A Suggestion on Improving Mainland

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

16 hours ago, Anicha Heartsong said:

Currently, to change terrain textures you need to own the entire region. It would be good if this ability were extended to all parcel owners, no matter how small.

I love this idea too but as Qie pointed out, the concern is that'll it'll end up looking like a weird quilt.

[Love Zhaoying]

7 minutes ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

I love this idea too but as Qie pointed out, the concern is that'll it'll end up looking like a weird quilt.

That's how "real" farmland looks, at least in the US (small acreage fields, not corporate farms)!

[BilliJo Aldrin]

39 minutes ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

I love this idea too but as Qie pointed out, the concern is that'll it'll end up looking like a weird quilt.

Here ya go https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/LandMap-Change-your-ground-texture-without-land-powers/236734

For a small fee I'll come over and texture your parcel for you. 😁

Edited July 13, 2023 by BilliJo Aldrin

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

14 minutes ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

Here ya go https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/LandMap-Change-your-ground-texture-without-land-powers/236734

For a small fee I'll come over and texture your parcel for you. 😁

Nifty tool, but we're talking about texturing the actual terrain.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

11 minutes ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

Nifty tool, but we're talking about texturing the actual terrain.

It creates a sculpted prim that mimics the terrain, you lay it on top and add the texture you want.

Unless you have admin rights to the sim, you are out of luck then.

[Mar Scarmon]

I just thought of a brilliant idea, if they could make a feature that permits property owners to de-render objects visible from their property for everyone who is on their property.  Problem solved!  That's my problem, how do I de-render things for tenants and prospective tenants?  They come to my property to check out a rental and see crap floating around nearby   Being able to de-render in my viewer only is not much help.

[Skylar Woodford]

On 7/22/2023 at 12:54 PM, Mar Scarmon said:

I just thought of a brilliant idea, if they could make a feature that permits property owners to de-render objects visible from their property for everyone who is on their property.  Problem solved!  That's my problem, how do I de-render things for tenants and prospective tenants?  They come to my property to check out a rental and see crap floating around nearby   Being able to de-render in my viewer only is not much help.

100%! I'm very lucky that my neighbors have pretty attractive plots - but I know two lots specifically that I de rendered everything because they had such tall walls it would literally block the sun.

[Della Starlight]

On 7/22/2023 at 12:54 PM, Mar Scarmon said:

I just thought of a brilliant idea, if they could make a feature that permits property owners to de-render objects visible from their property for everyone who is on their property.  Problem solved!  That's my problem, how do I de-render things for tenants and prospective tenants?  They come to my property to check out a rental and see crap floating around nearby   Being able to de-render in my viewer only is not much help.

What you have to remember is that you cannot de-render anything if you are using the Second Life Viewer. You can de-render using Firestorm, and I don't know about other third-party viewers.

[Katherine Heartsong]

3 hours ago, Della Starlight said:

What you have to remember is that you cannot de-render anything if you are using the Second Life Viewer.

I haven't used the standard LL viewer since about the first month here, but what now, really? Wow. I'd tear my hair out if I couldn't de-render some of the more garish (in my eye) parcels. It's also why I'm happy with my current parcel. I want to expand my gallery space, but can't move because any decent 1/4 parcel I find has at least one blindly awful neighbour.

Edited August 9, 2023 by Katherine Heartsong

[Love Zhaoying]

20 minutes ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

I haven't used the standard LL viewer since about the first month here, but what now, really? Wow. I'd tear my hair out if I couldn't de-render some of the more garish (in my eye) parcels. It's also why I'm happy with my current parcel. I want to expand my gallery space, but can't move because any decent 1/4 parcel I find has at least one blindly awful neighbour.

I "only" use the official viewer, and so far as I can see - that's one of the few features I am missing out on (the way I use Second Life).  I used Firestorm for a brief period years ago because it had a better way to block unwanted group messages at the time.

[William Gide]

On 6/18/2023 at 2:49 AM, animats said:

When terraformed land is abandoned, it should erode back to smooth terrain. There are some areas with multiple abandoned parcels with sharp vertical edges between them. The land looks like a former strip mining site.

