Building across Sims: A Case Study

Nothing big here, but I thought I'd post a solution to a build problem that I had.

I created this floating platform as a part of Liferain Park in Alviso. The platform is one of 4 that allow you to view the island park from 3 sides.

Only problem, the place I wanted to put it in Alviso was not big enough to get the angle I wanted. So, I had to put it across the Orwood/Alviso border.

Well, I own the land next to it in Orwood so that wasn't a problem. But if you've ever built a structure like this, then you've had the experience of having the floor go phantom on you as you walk across the sim border. I kept ending up in the water below.

From previous experience, I knew that I could get it to work if I positioned the prims parallel to the border on either side. But the platform was at an angle to the sim border, so there was no way to position them so that it would work.

see my solution in the next post.

So what I did was to overlap the platform with a set of invisible prims.

The invisible prims are butted against the sim border on either side and provide a mostly smooth transition as the person walks across. Since they're invisible, they don't change the asthetics of the build.

The picture below shows them using View>Highlight Transparent.

But I'm curious. Is there another way to make this work or is this pretty much it? Does anyone have a different solution?

Well, after playing with this a little bit, seems like it works much better if the prims overlap the sim border.

Two things that I noticed:

1) If you manually drag an object across a sim border in edit mode, then it doesn't move to the new sim's coordinates until it has gotten at least one meter into the new sim. Until it reaches 1m into the new sim, the coords are still from the old sims frame of reference, e.g., 256.9 instead of 0.9. There seems to be a 1m transition zone on either side of the sim border.

2) In my original solution, I placed 10x10 squares so that their edges were exactly on the sim border. at Y=5 and Y= 251. This worked mostly, but if you walked across at an angle, you would sometimes fall through.

Revised solution:

So, I decided to overlap the sim boundary and see if this improved the situation. Now, the squares are placed at y=2.5 and Y= 253.5. Thus, each of the prims overlaps the adjacent sim by 2.5 meters.

This appears to work much better. Walking perpendicular to the border is much smoother and walking at an angle to the border does not result in a fall.

oh crickey, half my 8k square is in Sand and half is in Picnic! are you saying that if i build something in the midle that overlaps sims it will not look right???? crap...

No, it will look fine. But it won't appear to be solid on the border unless you have overlapping prims from both sims at the border. You'll be walking along and as you cross the border, the floor will go phantom and you'll end up on the ground.

Very interesting, Shack.

SuLuMor built a bridge between Ross and Refugio for a mall I commissioned, and Foolish Frost built a bridge from Ravenglass to Carlisle.

They found that bit where you sink through as well. They found a way to bolster it with prims underneath. Seems to work. They could answer as to what they did, exactly, because I'm thinking you've discovered some new information here that might make this job easier next time.

I think I can work with the phantom aspect, now I know I have a built in glitch to work with. I think I can use it to my advantage actually, for example, by implying that there is water ahead (that is actually the border of the sim), I can direct people's attention to a better view *inspired* thanks guys/gals/furrys etc