Abnor Mole

Hmm... so... make it so the color of the terrain textures no longer coordinate with any of the rocks, trees, bushes, flowers or other greenery we've planted across a thousand regions just to make it look more uniform on the world map. 🤔 I'm sure no one would notice. 😣

The difference in the way the map looks is due to how we had to adjust our approach to meet the high demand for homes. One option was to try and clone the entire thing (like the original Linden Homes were), but that would have lead to an even more discombobulating arrangement, both on the map and from the eye level perspective with a "Belli 1", "Belli 2", "Belli 3", etc instead of a contiguous continent. (There were other factors too that would have made it not quite as simple a task to do as one might assume unless you have intimate knowledge of "how the sausage gets made" so to speak.) A compromise was decided upon. We would use clones of templates to fill large areas in order to get homes into the hands of residents quickly, and then knit them together with areas that are live built to fill spaces with unique content like community regions, transitions between themes, shorelines, railroads, larger waterways, etc. We were always concerned the approach could make those cloned from template areas of Bellisseria feel too "cookie cutter", but we found that from the perspective on the ground, it did not evoke that feeling. Only when looking at the World Map would you really be able to notice it. The map view looking less "natural" is an unfortunate consequence of the approach, but it is a relatively small price to pay in order to get literally thousands upon thousands more homes completed in a timely basis without sacrificing too much of what makes it attractive. Bellisseria would be probably a half to a third of the size it is today otherwise. And it is not done yet. There are still many many many areas left that still need "blending" and unique features added on to.

Ahhhh. I can see that

No. No, it definitely does not.

Wow. That is truly impressive. I think we should call doing this "The Full Magellan"

Try reducing your draw distance. You'd be surprised how many lag issues resolve themselves simply by not having to render objects 150 or 200m away you can't really see anyway. When I'm in my Linden Home 32 or 64m seems entirely reasonable and greatly improves performance.

It wasn't addressed specifically to you. I'm just saying there are options. Everyone can choose which option best fits their desired experience; whether it be a Linden Home, Mainland, or renting on or owning a private estate.

To reiterate, if not being able to restrict a parcel to group only, put up huge walls, teleport anyone home who tries to enter or give them a few reasonable warning time to leave before ejecting them is not the type of environment you wish to live in as part of your Second Life experience, then a Linden Home in Bellisseria is probably not your cup of tea. There are plenty of options for places where you can do those things. Bellisseria just isn't one of them. You're welcome to disagree, but based on the large numbers of people living there and the struggle with supplying enough homes even 2 years into the project, it is an alternative option many residents seem to prefer.

Maybe part of the problem is always defaulting to coming from the perspective that everyone who triggers a security system has ill intent, rather than assuming ignorance or error before malice is proven to be the case. If someone is genuinely being a nuisance the owner of the land can actively ban them. They just cannot have system that automatically bans people from the parcel whether the owner is home or not. If nobody is even on the parcel, how does the owner even know the person actually warrants that aggressive of a response? If they are there and the person has ill intent, it is not difficult to manually ban the person and be done with it. If someone feels they need to ban everyone who enters their parcel in Bellisseria regardless of intent and even when they themselves aren't even there, perhaps Bellisseria isn't the place for them. They might be happier on mainland or a private estate. We already thought about temporary banning. We already have enough to do that we aren't going to sit for nnn minutes waiting to see if the ban falls off at the prescribed time when someone complains about an orb that doesn't follow the Covenant. We are just going see that it is indeed automatically adding people to the parcel ban list and return it. Which brings up another point. Patch has insinuated before that if dealing with non-compliant security systems becomes too time consuming, we may have to consider a blanket ban of any security devices other than the one we've provided for free. We don't want to do that and neither do many residents and orb creators I would assume, since that is tens of thousands of properties where their products would be be usable. I'm hoping some of them will see the benefit of making a simple to use system that has better features than ours yet can't be set in a way that breaks the covenant. If something is made in a way that people can use it the wrong way, they will. If they can't set it wrong, then it's less they have to worry about and less complaints we have to deal with. That would actually help preserve Bellisseria as a market for the creators of such devices.

