A Suggestion on Improving Mainland

[Marianne Little]

I know what I posted about fixed land sizes contradict the "pay per square m".

So it could be one of the systems.

Or both: Fixed land sizes for Premium Plus on land that is landscaped like Bellisseria, without houses on them. This way Premium Plus claim a parcel instead of a house. There could be a rule like :Height of houses max 20 m. So you could buy the house you want as long as it isn't over that limit. Premium plus could even get a symbolic amount of Li added because the land comes without a house.

And old Mainland get the pay per square m - system.

[Rufferta]

Many great ideas above.

I had an idea I suggested to LL  - "If a water parcel becomes abandoned, make it public land rather than putting it up for auction." One of my first negative experiences in Second Life was finding that I couldn't sail on a lot of waterways because they were some other resident's private property. Sorta like clogs in the arteries. Granted, LL would lose some revenue, but I think it would improve the value of Mainland in the long run.

Also one of my first traumatic experience as a newb, (I'm afraid I took it personally), was running into a short-fuse 'security system' and being booted out before I could figure out how to respond. Could there be a minimum response time?

Granted that putting in water channels or bridges between the continents would cost a lot of computer time, how about putting in inter-continental waterways or bridges but charge private Region owners an extra fee to be placed next to them?

 

 

 

[Rowan Amore]

7 minutes ago, Rufferta said:

Also one of my first traumatic experience as a newb, (I'm afraid I took it personally), was running into a short-fuse 'security system' and being booted out before I could figure out how to respond. Could there be a minimum response time?

Freaked me out the first time this happened to but as with everything in SL, it was a learning experience and I was grateful for it.  Orb time limits have already been discussed to death.

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

16 hours ago, Rufferta said:

I had an idea I suggested to LL  - "If a water parcel becomes abandoned, make it public land rather than putting it up for auction." One of my first negative experiences in Second Life was finding that I couldn't sail on a lot of waterways because they were some other resident's private property. Sorta like clogs in the arteries. Granted, LL would lose some revenue, but I think it would improve the value of Mainland in the long run.

I had a similar idea to that too.

If a coastal edge parcel became abandoned and was located in a region without a protected waterway, then that parcel should be restored or retrofitted by the LL maintenance group to include at least a minimal sized protected waterway channel before being auctioned off to potential buyers.

Yes, the parcel might be a bit smaller than it originally was afterwards, but the buyer would still have access to the new protected waterway, along with the rest of the SL population. Seems fair to me.

That way, over time (possibly years), a whole strip of neighbouring parcels in a region (and neighbouring regions) could gradually "grow" their lost or missing coastlines back, eventually re-establishing a complete continent coastline.  This would particularly please the residents of east Sansara and southern Satori which have very poor inaccessible coastlines.

Certainly a better way than just keeping the current system which is flawed and unfair. 

Edited June 10, 2023 by SarahKB7 Koskinen

[Extrude Ragu]

56 minutes ago, Rufferta said:

Also one of my first traumatic experience as a newb, (I'm afraid I took it personally), was running into a short-fuse 'security system' and being booted out before I could figure out how to respond. Could there be a minimum response time?

So, I see this from a different angle - Game design.

I think everyone has subconsciously accepted that security orbs are just 'how secondlife works' - But think about it - How consistent and predictable is the security orb experience?

• Some orbs kick you after 3 seconds, whilst others wait 30
• Some orbs dialog you, whilst others send you text in local chat
• Some orbs teleport you home, whilst others send you to a nearby parcel

In all cases this is a really inconsistent experience for weary travelers and often leads to grief. Nobody who was designing a game would design a system to be so inconsistent.

What I think we need is a better mechanic for parcel boundaries that both gives home owners privacy, whilst also not griefing travellers be they on foot or in a vehicle.

Here are some questions I would start asking myself

• "If we were designing SecondLife, knowing what we know today about how people use the mainland, how would we design the behaviour that occurs for parcel incursions?"
• "How would the behaviour differ depending on if the resident is in a vehicle, vs on foot?"
• "Should a resident who enters a parcel immediately be able to see the people on that parcel?"
• "Should the parcel owner immediately see the resident who made the parcel incursion?"

And then instead of relying on scripters, who will make 100 different solutions that are all clunky and unpredictable, we'd go to LL, this is what we want to happen. Can you design SL so that this happens this way on the mainland, Thank you.