Today I was touring the mainland, by foot, by flight, and sometimes I just hop on one of those pods I've seen a few people complain about.

It occurred to me that, from a business perspective, the sheer ugliness of all that lumpy, empty land with the oversaturated ground textures would be enough reason to do something about the look of abandoned land.

So, I agree completely with @animats, and would add the further suggestion that abandoned land get some sort of (script deployed, perhaps) characteristic landscaping — with trees — so the world doesn't look like like a covered-over landfill. I recommend something specific to abandoned land, so people out hunting for mainland to acquire can tell the difference between abandoned land and the land of someone who likes to make gardens and forests. I realize there's probably a computational cost for landscaping, but I wonder if the cost of empty sim space that no one wants to buy isn't worse.

I've built up my land by buying abandoned land, and I specifically avoided areas that would put me next to vast hectares of other abandoned land, just because it's at least as unappealing as a tacky store or those giant privacy walls. Lightly landscaped abandoned land would be much nicer to live near.

(I did skim this entire thread, so I hope I'm not duplicating a suggestion.)

Edited August 12, 2023 by William Gide

[animats]

45 minutes ago, William Gide said:

abandoned land get some sort of (script deployed, perhaps) characteristic landscaping — with trees — so the world doesn't look like like a covered-over landfill.

There's been some indication at Creator User Group that there are plans for better land textures after PBR gets deployed. Skies have been modernized and look good, and so has water, but terrain needs an upgrade. Terrain doesn't even have old materials, let alone new ones. It's just flat base color. So suggest things in that area.

Maybe upgrade Linden trees and grass, which are also just flat base color. Then use them on abandoned land.

It would be amusing if there was a slow, automatic process for abandoned land. After abandonment, harsh edges gradually smooth out. Then some Linden weeds appear. Then more weeds and grasses. Then small trees. Gradually, the trees become larger. Eventually, after a year or two, it looks lightly forested.

Edited August 12, 2023 by animats

[Qie Niangao]

13 hours ago, animats said:

It would be amusing if there was a slow, automatic process for abandoned land. After abandonment, harsh edges gradually smooth out. Then some Linden weeds appear. Then more weeds and grasses. Then small trees. Gradually, the trees become larger. Eventually, after a year or two, it looks lightly forested.

The process of reclaiming abandoned land could stand some automated improvements, even if the gradual vegetation is further out on the development path.

Some of it could be scripted into a single invisible prim that gets rezzed on the first Governor-owned parcel in the region.

There's some interval (two weeks?) after land is abandoned before the Lab gives up on getting a request to restore the land to its previous owner. At that point the land permissions get adjusted again to enable auto-return (can't be LSL scripted) and all the contents poof back to the previous owners' Lost+Found folders. That's when the land reclamation process should begin. Each adjacent abandoned parcel should be merged together, a step that must consume some Linden time when preparing land for auction or acquisition by neighbors; though we lack LSL for that, surely a bot could be programmed to do it. Then either that bot or an easy LSL script should revert the terrain and smooth a narrow band at the edges to reduce impact on neighbors.

(For best aesthetics, the whole parcel could be lightly smoothed because the raw terrain files for Mainland seem to be broad-brush, leaving slopes weirdly terraced. The terraforming limits, though, are determined by those terraced heights, so parcels at auction should be fully reverted, not smoothed.)

And then the planting can begin.

[Charlize Eberhart]

Personally, I think the most unfortunate part about mainland is how dated the landscaping is.  The roads, the lights, the trees, the plants.  It's 2023.  On Heterocera there are literally just lamp posts in the middle of a brick road, it makes no sense.  I'd love to see some gentle updates done, it's an eyesore.

[Always Incognito]

7 hours ago, Charlize Eberhart said:

Personally, I think the most unfortunate part about mainland is how dated the landscaping is.  The roads, the lights, the trees, the plants.  It's 2023.  On Heterocera there are literally just lamp posts in the middle of a brick road, it makes no sense.  I'd love to see some gentle updates done, it's an eyesore.

