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Insane idea..


Kagehi Kohn
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I consider this a two birds type idea. But, I suspect its completely impractical, from a server standpoint, if not from a tech standpoint. So.. What is the idea... something similar to portal apatures (this being the best analogy I can come up with). The two birds this potentially kills are:

1. Camera, like real working ones.

2. Building interiors.

So, the prinicple idea is to take advantage of the abilty to create a secondary "camera", which views another location. This isn't used much, but it does exist in some games. In this case, it serves two functions - you could, with restrictions to, say, region owner, have the capacity to set up textures that "watch" another location in the sim.

This however is a "side effect" of the true purpose, and may represent enough of a problem to be "will not implement".

The real benefit of being able to do this is to create something I will call a threshold object. This would be limited in size, and number, say, max 32mx32m, and.. not sure how many. They would create a physical link, or threshold, that functions like a sim boundary, linking to another sim. The sim itself would be a micro sim, or sorts. I envision one of three options here:

1. Scalable micro - sim. You decide how big the inside of your building needs to actually be, say, a 16mx16m, then a microsim is set up, which matches those dimensions. Connections are at the "sim boundary" on this side, and via the threshold object, in the sim that connects to them.

2. Fragmented sim - something like ban lines create subdivided areas. Without a threshold, any "open" space stares off into blank space (or rather, endless water, like any normal sim), so, you would be constructing a building so that, for example, you have two exists, or even a fire escape, each with a threshold, linking to the sim. The actual sim would be 128mx128m, but you could break it up any way you like. Threshholds, in this case, link the sims "by location", sort of like a TP hub, sort of. Entering the threshold object on "either side" would land you in the connected sim, as though you walked between two normal sims.

3. Non-scalable, boundary linked - a normal sim, again, possibly smaller, since you are only linking via the thresholds, but where you are limited to X number of connection points, along the edge - in other words, you build all your structures, so that the "entries" fall along the edge you want. This is less versitile, and constrains you to, at best, two connections points per building (since, unless the building was the size of the whole sim, it could have, at most, only two adjacent edges in next to each other. This is in contrast to #1, the "scalable" version, where you could simply have the building "be" the same size as the sim, so you have all edges to work with.

What this has to do with cameras is this - the threshold would also "see through" to the interior of the building, where the threshold exists. So.. basically, the door to your building, in the main sim, "sees" through to the linked sim, but only inside the bounds of the "threshold" you placed, and same from the inside of the building. You still see what people are doing, through any windows you place "as long as the threshold is big enough to let you, and you can walk between the sims, across this boundary, but placing a solid wall, or window pane, etc. "in the way" effectively cuts off access, but not the view. (And, being an object, instead of an actual sim boundary, attempting to "jump" through the wall lands you inside an empty shell, so they have to actually use the entries you provided to get in and out.

So.. What is the point of this?

Well, prim counts, and sky scrappers. lol Right now, these are the things you can't do:

1. Have a lot of decoration in your building.

2. Have a lot of real floors in a sky scraper.

3. Have, say, 4-5 floors of a hotel, in which all of the rooms in the hotel are useable, instead of locked, like its some FPS "on rails", games, where everything except the key rooms are locked.

4. Tardis like features (its bigger on the inside).

5. Anything else which requires a lot of prims, and structure, which strain the limits of the existing sim.

In short - SL, for the moment, it good at the "Hollywood stage city" effect, but.. it starts having issues when you try to build a working city block. So, I had this mad idea - how do you, transparently, get the same result as a sim crossing, including being able to see people inside, but.. also get all the extra "prims" you need to make the inside of the building more than just a cardboard box, with stuff painted on the walls (sure, you can do a lot with one room, or even a few, but.. like I said, forget having multiple floors, a basement, a secret undergroung lab, or "anything else". Even if you where willing/able to use experience keys to just TP the person to a different sim... it would be nice if there was a... less expensive alternative. ;)

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you might want to have a look at HiFi

you can do this with what they are doing

can setup sims (spaces) within sims (spaces). In a cubic voxellised virtuallised way. The whole architecture is designed for this. Much of the geekspeek is about virtualising services within services. but can practically do what you talking about here

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  • 4 weeks later...

Forgot to mark this so I got replies in email, when I get replies, so responding late. But.. Sure, completely different engine would work. Except, that isn't the point.