 

[Ardy Lay]

People have told me that I don't have a voice in this conversation because I don't use roads, rails or waterways for traveling.  Well, I do rarely walk great distance.  I usually fly un-aided or teleport.  We have such great abilities there, and a couple of decent navigation aids, easy ways to save and share destinations we visit and pretty good ways to discover new destinations.  Why is so talk of rehabilitating the mainland focusing on archaic and arcane transportations methods?  I have to assume it's because people actually enjoy them.  Do people really use planes, trains and automobiles to get around Second Life or are they using them because they enjoy using them?  If it's for enjoyment, then please keep this in mind when considering remediation.  Endeavor to make the result as enjoyable as possible and maybe more enjoyment will be had by more people.

[Polenth Yue]

What I'd like the most is a tier system that charged per actual area and doesn't go up in jumps. That'd make it easier for someone to own the weird little bits by their land, as it wouldn't require going up a whole tier level. On regions where the road goes through at a diagonal, this is really the only way to stop people cutting off those little bits. It's just not possible to cut the region up neatly into parcels that fit the current tier system.

In other news, it'd be nice to see a refresh done on all the roads. They have bits where the road surface was never added or there's a default plywood prim showing that was adding at the region crossing. Also some roads ended up with an excess of light sources. Sending someone out to walk each route and note needed changes would be a good start.

[Nukasa22]

1 hour ago, Polenth Yue said:

it'd be nice to see a refresh done on all the roads

Yes it would be, and also of all of the Linden objects currently out there. But this would be a tremendous effort. And the question must at least be asked and discussed if it makes sense to overhaul the existing mainland, or if it would make more sense to create a new continent and do those things that may be off in a better way. Better Linden objects, better sailing, less to be abandoned unprotected land. I mean they understood it when they build Horizons, or even Bellisseria. I know there are many arguments against a new continent. What happens to the old continents? Will it be impossible to buy abandoned land? Could it be done in any way that Linden could afford it or is there no way to finance it? It would need to be an investment that aims for more revenue through more people that would be attracted by the addition of the new continent. And of course you'd have the people who currently own "premium spots" on the mainland who would face a potential decrease in land value and who are strongly gonna oppose this, too.

[Marianne Little]

1 hour ago, Ardy Lay said:

People have told me that I don't have a voice in this conversation because I don't use roads, rails or waterways for traveling.  Well, I do rarely walk great distance.  I usually fly un-aided or teleport.  We have such great abilities there, and a couple of decent navigation aids, easy ways to save and share destinations we visit and pretty good ways to discover new destinations.  Why is so talk of rehabilitating the mainland focusing on archaic and arcane transportations methods?  I have to assume it's because people actually enjoy them.  Do people really use planes, trains and automobiles to get around Second Life or are they using them because they enjoy using them?  If it's for enjoyment, then please keep this in mind when considering remediation.  Endeavor to make the result as enjoyable as possible and maybe more enjoyment will be had by more people.

It is a hobby to drive, fly or sail in SL.

It is also the knowing that I can do it, even if I do not. It is the same with water. I do not sail, even if I know the basic and has done it a few times. I like to see a boat by my dock. It looks nice.

It adds to the realism for me. There is my house in the middle of nowhere. It is no road, no railway, no cobblestone path?

So for me, it is about looking "right". It may seem silly that in a world where we can build anything, so many still want a house that is similar to what we could have in RL. Just bigger, better. A Porsche instead of a VW Golf. No, a Porsche and a Rolls Royce.

And they need a road to drive on. This is what private estates lack. Private estates can have the luxury house and the cars, but no roads.

I am a ground resident. I have never been a skybox one. Yes, I have a platform where I can unbox and rez stuff. But live up there, in a box with some landscape printed on the inside? Some love the "Mirror" skyboxes. I thought they looked great when I first saw them. But after I spent more than a few minutes inside one, I needed to get out. It all felt wrong.

[Mar Scarmon]

I notice many mainland parcels that literally have not changed for over a decade.  You never see anyone on them either, other than occasional wanderers, certainly not the owners.  I always wonder who would pay the tier for something that is apparently unused?  I suspect that many are grandfathered by early SL permanent grants or similar, and no one is paying the tier.  I wish SL had a policy that if a parcel was not being paid on, and if there has been no sign of the owner in years, recycle it, sell it, make public land or water ways out of it, just do something with it!

