sl-service-account
commented
1 year ago aquietrabbit commented at 2022-11-03T15:29:10Z, updated at 2022-11-03T15:39:01Z
As someone who manages a bunch of sims, I do not like this feature idea for several reasons.
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It doesn't matter who sets these boxes up. I have a need to know who is in the regions I manage at all times and this would make administration painful in a lot of ways.
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If you need absolute privacy, you should have a completely private region (or homestead). This should be a last resort, though. SecondLife is a social game and people who don't want to be social in it should be logging out, not retreating into invisiboxes.
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You can already do most of this by demarcating a parcel in your region as the private space and enforcing privacy at the LSL level by simply adding new visitors to the private parcel's banlist during a time people want privacy, then clearing the parcel banlist when that window ends. Parcel access tools used in tandem with a competently-managed estate level banlist do everything listed here except anonymizing the radar (which would be annoying - also, where you are in a sim isn't private info).
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Just make an alt if you absolutely do not want the attention. Lots of store owners and etc that I know do business on the business account and fun on the fun account because it's a lot less hassle that way.
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The minimap is, as far as I am aware, the authoritative data source for the radar, not the other way around. If the viewer starts lying to people by telling them x user left the region, they will begin probing more aggressively to look for other ways to get the same scan data.
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The number of functions affected by this at the LSL level alone basically precludes this feature from being a thing even if all these other reasons were not present. If someone can't rely on llGetAgentList they will start spinning volumedetect megaprims to scan regions again which is not something anyone wants.
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The entire design of this feature seems like a bandaid for people who didn't do a good job planning their sim. If you want to see privacy in rentals done correctly go look at the parcel layout for Retroville and examine the way their experience teleporters are set up.
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If someone is a parcel owner and doesn't know how to use the existing parcel settings to toggle privacy options on demand, giving them more tools for privacy isn't going to help them anyway. Selectable presets for privacy settings on a parcel might be a better solution to get closer to what you want.
How would you like the feature to work?
In Short
Parcel Owners and Estate Managers would have the ability to create a 'Privacy volume' using an invisible phantom prim, that when inside, avatars would effectively disappear from the nearby avatar list and minimap
The Technical
Primitives would have the optional parameter Privacy Volume which is disabled by default.
Privacy would be done server-side. The simulator would keep track of the location and bounding-box dimensions of privacy volumes within the sim.
When the user enters a privacy volume, I suggest there are certain behaviors:- Simulator to Viewer communication
As far as the viewer is concerned, when a user enters a privacy volume, the simulator should tell other users viewers who are not in the volume viewers the user has left the region. The viewers of users outside of the viewer should no longer be able to tell that the agent is in the region.
I propose that, for the sake of still showing the sim has people in it, that the simulator would instead report a fake user to the viewer like 'private.resident', with a location of <0,0,0> - Letting other users know there are people on the sim, but still giving the resident privacy and anonymity within their space. Compatible viewers in the future could detect the 'private.resident' username in the future to avoid drawing a cloud in the corner of the sim.
An exception would be made for estate managers and parcel owners, who should always see the true username of who is in the volume, for administrative purposes.
For users who are inside the privacy volume, they will still be able to see the location and true usernames of people who are outside the privacy volume in public space.
Minimap
The dot in the minimap would no longer show the users true location, but would move to <0,0,0>, moving a meter to the right for each resident in a privacy volume so it's easy for users to see how many there are. In future compatible viewers, this information could be displayed a different way if needed, by detecting the fake username or user UUID reported by the simulator.
The dots could be made grey to distinguish them from users in 'public' areas of the sim. Keeping the dots just in the bottom left to not give away location. Hovering the dots would not reveal who they are.
Scripts
For scripts that are not owned by the parcel owner or estate manager, functions that retrieve the list of avatars in a sim/parcel like llGetAgentList , sensor etc would simply replace the agents uuid with our fake private.resident's uuid when the agent is in a privacy volume the script is not in, this would avoid breaking existing scripts that depend on knowing how many people are in the sim, and would allow scripted radars to continue to 'work' without script error.
Why a prim volume and not a parcel setting?
Please watch my very informative video that I worked very hard on :P
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsUpKrouyUo
The typical thing will be that people will want to be able to sit out in their lawn and chat to neighbors, which wouldn't be possible if the whole parcel was a privacy volume.
Also, it will be very useful for multi-story apartment buildings, and living in hustle-and-bustle, up-and-coming lively towns, where everything is close together, whilst still giving residents privacy. We could get some real lively places going on with lots of people living near each other!
Letting people simply drag a cube over their home to define the space that should be private is the most flexible solution I can think of, and would solve issues like in my sim where apartments don't fit neatly into parcels due to creative non-grid land layout, sky-boxes etc.
