That’s it – in principle. But as we all know, there are many ways to interpret a few simple sentences. So, I will try to elaborate a little on some of them. What follows describes, combined with a document called OTHERLAND FINEPRINT, the contract you are entering with the THE OTHERLAND GROUP, should you decide to become an OTHERLAND resident.
BUILDING
Most people, who come to live here on the OTHERLAND Archipelago, come because they like the landscape and the overall style of the land. Please try to conserve this while setting up your builds, too. This is a residential area. No skyscrapers and no parcel-filling boxes. If you want some dirt cheap land where you can build anything that the prim allowance makes possible, there are other offers in SL. We will gladly supply you with references to these competitors.
This said:
- Flying houses and other large structures in the sky (skyboxes) are only allowed above 400m
- No skyscrapers (this is residential, not downtown)
- No houses "floating on water"; rocks created by you don't count as "land" ;) Exceptions to this rule might be possible in some of our themed sims.
- Don't build directly on the border of your property. Keep a distance that is in proportion with the height of your build.
- General rule of thumb is:
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allowable height = 2 times the distance between the nearest wall and the border.
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allowable height of wall facing the border = 1.2 times distance from border.
- If you absolutely NEED to build nearer to the border, ask the neighbor. If the neigbor agrees, you might build near the border on ONE side of your land. Get your neighbors agreement in writing: on a non-modifiable notecard that should show your neighbor as the creator of this notecard is best. ATTN: the next owner of the land might not agree! If this happens, you would have to change the building.
Keep a balance between parcel area and building size. On all parcels of 4000 sqm or more:
- Don't cover more than a third of the area with your buildings.
- Don't cover more than half of the land (water is not land) with your buildings.
- Swimming pools or pathes don't count as building ;)
- Never cover more than half of the area with prims
If the sim you are living in, is not “themed”, the style in which you build is yours to decide. (Here is a list of our current themes) But please remember: “Build your house that it would fit (with a grain of salt) into a residential area in RL!”
We are not against tree houses or castles in general, but if you plan such a building please ask us before you erect them. Many prefab castles and tree houses sold in SL are way too large (especially too high) for smaller parcels of less than 10,000 sqm.
If you can make that possible in any way, please leave at least some 32 prims unused on your parcels! That makes it possible for other residents to fly over your land with a vehicle or to sail the waterways of OTHERLAND.
PRIVACY
Please preserve your neighbor’s privacy. No stalking, no spying or eavesdropping scripts. If someone does not want you on their land, please respect this wish. It should not be necessary to ban you for that.
If you want some privacy your own, please refrain from making your land accessible to your group only. You can do this for a short time (2 hours) while you are on the land, if you absolutely feel it is necessary. But don’t set it up permanently. Before you leave SL (log off) please clear any general access limitation.
If you absolutely don’t want someone on your land, ban him or her.
Please do not use the access restriction "Residents, who have not given payment info to Linden Lab". This bans more than half of Second Life's population - some of them are the nicest people imaginable. Yes it is true, that many impolite people (griefers) did not give payment info to Linden Lab. But alienating potentially half a million good guys because you want to keep out a few hundred bad ones is probably not a very good idea.
If you don’t know who it might be that will bother you and still want to ensure a maximum of privacy, please build yourself a nice sky box above 400m (there are prefabs for that purpose, too) and install a polite security device there. A polite security device is one that
- does not use push
- works only over the land that is yours
- gives trespassers at least 20 secs warning
No security systems are allowed, if the reach down below 400m - not even polite ones.
And please ... If you can make that possible in any way, please leave at least some 32 prims unused on your parcels! That makes it possible for other residents to fly over your land with a vehicle or to sail the waterways of OTHERLAND. If you fill up your prims "to the top" that effectively destroys any boat or plane entering your land. And I don't think that is polite, especially with owners of large parcels and those which include open waterways.
VEGETATION
We put a lot of effort into setting up the initial vegetation on the land. This is maybe as important for the overall impression and beauty as the shape of the land. So please follow the following rules
- Every parcel on the OTHERLAND Archipelago has to contain some trees and plants!
- You can delete the ones we planted. But then you have to put up your own instead. You do not have to create a forest! :) But put something green around your house. You will see, that you like it!
- If you place your own vegetation on the land, please preserve the general character of the vegetation on the sim. Don't fill your parcel with palms and tropical plants on sims which have initially been forested with needle trees or vice versa. Have a look around before you become a resident of OTHERLAND. We offer different styles of vegetation and landscape. Choose the one you prefer BEFORE you select your land.
If you ask, we will provide you with automatic planters that contain the original vegetation of the sim. It is easy to reforest large areas very efficiently with these devices.
TERRAFORMING
You - and your neighbours, too - came here because you liked the landscape. Please keep it that way. You can terraform the land within the limits of the tools SL supplies you with, but
- Don't change the general style of the land. If you bought flat or gently sloped land, don't raise a steep mountain in the middle. If the land is hilly, don't make a perfectly flat tabletop of it. (It does not matter how the land looks below your builds of course.)
- No stair cases! Don't raise or lower the land so far, that a sharp edge (stair step) is created at the border of the land between your and your neighbors property.
