Sex, Lies and Terraforming -- tech advice needed

Well, with that title, I hope I got some attention! LOL

Anyway, even though I've been a resident of SL for a while, only lately have I tackled terraforming, mainly because I had no need to know until now.

Recently my partner and I "bought" a section of land on a private sim, not mainland (a quarter sim, 128x128.) Basically it is a tropical island theme, and by covenant each quarter sim has to maintain a certain amount of water, otherwise we are free to terraform it so long as it keeps the general theme and it is not obnoxious.

Well, being the totally clueless newby I am, I began to experiment with terraforming, and right away I pretty much destroyed the existing terraforming. The problem is that the "owners" of the sim never bothered to bake the existing terrain, so I could not revert it to what it was! Not only that, the owners refused to do some sort of reset (there was another name for that which I don't recall) since it might lead the other property owners on the sim to lose inventory. I decided not to ask my neighbors for permission to do this.

So, lacking time, I essentially sunk the whole quarter sim below water, then raised up a small and flat and ugly little rectangular plot of land until I could get to terraforming it for real.

Of course, I find the SL-provided terraforming tools to suck royally!

Here are my limitations and allowances:

1) I do NOT have access to the RAW file to edit/export/import that directly -- it's not mine to edit. And I don't really have much cooperation of the sim owners. (I suppose after I terraform my island I can get them to bake the terrain, something I don't have authority to do.)

2) The ground textures and associated elevation ranges for the sim are fixed (no control over that, either.)

3) I do have full control of elevation of my quarter sim property from 0 to 100 meters (water level at 20 meters). This is more than enough to do what we want to do.

O.k., my questions.

1) Is there a way that I can externally design the elevation data for the quarter sim and then somehow import and apply that? (Fortunately I screen captured our quarter sim island from the Map image as it existed before the terraforming accident, so I have something to start working with -- we like the basic island shape.)

2) If yes, what tool(s) could I use and how do I import/apply the data?

3) If not, what third-party terraforming tools could I use in SL?

Thanks in advance for your help/advice!

Your Landlords sound like moneyhungry uncaring a**eholes just in it for your money, find a new sim and hand them your notice.

Nevertheless, even if I moved elsewhere, I still would like to understand my options for terraforming given similar parameters.

Thanks!

Without a cooperative sim owner, no, you can't use external tools to edit terrain in a sim you do not personally own. Your only option while remaining in that sim is to learn to use the in-world tools, or hire someone like me to do it manually for you.

You might at least try the "revert" option for your parcel. That may not return it to what it was when you bought it, but it should restore it to the last burned terrain settings, which are likely a better start than dead flat.

If you DO move to a sim where the sim owner is willing to cooperate and trust you with access to the.raw files, consider yourself blessed. You need to be careful, but you can edit just your own parcel that way, using Photoshop and/or other external tools.

What you'll need to do is have the sim owner burn the current sim terrain to a new .raw file. He saves that as a backup, and sends you a copy.

You edit your parcel in the raw file. There is a layer in the file that defines parcel borders, with each parcel assigned to a different greyscale value. I can't recall which layer it is, out of the 13 or so in the file, but you'll need to locate that layer and use it to identify the limits of your parcel.

Once you know the parcel's limits, restrict your editing ONLY to that area, and have at!

Save the file, and send it to the sim owner. The sim owner should burn the terrain to a new raw file just before uploading yours, to make sure no other sim resident had made manual changes while you were cooking up your changes.

The sim owner then uploads the raw file you edited, and you check the results. If it's good, cool. If not, he can upload that backup he made just before your changes were uploaded, and back out your edits, so you can try again.

Hmmm, actually my inquiry over in the technical area shows that I definitely could run a script to adjust the z-height for any x-y coordinate within my parcel since I now have the permission to adjust it from 0 to 100 meters (water height 20 meters). So I can certainly design it externally so long as I can translate the height data into a script to run "in-world".

Well, as noted in my original message, the sim owner never baked the terrain in the first place, so that channel in the Terrain RAW was set to 0. Any reversion I tried on any selected property set the height to 0. So the original terraforming, when I bought the property, is gone forever. Fortunately I have a screen capture of the Map of the sim, so I at least know the outline of the original island.

Having access to the Terrain RAW would be cool and definitely preferable, but in principle I don't need this as I discussed above, and is being discussed in the tech area. That is, it is *possible* to externally design the height field for all grid points in a parcel and then create a script to apply that data "in-property" without need for access to the Terrain RAW file.

Good advice! I do intend, once my parcel is terraformed, to contact the sim owner to bake the terrain. I will also ask for the RAW file, but the only value in that since I don't have permission to replace the Terrain RAW file for the sim is to archive it for them -- redundant archiving.

I'd love to get the Terrain RAW file for my sim, and then edit the Height Field (Channel 1) for my parcel (which is the NW quadrant of the entire sim), but I doubt the sim owner would give that to me. If I were the sim owner, I would not let one of the parcel owners tweak it. How would I know they would not make a mistake and cause problems with the other parcels? It'd get real messy in a hurry.

Again, I'd love to be able to do this, but I don't have warm fuzzies the sim owner would release the current Terrain RAW file to me to edit and then replace it, for the reason I just cited. If I were the sim owner, I would not allow this, at least without my close supervision.

Yes, but are there potential problems when one reverts back to the original RAW file? For example, could inventory be lost in the process of:

original RAW --> replaced by updated RAW --> reverted back to original RAW?

If there's no possibilities for problems, then I suppose I could ask the sim owner to do this, but I'm not holding my breath that they would agree to let me twiddle with the Terrain RAW file for the whole sim.

Sorry if I sound critical in this reply. That's not my intent. I'd rather find a solution to edit the terrain externally and then apply that, without having to use/replace the Terrain RAW file. It appears it is possible to do via scripting.