Why is this feature important to you? How would it benefit the community?
Understanding the Problem
To understand what we are trying to create a solution for, first we must think about the social function of a home. This might sound like stating the obvious, but one of the functions of a home is privacy and anonymity. We have four walls and a roof, and in general people go inside their home because they wish to switch off from the outside world - they do not currently wish to be found, or participate in the town square. This is generally a temporary affair, people just need some space to switch off or be alone with a loved one from time to time.
Community based sims (ie. Places people gather to socialise and participate in social activities, role-play etc) have a unique problem when it comes to renting homes to tenants - Potential tenants often prefer to rent elsewhere in far-flung parcel farms, and one of the most common stated reasons (that I have encountered) is privacy - Because they make lots of acquaintances in a community sim, and there is lots of traffic, they are more likely to find attention drawn to themselves either via the mini map or nearby avatars list. Instead such people will rent in far flung 'parcel farms' intentionally seeking out a place where they know nobody will bother them for maximum anonymity and privacy.
Is this really a problem?
I think so yes, please allow me to present some of the reasons why I think this is a problem worth solving and see if you agree with me:
Missed connections lead to a rise of isolation in SecondLife
As a private sim owner of 8 years, one of the social effects I notice of people choosing to rent in far flung anonymous parcel farms is that people will often only teleport into community sims to check if people to meet are around, but will miss each other (sometimes by mere minutes) before leaving and teleporting back to their home. This creates difficulties building community.
In turn, for visitors, this creates the illusion that there is no interest in a community sim. And gives rise to the classic 'SecondLife is dieing' mindset.
You might think that by giving people the ability to disappear off the minimap, we make this situation worse, but actually I think the opposite, because if those people were in their home in the community sim, they would see when other people enter the public areas of the sim and are more likely to walk out of their home to come meet them, as opposed to if they had chose to live in a far-flung parcel farm sim, where they would never know if new people entered their preferred community space.
The long-term economic sustainability of SecondLife depends on Community sims existing
I don't like to be a doomsday person when talking about SecondLife, because I think SecondLife is a great platform. But I do think the current trajectory we're on is not the best, there has been a definite decline in Community sims, Roleplay sims etc.
It may well be profitable in the short term for LL to rely on just land barons buying up sims and turning them into parcel farms, but in the long term, the decline of Community in SecondLife, will mean that less and less people will want to live in SecondLife to begin with. We need our community sims because it's what drives people into SecondLife - What platform would SecondLife be, if there were no hangouts or community? I'd argue - A dead one.
Shop and don't hop
It's not uncommon for community sims to have shopping areas integrated into the social space of their sim. Having residents living in community sims means they are:-
More likely to shop within the 'local economy' and contribute to the growth of their local community as such, which in the long term will enable more smaller creators in SecondLife to make roots to grow from.
Privacy volumes, whilst it might seem counter-intuitive at first, I personally think will increase the amount of socialization that occurs in SecondLife by reducing missed connections, because residents will be able to live in busy community sims without feeling like they have no privacy. It will help sustain SecondLife by making community sims more economically viable and successful and also lead to more shopping and enabling more small time creators to grow into successful businesses in SecondLife.
Here's early plans of my town that I am building, one day this will all be mesh with GLTF PBR Shaders, actually I have already started meshing facades that use PBR
As you can see, it's very squiggly and in no way conforms to parcels. Also it's 3000 meters high! With privacy volumes, I could conceivably rent out the eventual apartments and be able to offer privacy to residents. We might want to consider culling volumes for something like this too!
Edelweiss Le Mont Saint-Michel is an amazing build in SecondLife for example. But you could not really let people have private residence here, because the buildings curve around. Imagine if we had privacy volumes for something like this, creators could feasibly let people have private residence in builds like these:
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Original Jira Fields
| Field | Value | | ------------- | ------------- | | Issue | BUG-232854 | | Summary | Privacy Volumes | | Type | New Feature Request | | Priority | Unset | | Status | Closed | | Resolution | Unactionable | | Reporter | Extrude Ragu (extrude.ragu) | | Created at | 2022-11-03T10:53:05Z | | Updated at | 2023-01-04T20:17:21Z | ``` { 'Build Id': 'unset', 'Business Unit': ['Platform'], 'Date of First Response': '2022-11-03T10:29:10.349-0500', 'How would you like the feature to work?': 'Using full fat editor, return in a moment', 'ReOpened Count': 0.0, 'Severity': 'Unset', 'Target Viewer Version': 'viewer-development', 'Why is this feature important to you? How would it benefit the community?': 'a', } ```