Skyboxes stacked up as high as they can go

[Kira Wroth]

I've been visiting different Mainland parcels for rent and noticed that many of the neighbors have skyboxes stacked literally thousands of meters up into the sky.

Is this done so that their neighbors will not build anywhere next to them, from the ground all the way up?

I wasn't sure if this is something I should try to stay away from when considering renting next to a person who is doing this. It is so commonplace that I thought I should post here and see if anyone has any insight into this. 

[beethros Karas]

Hello. Kira. Nice to meet you.

A skybox or skydome is a common thing in SL for many reasons.

One of them is what you said.. to avoid having the view blocked from the nearby parcels.

It is started way back in time, when someone wanted to take advantage from all the grid secondlife was providing... 

When someone buy or rent a parcel they actually rent all the grid from the ground all the way up to 4096m where the grid ends.

So as an example a parcel of 1024m has a footprint of 32 X 32 X 4096m ( H x W x H )

So, why not to create a skybox at 500 meters for sister, one at 1000 meters for brother, one at 2000m for best friend and 1 at 4000 meters for... mother in law

Other people they don't care for family but they are trying to earn some money by building skyboxes and rent them out to others.

So with few words, a person who pays for 1 lot, can actually have several homes with the same money.

Well, there are some disadvantages comparing with the privacy by living alone in a parcel.

For example, they all have to listen to the same music, have the same parcel name, picture, landing point etc etc.

That's why renters in SL prefer to rent a private parcel instead of a skybox. They want to use all the abilities secondlife provides.

... I cant avoid to tell you a story It happen to a friend lately..

He has rent a parcel of mine and he create there a skybox rentals company and he started to rent out skyboxes to the people..

A week later, someone came and said that they wanted to rent the actual ground and they ask him to move his "office" ( A place where the landlords set their tier boxes and info for their company) up to the sky so they would be able to rent and live in the ground level.

The ground level, was really a cool place due to nearby nice buildings and the platinum sand and water and trees etc etc..

So my friend, who wanted to not loose tenants accept it and worked a few hours to move his "office" up to the sky on a platform and he rent out the ground to those people...

So good so far. Here comes the funny part ...( lol)

The next morning ( Oh dear pixel God) they rez a.... SKYBOX on the ground level and started to live inside it behind.. Walls!

We both was amazed of that, but of course we haven't said anything..

Their money their choice!

With this example we can see another reason why people build BOXES to live inside.. They believe that they will have privacy and other people cannot see them, which isn't actually the truth. Walls or whatever prim isn't enough to stop eyes watching inside the house.

For that someone has to use the "about Land Menu" ...

Thanks for your question!

It make me feel happy to provide an answer with my point of view!

I am sure, I forgot more reasons why someone want to build a skybox, I will edit this later if I remember something and also I am sure more people will reply to give their point of view about this!

Wish you a lot of fun in your secondlife ( and RL)

Cheers!

beethros Karas

[UVB]

That was a funny story about the guy building a skybox on the ground-- shakes my head- lol

[Chic Aeon]

While there are many reasons to be "up in the air", one is that the framerate is always (in my experience at least) better than that down on the ground. Sometimes is it MUCH better like 3 or 4 times faster  -- so less what we call "lag" if you don't count the texture loading.

And yes, there is no privacy except on your own sim which you have closed off to the public .

 

 

[Prokofy Neva]

I think this is a very pernicious practice myself.

There are several well-known rentals companies that do this "stacking" and the HUGE drawback to it is that you cannot let people then have their own dedicated media stream.

They can't run TVs or radios and select their own movies and pictures -- because they are all stacked up on one lot like that, any time anyone changes the channel, everyone on that parcel has to watch this.

These companies have ONE radio station which they think is "enough" for all their customers. And I guess it works for some.

They also make these very sculpty "nests" of mountains or hills and plunk down cheap prefabs into it and people then live on that sculpty/nest thing. And everyone around can see into that area -- they aren't boxes in fact. So the only thing I suppose is you can have "avatars can see me" unchecked so that no one can see avatars, but they can peep into your house and yard.

What I find the most annoying is that these companies park all these stacks of pancakes alongside any other rentals they can find to "compete" -- although I never see green dots there so they aren't really "competing". They hog the map view with an ad to show up on the map, and then you have a hard time putting your own skyboxes -- on dedicated parcels -- anywhere they AREN'T because they are literally at every level, every 100-200 meters or so. 

So as you can see, I think this is a tacky practice and no, you shouldn't buy land next to it because it will be hard to find a level. On the other hand, on numerous sims where I've seen them, I don't see the green dots that much so the people aren't there. Yet they are so pervasive that they must get business.

All of this is preparation for Project Sansar, of course which people conceive of as a holodeckers' dream with no contiguous land.

 

[Qie Niangao]

---

Prokofy Neva wrote:

 

They can't run TVs or radios and select their own movies and pictures -- because they are all stacked up on one lot like that, any time anyone changes the channel, everyone on that parcel has to watch this.

These companies have ONE radio station which they think is "enough" for all their customers. And I guess it works for some. 

---

I'm not a fan of stacked skyboxes either, but just for completeness: it's true that regular parcel audio is limited to one per parcel, and there's no getting around it. Parcel media, however, can actually be directed specifically to individual viewers, so it's possible (though not common) for a scripted "TV" to direct one stream to everybody in one room of a building and a different stream to everybody in another room, even though the rooms are on the same parcel.

Again, that's not the standard TV scripts that everybody buys; one reason it's not common might be that the underlying script function is exactly the one used in the "RedZone" fiasco (because it makes it trivial to associate an IP address with an avatar, with the implications for revealing likely alt identities). Anoher even geekier limitation: it's practically impossible to know which viewers will respond to synchronization commands for different kinds of media streams.

Also, "Media on a Prim" (MoaP aka "Shared Media") isn't parcel-based at all, and unlike parcel media more than one MoaP stream can be active in a single viewer at the same time. It has all kinds of flaky disadvantages, too, but some products use it anyway, and I believe some of the flakiness gets a little better when WebKit is replaced by CEF, as in the "Valhalla" 4.0 RC viewer.

Both MoaP and parcel media can do pure audio streams as a kind of replacement of land radios (but parcel media supplies only one stream per viewer, so that one is either "radio" or "TV" -- or web, or whatever).

[Tamara Artis]

I used to live on Mainland for many years and had these skyboxes all around me, worst thing about them is that I can't have draw distance in the viewer set to any higher number because they are everywhere and really ugly. But as far as the privacy goes... I didn't mind it. There is really nothing I can have or do at my place that others don't know about it and as far as unwanted visitors, there are security orbs. 

Few times I tried to buy land that had less skyboxes and it was really really hard to find that kind of land, and even when I found it, in a month or 2 the sky was packed! So don't bother with that lol

You can rent a bigger parcel and rezz a platform, trees, even mountains and water on your platform or skydome and live inside without having to look at these skyboxes.

There was this one lady, my first neighbour, escort, all she had was one red wooden skybox and a red bedroom inside with 2 ugly porn photos and a bed in the middle of the room. I guess i t was her office lol. Along with her avi, everything looked pretty ancient but she always had customers there! Few times my friends would take photos and send to the guys lol