We recently added that new condition for using security systems to the covenant: "-Does not add names of ejected persons to the parcel ban list automatically" This is in response to situations where residents have accidentally crossed into their neighbors' parcel and then have visible ban lines facing them in their home. In some cases the resident abandoned their parcel rather than having to look at those lines constantly. One of the main reasons setting land to group access only was disabled at the estate level was to prevent visible ban lines. We felt that automatically banning anyone and everyone that a security device ejects is a little too unnecessarily aggressive and the practice is tantamount to that, the only real difference being they had to enter the parcel one time for it to take effect. People can still ban anyone they chose from their land. That has not changed. What has changed is there needs to be an active decision on the part of the owner of the parcel in each and every instance. It cannot be a passive automatic adding of all individuals the device encounters to the parcel ban list. If a security system is scripted to add people to the parcel ban list it needs to at the very least prompt the owner to approve the ban before it adds them. It's the owner's responsibility to review in each case if they really need to take the step of adding that person to their parcel ban list. I personally think it would be great if all makers of security systems would add a "Bellisseria" setting to their devices. Many people simply set out a security device at its default settings or just don't know any better. I would even go so far to suggest creators consider having their devices detect it is in the Linden Homes estate using llGetEnv( "estate_name" ) and disallow settings beyond what is allowed in the Linden Homes covenant. It would save a lot of aggravation on everyone's part I think.

Yes, the first it a pathway that leads to the front door. The other (if yours has one) is meant as a carriageway if you want to build one (or not, it's up to you). Both end right at the property line of your actual parcel. There are items in the content pack you can get from the mailbox out front that will allow you to extend them into your parcel if you choose.

If anyone is looking for a place where anyone can "fully utilize" their land in Second Life with practically no restrictions, they have those. https://secondlife.com/land/privatepricing.php

The question we always have to ask ourselves when we consider certain things is two fold. First, what are the benefits (the upside)? Alternatively, what potential issues are we opening up (the downside)? If the downside risks greatly outweigh the potential upside benefits, then it's something that isn't likely to ever happen. For something like allowing terraforming, the upside is a resident can smooth out or flatten bit of the terrain on their own if they wish to. The downside is residents could also raise their entire parcel 4 meters or dig a deep hole under the house. Besides looking horrible in the meantime with a house in your neighborhood up on a 4m tall block (very "mainlandian" to coin a term), chances are if they abandon the house for another they would leave it in that state for the next person to deal with... and that person might have no idea how to terraform or that terraforming is even a thing. So that has to be a "not going to happen." The problem with rotating houses is that while in some cases it would be nice to be able to turn the house in a different direction and it would probably be fine; it also means ALL the houses could also be able to be turned in a direction that is definitely not fine. Neighborhoods with houses flipped backwards and a 4m tall privacy fence across the front entry to the parcel would not be a very welcoming sight and effectively ruin any sense of community in Bellisseria. We made allowances for trailers and one of the log homes, but we limited it in a way so they cannot be rotated in a way that would lead to that sort of thing. With the Grandview, either the side with the windows faces the "front" or the door to the house does. Those are the only two options. Also, there are some instances where if the house was rotated its root center would be in a location that could not support it or even be outside the region. There is only one way there could ever be a theme where the houses could be rotated in any direction. It would have to be one where the house itself was designed from the beginning with essentially no true "front" or "back", eliminating the need for it to face in a particular direction to look correct OR it would have to be only ever be in locations where there is no front facing direction to the parcel. And that would have to be true across all instances and locations of that house type with regions built from the start with that functionality in mind. (And before anyone asks, that is not true of the Stilt homes in open water as they are the same houses that rez along the piers, which do always have a permanent forward facing direction.) So essentially the answer is: "We're sorry, we can't make that happen."

You don't actually own the home itself in Linden Homes though. You own the parcel. The home is still owned by us moles and set to the LDPW group with its root center not on the parcel. That is how Linden Homes allows for a house that does not count against the parcel LI. The controllers just read who the owner of the parcel it is for is and allows that account to interact with them. Because the house is owned by us and not the owner of the parcel it would be impossible for a script in a Linden Home to change the parcel media url using llSetParcelMusicURL even if we wanted it to.

