I was reading a post from Hamlet Au over at New World notes regarding Mesh terrain, which you can read here. However what caught my attention most was a comment from Masami Kuramoto:
“What mesh brings to the terraforming table is the option to use subtractive modeling. Think caves, tunnels, subway stations, underground cities. It’s all possible now.”
I’m not quite sure what Masami means, but the idea of sims being to have cave tunnels, subway stations and underground cities is something that could really add a new dynamic to Second Life. Think of exploring deep mines or dungeons. People have long wanted to build underground in Second Life, the problem is, you can’t, you can’t build at a base level and then raise the terrain, that causes chaos, you get error messages or items returned to your lost and found.
This is a great pity, being able to build underground would offer some extra richness, now there’s probably an obvious reason why you can’t and it’s clearly problematic to implement a system that allows us to build underground, because otherwise it would be here.
However it’s an area that would unleash something new to the Second Life experience. There are of course ways of faking underground and this is where Mesh, sculpts or even prims can come into play, but they take up prim space, which is probably why the practice isn’t widespread. These days of course we can rez 64 x 64 prims natively in the viewer, so that would enable a prim saving, but I still don’t see much of it in practice.
Whilst looking into these issues and potential, I stumbled across the following blog post: Landscapes Unlimited: Magnificent Vistas in Second Life where there is an example of Mesh landscaping and there are tunnels on the sim, presumably made from Mesh .. I think! The sim is worth a look to get a feel of what you can do with Mesh landscaping, although I’m sure there are examples of where sculpts are used this way too.