Digging a very deep hole ...

Hey everyone!

I'd like to dig a square hole approx. 400m deep (and 20x20m) on a parcel of land, but I can't seem to achieve what I'm after with the edit terrain tool.

Can anyone recommend a scripted product that can do this for me? Preferably with good instructions too - I'm no genius when it comes to terraforming!

Thanks in advance ^^

Tsukasa

Hi there Tsukasa,

If memory serves, you can go approximately 5 meters up or down on the mainland, then that
number goes up to 40 on private islands. There are very definite limits on terraforming land.

If you did own your own private island you could conceivably create a hole much deeper
by creating a terrain map to do the job for you. However anything over 50 meters will stretch
the terrain mesh to the point that you will have mass visual distortion. Since the terrain
textures are limited to 512x512 in size you cannot make up the for the distortion with heavier
or increased resolution textures.
A deeper hole sure, you could go as deep as 255 meters deep with the terrain map route on
the private island but it would look terrible.

So a 400 meter deep hole...not possible at this time.

Thanks very much for the advice

It's a shame, I read somewhere a while ago about the concept of not using skyboxes, but rather underground boxes. It seemed ideal for this purpose.

Ho hum, skyward it is!

Thanks again

A long time ago when I was still newish I had some estate land I put a standard house on
the surface then went into the living room and just started digging to see how deep I could go.

I was shocked at how deep I could go, I made a huge multi-floor basement. 40 meters is still quite a bit to work with it is like the equivalent of a 4 story building. You could put a 20x20
at the bottom of something like that at 40 instead of 400 then cover it with textured prims to make it appear that it is not there.

there used to be a list of sims (mainland included) that had unusual lterraforming limits... one I remember is 'immaculate' since a friend has a build there... raised the ground up pretty high, and I don't think it was maxed or even the highest edit limit for that list

there are some simple land editing tools, which I'm too lazy to look up, but if you try over in the scripting forums, or search the library forum, you'll have better luck.

The terraform limit for mainland sims has more to do with each sim's age than anything else. The oldest ones can go +/-40M. The batch that came out after those are +/-20M. Eventually, it dwindled down to +/-4M for everything newer, and it's stayed that way ever since. Why LL saw fit to reduce the limit by generation, I have no idea. Personally, I find it very annoying.

As for private islands, those can go +/-100M.

There's no way to do 400 with actual land. If you want to fake the effect, you could by building faux land out of prims 400M up, and then just build a 400M shaft extending down to the real ground. I wouldn't recommend it, primarily since flying and physics can get wonky when you build that high, but if you really want the appearance of a 400M hole, that's the only way.

A 400 M deep hole in real terrain is impossible, at least in terms of having a sim that is worth using. But there is a way to do it, technically, in a private sim and by editing a custom .raw file. But you have to screw up the entire sim's terrain to do it. It is completely impossible if you don't own the entire private island.

By default, the water plane in all sims is at 20 M elevation. Change that, and any sim next to yours won't match up. Looks really strange.

The absolute minimum elevation is zero Meters, or 20 M below the normal water plane. There are no negative values allowed.

Terraforming heighmaps, even using externally generated .raw files, have values between 0 and 255 for the height of each point in the terrain, in a 256 x 256 pixel grid, which equates to a 1 M horizontal and vertical grid spacing, and zero to 256 Meters possible elevations.

You can apply a multiplier to the height map, of up to a value of 2.0, which also makes your vertical heightmap resolution into 2M increments. So you could, in theory, make a sim into a dead-flat 512 M high plateau. But from outside that sim it would look horrible, like a 492 M tall (above the 20 M water line) by 256 M square column of land, with horribly distorted textures on the sides. You could then, in the height map, define a shaft that is up to 490 M deep, before you hit water, and again, the sides of that shaft will have horribly distorted textures. The bottom of the shaft will be 20 x 20 M, as you defined it, but the top will be larger. There are no straight-sided holes possible in SL. At best, it will be at least 2M larger in all directions at the top than it is at the bottom.

In practice, the deepest hole I have ever dug was 50 M deep. The sim has a 72 M high mountain peak, and I sculpted the excavation down to within 2M of the water plane. The top of the mountain had a prim lake covering the hole. The sides inside the hole looked pretty bad, but were entirely hidden by the prim caves that I filled it with. The outer slopes of the mountain were much more gradual, and came out OK.

4 stories.... actually, with the basic need of 6m or so for camera per story, you could have a 6story building in there, with a roof of 4m height to boot ^^


But yeah, unfortunately, digging really really deep holes isn't quite so easy in SL.... but 40m is usually plenty

This is true, I have a RAW file that can turn an island into a 700m deep crater. It was rather wild to see

It's a shame, because I can imagine the possibilities if it weren't abused, but I have a feeling this was done for good reason. I'm very glad every landowner-Joe can't immediately bump his 512 plot to it's "rightful" spot at +40 M regardless of its surroundings. I'd be curious to see whether those old sims look the way I'm expecting they would? Would 16m ad plots look like skinny square grass appendages with 3 cubes on top?