At present, all terrain in OpenSim is created using a 2D height map, as in Second Life™. Some time ago, I posted a blog post about the idea of using voxels, essentially a way of having a 3D grid of heights similar to 2D pixels. This has not been taken up or discussed anywhere else since but, I would argue, remains a serious issue in the usability of 3D worlds.

What can’t you do? Well, at present, you cannot make a seamless tunnel through land, i.e. you cannot have truly subterranean locations unless they are covered by prim land, rocks or other buildings. To do this, you would need a totally new type of height map, although it would perhaps be possible to write code to automatically upgrade existing height maps in much the same way as other database upgrades are made between OpenSim versions: essentially, the default for the upgrade would be for there to be no voxels beneath other voxels, i.e. no concavities. These could then be tunnelled later, which would require changes to both the server and viewer software. I admit, this is a LOT of re-engineering and unlikely to happen quickly.

Undersea locations would also be possible if sea voxels were marked as such, where no voxel marking sea height could be within a land space or above the maximum surface of the sea. This would enable air pockets under the sea, although excavating them upwards might be a tricky thing to make a viewer do in practice. At the moment, the manual land tools leave a lot to be desired anyway, but this seems like a thing that would be much harder to make work in a usable manner.

What about a temporary, easy workaround? In OpenSim, we love those! How about a tool to copy existing height maps into mega meshes with the same textures (and flat bottoms), that could then be exported, excavated horizontally as required and then put back in place of the existing height maps? The real height map would then be removed by flattening the terrain below the level of the mega mesh that had replaced it. It won’t fix the issue of undersea air pockets but it would make tunnels and caves possible above sea level, or undersea tunnels or caves flooded with water. Of course, as an after-thought, such meshes would also be usable in Second Life™ if they could be scaled to mega meshes without too much land impact. Any thoughts?