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Do you think the SL world is a flat plane or a round planet?


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1 minute ago, Gopi Passiflora said:

I'd like to think it's a round planet, with the sun and moon rising and setting over the horizon, the concept of the cardinal directions present on Earth (North, South, East, and West), and you can't see to the edge of the world. Although, there are no time zones like on Earth....

Hi Gopi! How've you been?

You know, I've not thought about this before but I actually think of it as flat, probably because I'm so used to only looking at the map. 

It would be cool to see the map turned into a globe!

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Just now, Beth Macbain said:

Hi Gopi! How've you been?

You know, I've not thought about this before but I actually think of it as flat, probably because I'm so used to only looking at the map. 

It would be cool to see the map turned into a globe!

Hey Beth! I'm good, thank you for asking. Hope all's well with you!

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6 minutes ago, Gopi Passiflora said:

I'd like to think it's a round planet, with the sun and moon rising and setting over the horizon, the concept of the cardinal directions present on Earth (North, South, East, and West), and you can't see to the edge of the world. Although, there are no time zones like on Earth....

Thank you, Gopi, for this timely injection of a little absurdist humour into this increasingly grim place.

To answer your question: SL is neither a globe, or a flat plane.

It is a shoe box, kept for security reasons under Ebbe's bed. I know this because when I travel too far up, down, or in the direction of any of the cardinal points, I hit a wall.

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I think of it more like the universe, with all those private regions being planets scattered around space & the larger mainland masses just being larger planets.  You can't walk/drive/fly between the planets, thus the technology of teleporting has evolved to allow for travel between the planets. 

 

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It is a non-euclidean manifold, with exactly which 3 dimensions project to provide the illusion of "space" at any point being different for every distinct block of regions- this being why you can't "see regions across corners" if that's the only point they touch - if there was a region connecting the two they would share the same dimension space and you could look across the mutual corner and see the other region. Exactly how many dimensions this manifold has is unknown and will only become known when it becomes impossible to place any further region on the grid without being able to see into another one. The number of dimensions can then be discovered by enumerating nR, the number of distinct region-clusters (a continent, a standalone private island, two or more private regions connected together each count as one region-cluster - if you can see into any region from another, they are part of the same dimension space) and d, the number of dimensions, will be found by solving nR=(d-1)C3.
(d-1 because, inexplicably, all possible dimension spaces appear to have a unified time dimension so this single dimension is explicitly excluded from the calculation)

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2 hours ago, Gopi Passiflora said:

I'd like to think it's a round planet, with the sun and moon rising and setting over the horizon, the concept of the cardinal directions present on Earth (North, South, East, and West), and you can't see to the edge of the world. Although, there are no time zones like on Earth....

SL is CLEARLY a Mobious strip of infinite length.

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21 minutes ago, KT Kingsley said:

Quite easy to test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes#Measurement_of_the_Earth's_circumference.

Which brings to mind a potential derail question, which are the easternmost and westernmost (and, for that matter, northern- and southernmost) mainland regions in SL?

The most northern spot that I can find on the map - not that specific region, but that row of regions:

image.png.4b853c0384c2427bb18690029899ba7d.png

 

This appears to be the most western:

image.png.e39cecb469bccb47d03560776612cf3a.png

 

This is the most southern that I can find:

image.png.0ca519d796a5ba86aa47ba281c2b6910.png

 

And the east side of Zindra looks to be the most eastern - not that specific region, but that row of regions:

image.png.127376b6638a07efff4efaa2786794fb.png

 

 

Rough guesses from scrollling the map around.

Edited by LittleMe Jewell
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Because of texture warping, probably a inverted sphere:

Snapshot_009.jpg.5df885df6f9c2a93e470de3310b24beb.jpg

But from a technical standpoint, the Second Life grid is either:

  • A 1,208,925,819,051,679,221,350,400 sqm flat plane. Region handles are two unsigned 32-bit integer(That is a number between 0 and 4,294,967,295), so that would be 4,294,967,295 * 4,294,967,295 = 1,208,925,819,051,679,221,350,400 square meters. This is the network limitation.
  • A 281,466,386,841,600 sqm flat plane. Scripts are not able to handle large 64-bit numbers natively, and I don't think there would be a need to go over 65535 by 65535 regions. Not to mention other complications that may arise, such as floating point precision errors. This is the likely internal limitation.

Either way, it is flat! Real planet curvature in 3D environments is a massive pain. A majority of game developers who make 3D environments that include a traversable planet will actually cheat by making a torus planet, like so:

1541789697177-DonutEarth.jpeg

The reason for this, is that torus shapes can unwrap nicely into a flat plane, you just make the values loop back over, eg a torus planet unwrapped to a flat plane that is 255 by 255 in size, you can make (256, 32) loop back over to position (0, 32), so it seems seamless and round, but it isn't actually round!

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8 hours ago, Chaser Zaks said:

1541789697177-DonutEarth.jpeg

The reason for this, is that torus shapes can unwrap nicely into a flat plane, you just make the values loop back over, eg a torus planet unwrapped to a flat plane that is 255 by 255 in size, you can make (256, 32) loop back over to position (0, 32), so it seems seamless and round, but it isn't actually round!

adding to this

if we were an avatar in the world and without any God/Linden/human knowledge of how the world is constructed, and we applied rational observation and measurement to the world (as an avatar) then

our observation of the position of the sun and moon as we move across the land would lead us (by rational thought) to conclude that the world is a torii with a single twist

where the body of the earth, sun and moon are stationary. Sun in the center, Earth a ring (single twist torii) around the Sun, Moon on the outside of the ring.  The surface of the Earth moves following the twist of the torii

which is the only measurable explanation for why the Sun always occupies the same latitude position no matter where we are on the earth surface and yet there is also day and night. A moon that also rises and falls in which there is no moon eclipse of the sun

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