- Don’t block rivers or other waterways; neither with terraforming, nor with prims or with scripted devices. There should always be some way for sailors to cross your parcel.
- Don’t build land with prims where there is none. No astroturf islands please.
- Don’t use prims (especially no megaprims) to circumvent limitations for terraforming! We, from the Otherland Building Group might use them, to design the land. No customer should use them without asking first.
USAGE
If not noted otherwise in any agreement between you and The OTHERLAND Group, this is residential land. So, you can have a yard sale. No problem. (A yard sale means, that the owner is on the premises while it is going on. No week long sales of used goods.) You can throw a party. You can play a round of poker with your friends. You can even offer consulting and counselling services in a small scale. But:
- No shops.
- No clubs.
- No malls.
- No casinos.
- No scripted weapons.
- No large advertisements (billboards).
- No *ingo.
We are not adverse to any of these; but not in a residential neighborhood. If you need land for these purposes, ask. We always have to offer some nice parcels on the mainland and will set up sims especially for these purposes in the second expansion round of THE OTHERLAND Archipelago.
LAG CONTROL
All residents and all parcels in one sim share the resources of one server. If this server has to work too hard and can’t keep up with the demands of the residents currently in it, “lag” happens. Lag often is not local. Too many scripts running in one parcel, can lag the whole server down and every AV in it will experience it.
Nobody likes lag. But sometimes it is hard to foresee what causes lag. In theory it is simple: scripts, a large number of large textures, prims (especially tortured ones) and many AVs coming together in one sim cause lag.
It is not that easy to determine the causes of lag in real (??) life (*cough*, obviously we mean Second Life here), though. The following rules help to keep lag down and be nice to your neighbors:
- Keep the number of guests on your parcel in proportion to the parcels size! What this means? For example: If you don’t own half the sim, don’t throw parties with more than 20 guests regularly.
- Don’t set up too many devices with lagging scripts on your land! (For the experts: a large number of scripts with a large number of listeners is bad.) We actually can check this with some tools. Ask someone from the team when you suspect lag nests in your sim.
- Try to minimize textures on your parcel especially, when they can be seen outside your building. Use 256*256 sized textures if possible, 512*512 maximum.
GRIEFING, CONFLICTS & LITTERING
If you have the feeling, that some other resident of Second Life is attacking or griefing you, please try to gather some evidence and send an IM to one of our estate managers in addition to filing an abuse report (if this is appropriate). If someone did litter your land with junk for example, select the object(s), choose "Edit" and make a snapshot of the screen with the GUI showing. That way we can see the owner of the object(s) in question.
Please send those reports quickly after the incident. In most cases we can't do that much, if the incident happened hours or days in the past.
Please note, that we can not do anything in the case of neighborly disagreements, when there is no clear violation of the Covenant or a violation of the ToS. The Otherland Group can and will not act as a court of arbitration.
Sometimes griefers or careless people will litter your land with "stuff". Please make it a habit to check for such "stuff" regularly (this is easily done with the About Land command) and delete or return it. This will not only make sure that Otherland is a more cleanly estate. It might improve performance on your sim, too (reduce lag) and leave more prims free for you to create nice buildings with.
APPLICABILITY
This Covenant is applicable to all sims on The OTHERLAND Archipelago, which are sold and rented as individual parcels and which are not declared "commercial" or "mixed". In sims, which are "commercial" or "mixed" (some commercial use, with residential parcels, too), shops are allowed. Clubs are prohibited here, too.
In the case of classic sims (full prim land), which are fully owned by a single owner, this owner can ask us if the sim can be used commercially. We might agree, depending on the nature of the store and its setup. It is paramount for us, that such a store doesn't "spread lag" to other sims. If a store is changed after our assessment, we might retract our agreement for any or no reason and the store might have to cease operation.
Some sims don't fall under the Covenant at all, even though they are part of The OTHERLAND Estate. These are sims, where no land is sold or rented at all and which are operated as part of the infrastructure of our estate. The management of The OTHERLAND Group decides what is possible here. We will allways try to make sure that neigboring sims are not influenced negatively by these installations - which are intended to be enjoyed by all Otherlanders. Should such a sim open in you neighborhood after you have bought your land and you should get the feeling, that its existence does influence your enjoyment of your land in a negative way, we will gladly buy back your land at 100% of your own cost and/or offer you similar land elsewhere on The OTHERLAND Estate.
CONSEQUENCES
This covenant constitutes a contract between you and The OTHERLAND Group. You agree to it by becoming a resident on a private sim owned by The OTHERLAND Group.
Breaking these rules or the TOS of Second Life constitutes a breach of contract. This might lead to the termination of the contract.
We never declare a termination of contract lightly. In most cases we will issue a warning or a polite reminder first or we might reclaim the land temporarily to remedy the source of the violation (usually that is the case with ban lines, agressive security scripts, destructive terraforming and buildings in violation of the Covenant). Some violations will result in termination of contract withot warning, though. This is the case with violent attacks (and ... No, we will not discuss who attacked whom first!) and any breach of the Second Life TOS.
Termination of contract because of a violation of the Covenant becomes effective immediately. There are no refunds in this case. Depending on the violation you might be banned from The OTHERLAND Estate, too.
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