Not in Second Life

[ChinRey]

I'm posting this in the General forum because although it's about a build, it's not really for builders only. I'm also posting it a bit too early. I was going to present a finished work, not jsut a concept, and I still have plants and houses and lot of other stuff to add and I'm not quite happy with the ground textures yet either. But it should be enough to give people with a little bit of imagination an idea what I have in mind.

This project started with the old slogan "Your World, Your Imagination". I thought, what if it really had been my world and my imagination - what would I have made out of it? This is one of the things I might have made.

Explorers want space, they want landscapes to discover and they want roads to travel on. Home owners want privacy. 64 1024 m2 parcels spread across a 4x4 opensim variregion (that's 16 SL sims for those not familiar with opensim) should give both groups all they want. (This project is really supposed to be nine such sims but I've only done the two most difficult ones so far. Once they are finished, the other seven should be quite easy.)

Then I realized there are no technical reasons why something similar couldn't be done in SL too. We don't have variregions here of course, but we do have homesteads. Think of the Horizon sims (or the SSP ones now). 24 double prim 1024 m2 parcel crammed into each sim. Replace each of those sims with four homesteads, each with six quadruple prim 1024's et voila. Same server load, less client side lag, more prims to the people, more privacy to the residents and room for some lovely landscape for everybody to enjoy. It's a win-win situation if ever there was one.

It's not going to happen of course, for a ton of reasons. But oh well, I build for my own enjoyment and for the challenge so it doesn't bother me too much. And at least I can show off some pictures. Here's what I have so far (those ugly bright green squares mark the house parcels in case somebdy wonder).

I may have verdone the hairpin roads a bit but it is a a very curvy landscape so they're hard to avoid.

I want to give the residents as many options as possible and I thought maybe there are people who actualy prefer to live by a rler-straight road across a pancake flat landscape. Got that too!

[CheriColette]

Is your place open to visitors?

[ChinRey]

46 minutes ago, CheriColette said:

Is your place open to visitors?

The one in the pictures? It's not in SL at all, it's on my own private grid. The build is 32 sims at the moment and still growing. Even if they are homesteads, it would still cost thousands of dollars a month to have them in Second Life. A homestead only uses a quarter of the server capacity of a full sim but that's not reflected in the price LL charges.

The title of this thread is "Not in Second Life". It's an example of what is perfectly possible technically but impossible because of several other factors, such as LL's pricing policy. I won't say it is a good concept, people have to decide that for themselves, but even if it is, it's an opportunity that was lost long ago.

Edit, oh well! In theory it can be done by LL themselves, maybe as special Linden Homes for those "super-premiums" they've been hinting at. They certainly can use the idea of spreading 24 1024s across four homesteads rather than cram them into a single sim if they want to but there's more to it than that. Quadruple prim quotas mean there's only 920 LI available for landscape and houses at each sim. It's going to be an open landscape so you can't cheat on the LoD and since you have to allow people to use long draw distances (512 m at least), you have to keep the lag down too. So no bloated LoD factors and a very careful texture management. And it has to be an interesting landscape, not just umpteen copies of the same tree. You certainly can't fill up all that space with 14 LI trees with a prim budget that tight. Technically possible yes, but it's not something the average builder can do.

Edited March 24, 2019 by ChinRey

[Maitimo]

4 hours ago, ChinRey said:

It's not going to happen of course, for a ton of reasons. But oh well, I build for my own enjoyment and for the challenge so it doesn't bother me too much. And at least I can show off some pictures. Here's what I have so far (those ugly bright green squares mark the house parcels in case somebdy wonder).

These pictures all remind me of the Scottish Highlands, or the Lake District in England. Then again, all your houses remind me of that too. 

Edited March 24, 2019 by Matty Luminos

[animats]

Very nice.

(One of my back-burner ideas was a semi-automatic road generator. You'd drive a vehicle over a road, and it would record the dimensions of all the road objects. That info would be fed into a Blender script. The script would compute a spline along the road path, then extrude a road cross section along the spline to give you a smooth mesh road. The cross section would then be cut up into 64m or less sections, ready for upload. The script would also take care of the support objects needed at region crossings. Useful for projects like this. You'd make a crude road with prims, and then the script would make you a nice one. Maybe we could even get the moles to use it to overhaul some of the bad roads in Sansara.)