I agree that would be nice! And easier to accomplishe maybee than set some kind of covenant against "abominations" as we all have different taste ^^ Pic from a friend of mine and her new neighbour - "your world your imagination" 🤐 

[UnilWay SpiritWeaver]

15 hours ago, Always Incognito said:

 🤐 

The Bellisseria rule against skyboxes below 2000m is a great rule. I'd call this image a skybox rezzed at ground. But on mainland there's no rule against that, sadly.

If you wanted mainland to look nice, it would have to have some kind of 'fitting the region / theme / minimum quality' for anything below 1000m. But a lot of people go for mainland precisely because it lacks an 'HOA'...

 

[UnilWay SpiritWeaver]

17 hours ago, UnilWay SpiritWeaver said:

But a lot of people go for mainland precisely because it lacks an 'HOA'...

I do wish they could take 1/3 or 1/2 of the mainland continents and give them the Belli covenant, while also making them uniform in maturity rating (this one here goes 100% G, that one there goes 100% M).

The shakeup would be radical. BUT they have done it before - when they made the A rating and pushed everyone who now fell under it over to Zindra. So we know SL will survive the drama, though it will be a LOT of drama.

I think a "mainland" that had the Belli rules would be extremely popular, as as long as the 'anarchy now' folks didn't lose their kind of mainland it would work.

[diamond Marchant]

2 hours ago, UnilWay SpiritWeaver said:

I do wish they could take 1/3 or 1/2 of the mainland continents and give them the Belli covenant, while also making them uniform in maturity rating (this one here goes 100% G, that one there goes 100% M).

Something strange is happening with Governance and I don't know if it is a change in policy or just a backlog situation. An obvious-no-doubt-about-it sex store is operation on a Mainland M region. Been there for weeks. Are they trying out an R rating..  sex stores okay but not public avatar sex?

[UnilWay SpiritWeaver]

3 minutes ago, diamond Marchant said:

Something strange is happening with Governance and I don't know if it is a change in policy or just a backlog situation. An obvious-no-doubt-about-it sex store is operation on a Mainland M region. Been there for weeks. Are they trying out an R rating..  sex stores okay but not public avatar sex?

Probably just needs to be properly AR'd and the AR then needs time to get handled.

 

[animats]

2 hours ago, UnilWay SpiritWeaver said:

I do wish they could take 1/3 or 1/2 of the mainland continents and give them the Belli covenant

It's been discussed before. A place to start might be urban areas where there are already terraforming and land cutting restrictions, such as Bay City and Kama City.

[diamond Marchant]

14 minutes ago, UnilWay SpiritWeaver said:

Probably just needs to be properly AR'd and the AR then needs time to get handled.

7 ARs have been filed, the first in July. The category "Indecency > Inappropriate conduct or content for Region Rating" is used. The "Click the abusive object" option gives them a picture. Details are provided. What more can one do?

If the issue here is simply that Governence is understaffed, then I would expect they would  NOT make any changes, such as adding more rules to mainland, that would require even MORE Governance activity.

Edited August 22, 2023 by diamond Marchant

[UnilWay SpiritWeaver]

1 minute ago, diamond Marchant said:

7 ARs have been filed, the first in July. The category "Indencey > Inappropriate conduct or content for Region Rating" is used. The "Click the abusive object" option gives them a picture." Details are provided. What more can one do?

Hmmm. Yeah that's unfortunate.

I don't know. In theory that should be all you need to do.

 

[animats]

14 minutes ago, diamond Marchant said:

sex store is operation on a Mainland M region.

Are they just selling sex beds or something? Or is it a brothel?

At some point, it's time to move to Zindra. Which isn't really that wild.

[diamond Marchant]

4 minutes ago, animats said:

Are they just selling sex beds or something?

this, with photos of avatars using the products... in public view from a protected waterway

Edited August 22, 2023 by diamond Marchant

[Persephone Emerald]

40 minutes ago, animats said:

Are they just selling sex beds or something? Or is it a brothel?

At some point, it's time to move to Zindra. Which isn't really that wild.

39 minutes ago, diamond Marchant said:

this, with photos of avatars using the products... in public view from a protected waterway

That's the (lack of a) problem then. Governance is unlikely to uproot a store just because it has some adult animations in it's furniture.