Parcel encroachment

Encroachment

When an object's position is on one parcel, but part of it extends into another neighboring parcel, often against the wishes of the owner of that other parcel.

The problem is that residents can place objects such that they are on their own parcels but invade the space of their neighbor's. The neighbor has no capability of moving or returning the object and must appeal to a higher power such as an Estate Manager or Linden Support.

The solution is to allow parcel owners to select and return any objects that encroach upon their parcel.

Testing whether an object overlaps a parcel is done by building a collision body for each parcel and using the physics engine to make a collision query between the object and the parcels. This is only done when a viewer requests that an object be returned. The normal object and parcel permissions are checked first, then the object is checked for overlap.

Unfortunately some regions use encroachment as a feature. An example is Luna which is a Linden-owned shopping mall with 3rd party vendors. Each vendor owns a small parcel of land inside the mall and can build their shop within their land, however they cannot return the walls or roof of the mall which nevertheless may encroach. While returning encroaching objects will be a manual process (only done on request) it would be a problem if people could accidentally or maliciously return existing content that has relies on encroachment.

Therefore, the ability to return encroaching objects will be disabled by default everywhere first, and must be enabled on a per region basis by Estate Managers. Also the encroachment returnability logic introduces the concept of estate content and allows an exception for it.

estate content -- Objects owned by the Estate Owner or an Estate Manager.

A region can be configured such most objects are returnable upon encroachment but estate content is immune.

How to Enable

Here is how to enable the encroachment returnability feature:

1. Install a recent viewer that supports the Sim Console feature (latest Viewer 2 beta viewer, to be safe)
2. Login as an Estate Manager
3. Open the Sim Console with Ctrl+Shift ⇧+` ( ` is the grave accent, commonly below Esc on QUERTY keyboards)
4. Type the following command: set allow_return_encroaching_object true
5. To allow return of estate content type: set allow_return_encroaching_estate_object true
6. To check whether the feature is enabled or not type: get allow_return_encroaching_object

Misc Details and Known Bugs

• The returnability logic relies on the object's physical shape which can differ from its visible shape. There may be cases where an object appears to overlap but is not returnable, or visa versa.
• Visible and physical shape mismatch will be worst for the following objects:
  • trees and grass
  • sculpty prims
  • flexi prims
  • static objects using the llTargetOmega() feature -- they appear to be spinning but are not spinning in the physics engine
• Phantom and Volume Detect objects will still collide for encroachment.
• Encroachment across region boundaries is not yet supported but is under development.