[ChinRey]

24 minutes ago, Matty Luminos said:

These pictures all remind me of the Scottish Highlands, or the Lake District in England. Then again, all your houses remind me of that too. 

All of them??? 😮

It's mildly annoying sometimes. I started working in that style because my SL land is in the Hidden Lake District. It was quite a struggle at first because I didn't know anything about Northern English building style at all. Now I can't seem to get out of it.

Maybe some birches will help...

 

[ChinRey]

2 minutes ago, animats said:

One of my back-burner ideas was a semi-automatic road generator. You'd drive a vehicle over a road, and it would record the dimensions of all the road objects. That info would be fed into a Blender script.

That's an interesting idea. You'd still have to adjust the terrain to make it a suitable road surface though and that's the main part of the job.

I wanted all the roads to blend smoothlessly into the landscape like this

and that meant fine tuning the landscape to the road rather than the other way round. I couldn't always get it as smooth as this but at least there shouldn't be any exposed edges and the ground mesh shouldn't extend beyond the grass texture part of the road mesh anywhere.

On average it took about three hours to make the road for each sim, two hours to build the road, one to adjust the ground. For some of the sims I made detailed prim roads first, for others I just put prim markers at strategic points and filled in the gaps in Blender.

Triangle counts varies from 18 to 280 but most of them are in the 120s or130s. It's low enough there was no point in making LoD models - it's full details all the way. I had to use 12 different 512x512 textures because of all the different asphalt/dirt road crossroad and T-junction combinations and there may be more when the build is finished but it's still a ridiculously low resource use for something that adds so much both to the looks and the functionality. They're great low lag sim fillers too; fill up a whole sim with this kind of road and you end up with less than 200 LI and less than 10,000 render weight. I'm trying to find good excuses to add more roads - or maybe a network of footpaths?

[animats]

26 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

I'm trying to find good excuses to add more roads - or maybe a network of footpaths?

Buy up abandoned land in the middle of Corsica, add roads and plants, connect it to the Linden road system, subdivide, and resell?

[CheriColette]

6 hours ago, ChinRey said:

The one in the pictures? It's not in SL at all, it's on my own private grid. The build is 32 sims at the moment and still growing. Even if they are homesteads, it would still cost thousands of dollars a month to have them in Second Life. A homestead only uses a quarter of the server capacity of a full sim but that's not reflected in the price LL charges.

The title of this thread is "Not in Second Life". It's an example of what is perfectly possible technically but impossible because of several other factors, such as LL's pricing policy. I won't say it is a good concept, people have to decide that for themselves, but even if it is, it's an opportunity that was lost long ago.

Edit, oh well! In theory it can be done by LL themselves, maybe as special Linden Homes for those "super-premiums" they've been hinting at. They certainly can use the idea of spreading 24 1024s across four homesteads rather than cram them into a single sim if they want to but there's more to it than that. Quadruple prim quotas mean there's only 920 LI available for landscape and houses at each sim. It's going to be an open landscape so you can't cheat on the LoD and since you have to allow people to use long draw distances (512 m at least), you have to keep the lag down too. So no bloated LoD factors and a very careful texture management. And it has to be an interesting landscape, not just umpteen copies of the same tree. You certainly can't fill up all that space with 14 LI trees with a prim budget that tight. Technically possible yes, but it's not something the average builder can do.

I get it now. And I did read the title but thought it relating to the concept not being in Second Life (not the whole thing as you have further explained). 

[lucagrabacr]

That's a nice landscape  reminds me to the snowland part of Sansara, but it looks better imo because of the grassland scenery

[Marianne Little]

I wish mainland could look like this. At least part of mainland.

The best is that the parcels don't touch, so there is green trees and ground between the parcels.

Buying up abandoned land sounds like a great idea, but someone would have to hold the public land in between the parcels, or else it goes out of control. It is out of the average persons economy. And the lottery drawings is never picking me as a winner.

LL has so much abandoned land, I wish they would let a resident do something like this for them. It would look so attractive. A resident like @ChinReydoes it for her own entertainment, if I read the first post correct. LL could name a park or a lookout point as a honor to the resident landscaper.

Of course there should be mainland with no rules left, but that is hardly a problem, it is so much of it.

