Water, Water Everywhere.
tracked
Crush Cutie
Currently, the only way to sail anywhere is for LL to deploy regions and then not use them.
Building bridges, and tiling empty space between continents with regions is no doubt an expensive use of resources and has resulted in patchy coverage.
Time for a better solution.
I propose LL create a new, special type of mega “watery void” region.
* 16,384m square (min size, as large as you like really\) with a 256m parcel tile.
* A standard regions resources, prims, avatar limits, scripts, etc.
* Rez enabled. Short Auto-return.
* The entire world map space is covered with a grid of “watery void” regions.
* Regular private / mainland regions replace 256m tiles in the “watery void”.
* All existing water regions can be deleted.
* Owned by Abzu Linden. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abzu)
Regular regions perfectly align with the 256m “watery void” parcel tiles. The estate that owns the regular region also owns the 256m void map tile ‘under’ their region.
When an avatar leaves a regular region via a border that does not have an adjacent regular region, they are moved to the ‘underlaying’ water void at the relevant position and vice versa.
The entire grid becomes a single connected world that can be navigated and traversed.
A transparent user experience.
* A user stood on a regular region looking out to a “watery void” will see the void water and avatars, boats, etc as their draw distance allows. They will also see nearby regions that are not directly connected to the region they are on.
* A user in the “watery void” adjacent to a 256m tile that contains a region will see that region, its terrain map, objects and avatars as their draw distance allows.
Private regions can opt out of allowing traversal to and from the “watery void” by setting estate access restrictions on the ‘underlying’ 256m tile.
* A user stood on an opted out region will see exactly what they see now, a limitless ocean to the horizon, no avatars or vehicles in the void. No nearby regions that aren’t directly connected.
* A user in the “water void” adjacent to the to the opted out region tile will see nothing. That map tile will be marked as no entry (as a parcel with access restrictions functions now). They will not be able to traverse into the region via its border. They will not see any content from that region, no terrain, no objects, no avatars.
The intent is to allow avatars (walking, flying, in boats, whatever) to traverse the entire SL grid from one corner to another. Entering and leaving ‘regular’ regions as they are placed right now, with minimal region crossings and minimal server requirements. Fully preserving the privacy of private regions where desired.
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ST33LDI9ITAL Resident
And can we get one of these that's combat enabled as well please...? kthx
Jeogeot Gulf is one of the best and most unique places in SL imo. Need more areas like it.
Nelson Jenkins
Functionally, this sounds similar to multiple regions sharing a host, just that the regions are very slimmed-down and you could run more than 4 at once (I think that's the high-water mark right now). I'm not sure what the new AWS infra looks like but I'd assume it would be trivial to "host" a bunch of regions with no terrain and no permanent objects.
As long as those 256x256m chunks are treated as regions for viewer and LSL purposes - maybe just LSL - this could probably be done almost completely server-side.
However, Openspace regions already did this in a way, and LL wound that program down... so who knows.
VriSeriphim Resident
Nelson Jenkins
Just FYI. existing OpenSpace regions were "grandfathered", so many still exist. The change was to no longer offer them for "purchase".
Kyle Linden
tracked
Issue tracked. We have no estimate when it may be implemented. Please see future updates here.
Thornotter Resident
I'd rather see this work by designating a prim to be 'water'. Once a prim is set as water (e.g. on the Features tab) the existing SL water shaders are used to render it.
If the prim is also set as phantom and an avatar is inside of it, their animations should automatically switch to the swimming variants.
This would allow creators to easily build pools, bath tubs, aquariums (e.g. for mermaids) or other common use cases.
Crush Cutie
Thornotter Resident Why not both .....
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Thornotter Resident that's a completely different proposal which should, most definitely, be created as a new feedback request! Go for it, I love your idea!
However, Crush Cutie's proposal is about building a continuous ocean. Quite a different beast :)
VriSeriphim Resident
Thornotter Resident
I like this idea. One caveat, bathtubs are too small/shallow for swimming animations.
Perhaps the animation switch could be depth sensitive? Then we could still water effects without unduly affecting animations.
Thornotter Resident
VriSeriphim Resident yeah, exactly! Maybe it only triggers if the Z height of the body of water is >= to the avatar height.
Skyhook Arkright
ooooh, travelling :-)
Kadah Coba
Variable region size would be really handy for this sort of thing.
Crush Cutie
Kadah Coba: the point is to improve the end user experience and make the world truly contiguous, this isn't ever going to be a new server product they can sell .. so, the technical details that I've spelled out are entirely up for tossing in the trash so long as the intent and functionality remain.
Sammy Huntsman
To add to that, add water physics and waves. So we can swim without having to use HUDs and stuff.
Tayln Osbourne
Infinite water void is a nice idea, though they'll likely need to be, at largest, 512m chunks. Each significant digit in a coordinate will reduce precision, this is why when you go above 999 meters things start to get jiggly and builds start dropping smaller decimal places randomly, and at silly heights you turn into polygon soup. This is a hard limit due to how sim-context coordinates are stored.