For quite a few years residents have been able to set the environments of their parcels and sims. "Environment" in SL usage means everything in the sky, from cloud cover, sky colors, sun and moon, stars, speed with which all those things move, schedule for sunrise/sunset and moonrise/moonset. It also includes a myriad of details about the "SL water", which for us is the water in LA and CN and the water which surrounds the estate.
But these settings have been esoteric, to say the least, with a poorly implemented user-interface. Only a few of us have even tried to build interesting environments, and its always a struggle. But this situation is changing. SL has for years been working on a new Environment control system, which includes the concept that, like everything else in SL which is resident created, environments will become Inventory items, capable of being bought and sold or given from person to person. The mainstream SL viewer already contains all this, and hope has it that shortly the Firestorm viewer will support this too. When that happens, there will be MUCH more incentive to modify our environments.
And this brings us to the problem. Since only one or two people in the CDS have ever implanted environments in our estate, likes or dislikes of those environments could easily be resolved with a chat. But with environments due to become mainstream commodities, the possibility of more difficult decisions increases. Let me describe the problem with examples.
Right now, if we set every sim in the estate to the SL default environment, and we walk around the estate from sim to sim, crossing a sim border causes no change in the environment. The sun or moon stays in the same place, the clouds continue to fly overhead, the time of day is the same. But if an estate manager has cause to modify that, even for the minor need to set a sim for a certain time of day for an event, then crossing a sim line is extremely disruptive as your environment switches from one to the other. And changing the time of day is just one thing... walking from SL default morning to a fantasy sunset by crossing a sim line (or tping into that sim) is extremely disruptive.
Now, I know that some people have expressed pleasure in the idea that "conditions" might change as you walk from sim to sim. I'm not entirely against that myself... but these are all individual opinions. In point of fact, my biggest issue is with the clock... the sun cycle and the moon cycle. I personally really dislike a day cycle that changes when crossing a sim border, even if the other qualities of the environment might change. The current default day cycle in SL is 4 RL hours long, aligned I think with hours in SLT, with one of those hours being darkness and 3 being light. I like that cycle, but others might argue we should change it. But regardless, in MY opinion, it should be uniform throughout our sims.
So this is just hinting at some of the issues. Sure... I do have strong opinions about environments... in fact, in a previous virtual life (before SL, if you can imagine that!!@!) I was an environmental expert and created that world's standard tool for environment control. But in the CDS I'm just me, so I propose that we convene an Environment Working Group to study and recommend to whomever would receive and approve the recommendation an appropriate environment policy for our estate.
Thanks for reading!
Sudane...........................