Edited March 24, 2019 by Marianne Little
removed 2 words

[ChinRey]

5 hours ago, lucagrabacr said:

That's a nice landscape  reminds me to the snowland part of Sansara, but it looks better imo because of the grassland scenery

Thank you. This is actually how the project started. The inspiration was MilitaryVerse's Atropia sims, not anything in SL, but the principle is the same.

Not just the Snowlands but most of Sansara and Heterocera have some seriously good landscaping. It adds so much to the quality of the scene and it comes with no overhead whatsoever. What those continents lack, are good ground textures and spaces it's easy to build something on. Those two problems are easily fixed without resorting to the modern solution of loading a ton of meshes onto some bland simplistic ground and that, perhaps more than anything else, was what I wanted to demonstrate.

 

5 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

LL has so much abandoned land, I wish they would let a resident do something like this for them.

Maybe but it's all wishful thinking you know. The frustrating part is that it's not that can't be done, it's all because it's Not How We Do It In Second Life.

 

16 hours ago, animats said:

Buy up abandoned land in the middle of Corsica, add roads and plants, connect it to the Linden road system, subdivide, and resell?

That would be great but as Marianne said, somebody would have to protect the roads and the "buffer zones" between the houses. If you sell the moneymaking parcels, you'd be left with a lot of tier and no income.

Edited March 24, 2019 by ChinRey

[BilliJo Aldrin]

It's simply amazing, congrats.

And as others have said, it's a shame LL doesn't allow trusted members to do something like that on abandoned land.

I could spend hours and hours terraforming and planting in a "beautify SL" campaign.

[Parhelion Palou]

23 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Quadruple prim quotas mean there's only 920 LI available for landscape and houses at each sim.

I'm confused about your numbers. A 1024 sqm parcel on a homestead region gets 78 LI (5000/64). Make the region bonus 4.0 and it the parcel gets 312 LI (which is what a 1K parcel on a standard estate region has). Six of those parcels is 1872 LI, leaving 3128 LI for use in the public areas for the houses and landscaping.

[ChinRey]

44 minutes ago, Parhelion Palou said:

I'm confused about your numbers. A 1024 sqm parcel on a homestead region gets 78 LI (5000/64). Make the region bonus 4.0 and it the parcel gets 312 LI (which is what a 1K parcel on a standard estate region has). Six of those parcels is 1872 LI, leaving 3128 LI for use in the public areas for the houses and landscaping.

Oh yes, that's right. I was thinking in terms of full sim prim quotas. So 680 prims per resident and 920 left for the houses and the common land. Or something like that.

Edited March 25, 2019 by ChinRey

[Parhelion Palou]

4 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Oh yes, that's right. I was thinking in terms of full sim prim quotas. So 680 prims per resident and 920 left for the houses and the common land.

680 prims per resident (1K parcel) would be a bonus factor of 8.72 for a homestead. With 6 residents that leaves the 920 LI that you stated.

I realize it's not important for the thread. It would be interesting if LL tried something like this, but I don't believe they *want* the Linden homes to be that attractive.

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Parhelion Palou said:

680 prims per resident (1K parcel) would be a bonus factor of 8.72 for a homestead.

Make it bonus factor 9 then

Oh, and that talk about quadruple prims for a full sim was a misunderstanding. That would be 1340, not 680 prims. 24 such 1024s on a full sim or six of them on a homestead would be more than the sim's full capacity.

 

59 minutes ago, Parhelion Palou said:

I realize it's not important for the thread. It would be interesting if LL tried something like this, but I don't believe they *want* the Linden homes to be that attractive.

I don't know what they want, they do seem to be keen on capturing tenants from the private estate owners these days. But I can't see them actually doing something like this.

Edited March 25, 2019 by ChinRey

[Aethelwine]

I think the closest I have seen most similar to this idea in Secondlife are those in Second Norway where homesteads are divided up with common space between them and a road system and waterways. The waterways dominate, because they fulfill a desire for people to have a home with a place to rezz their boats.

That said I would like the option of living on a continent like yours where I could drive my car down to the coast to start a journey, but occupancy on the Hollywood estate sims seems lower now than I remember. The market you would be looking at does seem to be contracting.

[Hunter Stern]

I love the raised road curbs , and honestly, your pics make me think of a sprawling English hillside at a glance.

[Candice LittleBoots]

I don't understand what's happening here or what people are talking about, but I like the pictures and it got me thinking ..