I agree about outdated ground textures and horrible old plants and trees.  Please let surrounding landowners landscape some of the public spaces.  I would like a rule no sky boxes or other sky crap under 1000 meters.  Also if several different landowners agree that something is obnoxious or atrociously ugly they should be able to petition the Lindens to force it to be cleaned up.  Finally, there is too much available mainland, take some land off the market, make it public, turn it into roads, parks, or waterways.

 

[Sparkle Bunny]

8 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

Or both: Fixed land sizes for Premium Plus on land that is landscaped like Bellisseria, without houses on them. This way Premium Plus claim a parcel instead of a house. There could be a rule like :Height of houses max 20 m. So you could buy the house you want as long as it isn't over that limit. Premium plus could even get a symbolic amount of Li added because the land comes without a house.

This, but for Plus. 512 parcels separated by Linden walkways, a covenant with a minimum height for skyboxes and some other basic etiquette (no rentals, no sandboxes, no full bright 'privacy' fences, limited breedables). Basically like the old Linden Homes continent, but you get to place your own house/skybox/shop. Put these estates on currently empty inland regions and do not allow parcels to be resold or purchased by Premium users, only abandoned back to Governor Linden to be set to sale to another Plus subscriber. It'd be a halfway house between madlands and Bellisseria and bring some of those vast tracts of abandoned land back into use.

[Mar Scarmon]

12 hours ago, SarahKB7 Koskinen said:

@Patch Linden, @Derrick Linden, @Quartz Mole

Dear LL. Please...

5. Place snow permanantly on top of SL's tallest mountain range in Campion region. Because SL's tallest mountains without snow on them look really stupid, especially as smaller sized mountains and molehills further south in the Snowlands and Sakura are covered in the stuff!

 

I own a great deal of the land around Mount Campion and I would take issue to the Lindens covering my land in snow, If I wanted snow land I would have gone to the winter area on Sansara.  Also if you go to the summit of Mount Campion now there are plots with palm trees and other out of place features.  I have gone to a great deal of expense and effort to beautify the area around Mount Campion, it is set up a mountain park, Mount Campion National Forest, but adding snow to my build would mess up a lot of the work I have done.  This being said I am firmly committed to the betterment of mainland Second Life.

Thanks

Marz

Second Life Maps | Campion

 

Edited June 10, 2023 by Mar Scarmon
add map

[Extrude Ragu]

9 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

Change ugly ground textures.

I am in an internal discord group that is shared between some creators on SL and also some of the LL developers who are working on the PBR project.

There is a viewer in the works that supports PBR terrain. It is a lot prettier than the terrain we have in SL today, a whole lot less flat looking and they've bumped the resolution up.

Ive had a play with a development version of this viewer and it looks very pretty

[Qie Niangao]

4 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

There is a viewer in the works that supports PBR terrain. It is a lot prettier than the terrain we have in SL today, a whole lot less flat looking and they've bumped the resolution up.

Somebody claimed that Mainland terrain would not get the new PBR materials. I've not heard one way or another, myself, and hope we'll get a refresh on Mainland.

This somehow reminds me: Are they ever going to fix the EEP settings on Mainland? That would be a big improvement, and it keeps coming up in Linden meetings, but nobody seems to step up and take responsibility to actually get it done.

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

I hate EEP so much that I permanantly deactivated it in my viewer since its introduction.

The older Windlight system with its superior daylight/night time slider was a far better, easier, more precise and quicker method to change light and shadow conditions than EEP allows.

Edited June 10, 2023 by SarahKB7 Koskinen

[Nukasa22]

22 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Somebody claimed that Mainland terrain would not get the new PBR materials.

Sounds plausible to me. Mainland seems like a hot potato to Linden. You replace the ground textures with a better version and people are gonna complain and ask how it can be that they paid for their land and now their precious texture is gone. (I'm saying this having only seen one screenshot of the new ground textures. Maybe it's even possible that the new textures may look objectively worse in very specific instances and it actually would be a legit issue for some.)

Edited June 10, 2023 by Nukasa22

[Rowan Amore]

Upsetting the status quo has always been their reasoning behind not making improvements to mainland.  They do.plenty of other things, in their best interest, that upset the majority but they do them anyway.  Not sure why they won't do the same with mainland.

[Gabriele Graves]

What some people will see as improvements others will see as the exact opposite.  There is no single view on this.