The where intended, on the off chance someone in Linden might be looking, to spark ideas of what might be possible to do. One huge limitation SL has imho, besides its nuts land costs, is its prim limits, which make it impractical to actually furnish anything higher than two stories, for the most part, or even, sometimes, justo one story, never mind a real city. So.. Being able to, for someone that can afford to rent space enough (if not a whole sim), to be able to, in effect, offload the "inside" of a building to anothing simulator... would be a huge improvement.

We are, imho, already at a bottleneck, when it comes to creating realistic buildings with a lot of floors/rooms. But, mesh has, while helping in some cases, also created a new issue - we can make things look more real, but.. there is a limit to how far you can push that, before you are right back to the, "Not enough prims to do this.", situation.

So, a solution that lets you, or someone else, rent land "off sim", as it where, an "link it" to become the inside of a building that is "in sim"...

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  • 2 weeks later...

yes true about SL, the platform is restrictive in what it can do. bc of the design

but if SL was to do totally and seamlessly what you envisage then it would need to be on a differently designed platform yes. one that is designed to allow portals.

so make a different designed platform, with portals, that can do this. so make Sansar, which is designed to have seamless portals

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also, just about SL and how you can do this with the Experience tools

example

make a building facade on one sim, with entrance and corridors to rooms

when walk in the door to a room then it "portal" you to another sim, where the room is. and vice versa. Exit the room door and portal back to the corridor on other sim

is not quite seamless this as a specific built platform, but the effect is the same

 

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eta. Some TPV allow to turn off the Teleport black screen. So that can help as well to keep the immersion/contiguous effect going

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Yeah, there are some "less than clean" ways to do it. In this case "less than clean" means, "Not in a way that will let you a) look through a window/door, and see the inside, from the connect sim, or b) do so without the expense of a full sim added.

The latter, for most people, being the most prohibitive.

I did have the idea for something not entirely disimilar, and it might even work on "large scale" projects, presuming a few things, like a lot of twisty corridors (steam tunnels, perhaps?). A mesh based "structure", or even prim based, if you where clever about where you put the offset prims (while still linking one), in which the "center" of the whole entire level is at a fixed point, but only the elevator, or stairway, etc. is "always rezzed". Rooms, and their contents, sections of corridor, etc. get rezzed, based on tracking who entered the area, and where they are (this thought requires some clever sensing, like, say a custom mesh, with volume detect on it, which defines the "trigger points" needed to see when someone is passing a certain point, and in which direction. then you derez the area they can't get to/see, and rez the next area, they are about to arrive at. Though its more likely you also need to "sense" where they are in general, in case they stop and stand someplace, instead of passing a sensor, or leave the sim, or log in/out, etc. and you need to bring back/derez parts...

In principle.. this means you might have, including the place they are at, maybe 5 sections rezzed at a time, per AV. The next one they will be at, and may need to see, the next one after that, in case they run to get there, and the prior two, they just left. If you have, say, 50 such sections, then unless some people decide to all stand in different places in the maze of tunnels, and "force" then to all be rezzed, your might, at worst, have say, 1/4 of them "in world" at any time. It would, in principle, save on a lot of LE, depending on the complexity of the build. And, by making sure that each "part" is centered on the same point, you only need one rezzed for the whole thing, not one with scripts in every part, to move it all about, or some similar mess.

Still, would be a rean mess to design, build, test, and custom create, so it worked right. :P

But, for a large building, like a sky scraper.. maybe its not so bad if you could, say, move a second object, ahead of your elevator, to "rez" the next two floors you are about to arrive at. And, thus, gain 50 floors of rooms, instead of, like is common, 2-3 real floors?

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Kagehi Kohn wrote:

 

But, for a large building, like a sky scraper.. maybe its not so bad if you could, say, move a second object, ahead of your elevator, to "rez" the next two floors you are about to arrive at. And, thus, gain 50 floors of rooms, instead of, like is common, 2-3 real floors?

if have a look inworld at the low-cost skybox rentals. They use this principle. The skybox is rez only while the tenant is present. When the tenant leaves then de-rez and use the the prims for the next tenant. and hope they dont all turn up at the same time (:

if made a ginormous tower out of 64m hollow prims then texture outside with a facade and then texture inside with strategic placed window alphas then can make how you meaning. Using the same technique as the skybox rentals. Just all bunched in the tower, instead of spread across the sky

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like a foyer at ground level. With a lift. Avatar gets in lift. Press button for floor. Up it goes. When it stops at the floor. Rez the apartment room(s). Open lift door

avatar can go other way. In lift. Press for ground. Down it goes. Apartment derez

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