It would be great if we could run our own mini-SIM on our own home computers that have off-grid coordinates that people can TP to when we are online. Of course, our little bit of land, or skybox, or whatever, disappears when we log off. Wouldn't that be fun!  (or would it?)

[Selene Gregoire]

3 hours ago, Candice LittleBoots said:

I don't understand what's happening here or what people are talking about, but I like the pictures and it got me thinking ..

It would be great if we could run our own mini-SIM on our own home computers that have off-grid coordinates that people can TP to when we are online. Of course, our little bit of land, or skybox, or whatever, disappears when we log off. Wouldn't that be fun!  (or would it?)

It could be done. Active Worlds has done it for over a decade. You can host your "world" on your own pc as well as your object path. This means that none of your objects ever need to be uploaded to AW, unless you want to offer them for sale. AW also provides free resources for citizens to use in your worlds. Point being LL could do this, they just don't want to.  Some of us have tried, from time to time, to get LL to do something like this. Our pleas have always fallen on deaf ears.

Edited March 27, 2019 by Selene Gregoire
sometimes my fingers have minds of their own.

[ChinRey]

17 hours ago, Candice LittleBoots said:

It would be great if we could run our own mini-SIM on our own home computers that have off-grid coordinates that people can TP to when we are online. Of course, our little bit of land, or skybox, or whatever, disappears when we log off. Wouldn't that be fun!  (or would it?)

That's exactly what I do. I have not just a sim but a small grid running on my own computer. I can do whatever I want to there without having to worry about the cost or what anybody esle thinks. It gets a bit lonely of course but if I really want to, I can take it online, connect it to the hypergrid and invite people in.

But Not In Second Life.

Linden Lab did actually try to offer the SL software for private grids once. The project was called Second Life Enterprise and a license to host a grid only cost a symbolic 55,000 dollars -  a bargain compared to opensim's hefty $0 charge. The SL Enterprise grids were not connected to SL but in theory you could move content back and forth between the two. The only thing you had to do, was prove that you owned the IP rights to every prim, texture, animation and other asset on the sims.

For some reason it never took off: https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2012/03/second-life-enterprise-was-a-costly-mistake/

(Edit: I think the Second Life Enterprise project illustrates better than anything else why I call the period after Cory Linden but before Ebbe and Oz SL's "Six Dark Years". That's history thankfully although the consequences still cause serious problems today. Sansar is not history though, am I the only one to notice some worrying similarities?)

Edited March 28, 2019 by ChinRey

[Rufferta]

I had an idea. How about Second Life take some of the abandoned sims on Mainland, hire ChinRey to landscape them and put roads on them, and then put some of the 'Linden Homes for Premium Members' on them? They would have to leave 'wildlife corridors' and such in place, but I'm sure it would improve the Mainland.

I'm no techy, I'm sure there must be numerous reasons why the Lindens have to put their Premium suburbs on big pieces of separate land or they would have thought of this themselves already, but I thought I'd mention it.

Edited April 2, 2019 by Rufferta
'noob ghetto' was probably not the best choice of words

[ChinRey]

On 4/2/2019 at 6:00 PM, Rufferta said:

I had an idea. How about Second Life take some of the abandoned sims on Mainland, hire ChinRey to landscape them and put roads on them

They can't afford me.

But seriously...

On 4/2/2019 at 6:00 PM, Rufferta said:

II'm no techy, I'm sure there must be numerous reasons why the Lindens have to put their Premium suburbs on big pieces of separate land

They don't anymore, the new SSP sims are connected to the mainland continents, in fact they connect two mainland continents.

The concept I've sketched up here wouldn't work for Linden homes, old or new, or course, since they aren't double prim but t could be adapted with 12 regular prim quota 1024s for each homestead sim. It's not something the Moles are able to build though and it's understandable that they don't want to hire outsiders to do new Linden Homes.

[Zeta Vandyke]

On 3/27/2019 at 8:23 PM, Selene Gregoire said:

Point being LL could do this, they just don't want to.  Some of us have tried, from time to time, to get LL to do something like this. Our pleas have always fallen on deaf ears.

It would be awesome, but I guess LL would be killing their own business model if anyone can host their own regions. I mean, I can rent a virtual server for 10 USD$ a month and keep a region open 24/7 (probably not the highest bandwidth for that price but you can upgrade). LL is incredibly expensive in their server rent, because they have monopoly.