' behind the mountains, with a pot of L gold unreachable except for the great occassional achieved 'sit'??

Thank you, Yumi! No offense taken, nor do I believe intended.

The range has been named: Sierra Azul

Not all Victorians were English, after all. Some of us were raised in the howling wilderness of the New Colonial Territories, amongst the Pale Savage tribes, which are there known by the mysterious moniker of "Texican".