We need to have theme-free places that encourage random creativity and where people can explore crazy ideas and build unconventional things and scratch their itch.
This is one of the things that makes Mainland great and drew many to SL.

To have that, it means accepting that some people may not like what others are building/experimenting with.
These places simply cannot be "improved" visually without destroying the ability to do that.
To argue otherwise is just simply being unrealistic.

With that in mind, I would strongly oppose any covenant or restrictions being applied to Mainland.
To attempt to do this would not improve Mainland for those calling for it, it would shift the issue as they see it to one of enforcement which clearly LL does not have adequate resources for.

Bellisseria works at least as much due to the facts that each parcel currently has small LI allocations, the home and surrounding area landscaping/decor is LL provided and cannot be removed as it is to any covenant and it's enforcement.

So the the question in my mind is:  How much Mainland (of the type we have today) does LL need to provide?

Perhaps nowhere near as much as there is today.  So perhaps reducing the available amount is the answer.

If LL want to shrink or decommission some of the Mainland then they should consider schemes to begin to acquire those regions over time so that they can defragment them.

This would need a workable plan because this would potentially be a long and extensive exercise to achieve.  The plan would have to include schemes like buy back, land swap or equivalent recompense to achieve it.  One of the first steps would be to no longer auction off or give out any more abandoned land in areas they plan to defragment, own and eventually repurpose.

Yes, it would be hard and time consuming to do it right without the high risk of alienating lots of Premium members.

I suspect though that LL don't care that much about the resources that Mainland currently consumes enough to try something this risky.

I would also suspect Mainland isn't any kind of money pit for them. After all, most land is owned and paid for by residents with subscriptions.  They even get to auction off abandoned land that they already sold again and again as a bonus.

The smart thing to would be to minimise support resources and costs to maximise revenue and let it be as is and ignore the moaning.
I further suspect that this is in fact the plan.
 

Edited June 10, 2023 by Gabriele Graves
corrections

[Teresa Firelight]

I recommend that LL "invent" a new type of mainland that has some enforceable covenant rules... for example:  a continent where you cant have floating things above the ground (that are not clearly sim design) until 2000 meters... a continent where orbs have to give a 15 second warning and where planes can fly between 1000M and 1990M as long as the pilot/passengers are not explicitly banned. while we are at it, make a rule that the smallest parcel allowed is 512 sqM, and where there is a fair amount of protected waterways along the shores (so that any one owning partial/full water parcels can access a protected assess to lakes/seas, etc.

Those who do not want restrictions can continue to live on the original mainland and enjoy the unrestricted creativity that mainland can foster. But those who want some protection that their "new" mainland wont be "trashed" by an inconsiderate neighbor in some of the most basic ways that people have been complaining about in this forum.

Give people a choice in their mainland... total freedom or some protections. Then they can live in the mainland that works best for their needs.

While we are at it, please add a feature to "derender all by owner" that basically keeps the viewer from drawing any objects owned by the specified owner. That way people can quickly/easily "block" neighbor views that appear unsightly to them.

Edited June 10, 2023 by Teresa Firelight

[Eowyn Southmoor]

*removed cause having discussions with some individuals is pointless*

 

 

Edited June 10, 2023 by Eowyn Southmoor

[Aethelwine]

The argument around resource for enforcement only applies where the rules need to be manually enforced. If enforcement of a rule was automated or if a functionality was removed then there would be no additional resource required. Even when enforcement is required, there may be changes where benefits outweigh resource needed. 

[Aethelwine]

One specific example of somewhere really sad that could perhaps do with some love is Frostar, on the east edge of Gaeta iV.

It quite possibly is a monument to the end of an era when mainland was being expanded, a rushed ugly expanse of "Palm tree 1"s that don't properly resolve unless you cam to within a few metres of them.

I might have previously blamed the moles for this but looking now it looks like a Governor Linden build. the structures are frugal and rundown but not so bad it is the expanse of those ugly palm trees that makes the area an eyesore.

Arguably I suppose the austere, rushed lack of love is indicative and a monument to its time and therefore worth preserving because of the way it portrays that, but really even that considered.... please just do something with it instead. Maybe the library palm trees can be universally replaced with something that has a lod factor that works beyond 2 metres, or send a mole there to rip them out and redecorate, put in a park or just nicer trees and some shrubbery, just deleting those trees would be an improvement.