I believe you. It's not a problem with that house though. The house doesn't have the ability to change the parcel music stream. If one is left on a parcel settings it is from a previous owner of the parcel. Also make sure you are selecting your parcel. You should be able to change the music url if it is your parcel. Could you have selected the main parcel outside your house by accident? What I also think it could have been though is not a music stream at all technically... but a nearby media player that was left running and playing music and that is what you were hearing. Once you got far enough away from it, it stopped. If that is what is happening, go into your preferences and find the section for media (Note: media... not music) and make sure Autoplaying of media is disabled.

Linden Homes are a special case in that they work a little differently when abandoned to the ownership of Governor Linden (the parcels are cleared and all objects returned when that happens), but that would be a question for the Lindens that code that system. There are other settings that would also probably benefit from a default setting such as restricting sounds and voice to the parcel. It may be a simple case of the code that resets autoreturn to 0 on ownership change supersedes any value they may attempt to have the system enter as a default.

I'm a huge advocate of residents learning how autoreturn works and using it. If you plan on leaving build open at all on your parcel you should always pair it with autoreturn. Here are a few things about land settings many people get confused about: -Autoreturn always defaults to 0 minutes (off) whenever a parcel is subdivided, joined or changes ownership. That includes deeding or reclaiming land to or from a group. Always check and reset autoreturn after one of these events. -Autoreturn resets to 0 so that when a parcel changes ownership all of the content on it isn't immediately returned. -Deeded land is different from Setting land to a group, but autoreturn will not return objects if the object is set to the same group the land is set to or owned by. -Object entry prevents objects from being moved onto the parcel, but does NOT affect vehicles. Having autoreturn set will take care of those for you.

I don't think this could have been put any more beautifully. Thank you.

On behalf of all the Moles....

Hmmm... yeah.... nothing says "grief me" like putting on a badge with no actual authority behind it and trying to tell people who don't want to willingly participate what to do. 😉

Just remember the Windex Rule. They don't have warning labels on glass cleaner that say "DO NOT SPRAY IN EYES!" because they think you're stupid enough to do that. They have them because somewhere, sometime, someone was.

I don't really recall exactly how long it took to build the original Linden Homes. I know it was a long time. I'm not sure of the exact numbers presently. In terms of houses/regions though it is about twice as many homes per region in the old LH, which make sense since the parcels are about half the size. But it didn't have the same level of infrastructure either. You couldn't change your house style. There weren't really any significant pathways for exploring. When demand exceeded supply the entire thing was just quickly cloned. All of which I feel contributed to the most important thing Bellisseria has that the original Linden Homes always lacked... a genuine sense of community.

My favorite part is that I still get the occasional message like "That apartment thing... that is just a joke, right?"

RE: posts Yeah, sadly most people who put up an orb probably won't bother to mark the corners of their parcels. 😒 The posts aren't just there to let boaters know where someone else's property line is though. They are also there to let the property owner know where their property line is. Without them, many would rez all sorts of things extending in every manner of directions far far far outside their parcel. Sail a bit around mainland and see how many do that into the protected waterways and you'll see what I mean. If they had the ability to remove the posts, many would do that just for that purpose most likely. The posts may not be the most attractive, but at least everyone can see them to tell where their boundaries are. Which makes them better than the alternative of trying to navigate between houses where the waterways have been choked off by encroaching objects from residents who simply can't tell where the boundary line is. RE: piers The piers have bollards blocking vehicles from driving onto them because the piers themselves are not very vehicle friendly. With many vehicles (other than wearables) as soon as you get to a junction between two pier sections you'll get stuck. You actually can drive on the piers if you want, but we don't recommend it for that reason. That's why the bollards are there, simply to make it clear the piers aren't intended to be driven on. If you happen to have a vehicle that doesn't get stuck on them, then by all means putter your way down the piers to your heart's content. It's not like anyone is going to give you a ticket. 😉

That is correct. Most Mainland can only be terraformed +/- 4m from the original level it was "baked" at when it was created. The only way to smooth it would be to raise the land around that spot if you can. Once the terrain reaches it's limit it won't move any further. By using the Revert tool in the terrain editing window you can see what the starting point is for the land that you have to work with.