It is a glaring exception to the high quality Linden and Moles builds elsewhere.

 

Edited June 10, 2023 by Aethelwine

[Marianne Little]

As I see it, the trouble by keeping Mainland just as it is and adding a new continent, is that LL pays to run every region.

We do not want higher tier and higher Tilia fees. Yet, LL has to get the money from somewhere. This is where the TOS comes in. People who has not logged in for years and years, has not used their granted land. I mean the TOS let LL do what they want with us every time we agree to it. If the deal they had with LL, that the land was given to them in perpetuity, the TOS is still overruling it.

Am I mean to say this? Well, if they left and has not used SL for years, why should they keep land it cost to run? And if they return, it is simple: They get similar sized land or they throw a hissyfit and log off again. LL is not losing a valuable customer. They were just holding up land.

Even if it is taking time, I think that working on updating Mainland would be better than adding hundred new regions.

It is a search for Mentors going on. I have become more and more an introvert so mentoring is just not for me. But I could tinker a bit with land, remove ugly trees, lay roads, get some updated landscaping details. Be just a wandering hermit. I often read on the forum that people love to garden and landscape. If LL can get unpaid mentors, I think they can get unpaid garderers too.

And about ground textures? It is worth to upset a few and please the many. You stagnate unless you update. You keep a few and do not attract any others.

[Marianne Little]

I agree that LL need a place with no rules where people can be as creative as they want.

But unused, abandoned land is a waste of money. So do not start with taking away peoples 0 second orbs and 64 m privacy walls. Start to work on the abandoned land. It is so many regions that are empty or have a single 512 or 1024 plot taken. Do it as an experiment. Make some inland lakes, with canals between, put down a new road that connect two others, update land with pockets of protected land with a bit of new trees. See if people buy land next to the new lake.

It would be a big surprise for the owner of the 512 m, to log in and see a lake and a road where it was empty land before. But not more a surprise than if a resident bought it to set up an adult club walled in. That can always happen, people can ask to buy abandoned land.

You never know what happens on land you do not own and you can't contol it.

If it is a demand for Mainland with rules, LL has the first generation Linden Homes they can make rules for.

[animats]

2 hours ago, Aethelwine said:

rushed ugly expanse of "Palm tree 1"s

The giant wall in the back isn't helping, either.

I happen to be working on trees in Sharpview at the moment, and it's amusing to see how it actually works. Each species of tree has a texture like this:

Bark, leaves, and impostor, in a texture atlas. This "Pine 1" texture is from the Other Simulator We Can't Talk About Here, for copyright reasons. The image used for SL is pretty much the same. Diffuse only, no normal or specular map. If built-in trees had materials, they'd look less flat. If terrain gets materials, so should trees.

Trees are put together from the bark texture and the leaf texture, using an L-system tree generator. This is a "move random distance, branch off branch of random size for random distance, recurse" generator. Each type of tree has different parameters that control the range of randomness. It's a classic technique, and works well for the branch structure. But when all you have for leaves is that one fuzzy texture at the upper right, leaves can't look good.

Beyond some distance, you just get the flat impostor picture in the lower right. From the complaint above, that's happening too soon.

Trees were supposed to sway in the wind. The code for that is still in the viewer, but apparently disabled as "creepy".

Legacy trees are not used much any more. Bellessaria uses mesh trees. Spending effort on terrain is more useful.

If terrain textures are getting attention, there's another useful trick. Texture randomization. Like this:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/20206840/174149327-fd6bbf22-9299-49f9-8f96-c043d90fdde4.mp4

As someone pointed out when I last posted this, it's "stupidly clever". You put in a texture of high-resolution dirt, grass, sand, or water. Anything that doesn't have visible large structure, like a brick wall. Now you have nice grass, dirt, etc., but it repeats too frequently. So this technique remaps the UVs in a pattern of randomly rotated hexes to hide the repetition. Now you can have huge areas of high-rez grass from a small texture image. And the GPU does all the work.

Theory: https://jcgt.org/published/0011/03/05/paper.pdf

Open source code: https://github.com/mmikk/hextile-demo (MIT license, so LL can use it.)

This is much simpler than procedural grass generation or custom shaders for each type of surface, the kind of thing Pixar and Unreal Engine do. Users can just drop in a texture, select "random repeat", and get something good. Easy to explain. Watch the video.

 

 

Edited June 10, 2023 by animats