As previously reported in these pages, in April the Lab made some changes to the behaviour of Damage settings on land. At the time, the changes caused a certain amount of confusion in the way they limited people’s abilities to set Damage compared to previous behaviour.

As a result, a number of bugs were filed against the changes, including BUG-9098, BUG-9253 and particularly BUG-9422, prompting the Lab to acknowledge there are issues, and promise to look into matters to see if anything could be done to improve things.

As a result of this, the Lab has now come up with a proposal on how Damage can be managed at both the region and the parcel level (there are no plans to offer Damage settings at the estate level) in order to provide region and parcel holders the greatest flexibility on how Damage can be managed on their land, as identified in the various use cases offered through the bug reports.

The proposal was unveiled by Oz and Grumpity Linden at the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, July 31st, and the detailed discussion of the changes can be heard via the meeting’s video (11:16 through 19:16). However, in essence, it is being proposed that:

The current Region / Estate > Region > Allow Damage function will remain, and is set to off by default – so damage will be disabled at the region level by default

by default – so damage will be disabled at the region level by default A new setting, Allow Parcel to Override Damage will be added to Region / Estate > Region, which will allow parcel owners within a region to set Damage for their land, even if it is disabled at the region level via Allow Damage. This will be set to on by default

setting, Allow Parcel to Override Damage will be added to Region / Estate > Region, which will allow parcel owners within a region to set Damage for their land, even if it is disabled at the region level via Allow Damage. This will be set to by default The About Land > Options > Safe (No Damage) option will be unchecked by default – so Damage will by default be on at the parcel level by default.

Thus, under this approach, and by default, parcel owners can still have Damage enabled if they wish, while the region owner can have it disabled in order to make places like public areas safe from unintentional Damage, for example.

However, region owners will be able to retain overall control for setting Damage on a region by unchecking Allow Parcel to Override Damage. This will cause the entire region to obey whatever is set via Allow Damage, and the Safe (No Damage) option in About Land > Options will be disabled / greyed-out for all parcels, preventing parcel holders from changing it.

In addition, further changes will be made to the viewer so that it will only display Damage icons in regions / parcels where Damage is enabled.

Currently, there are no times scales for when these changes (which will involve updates to both the simulator code and to the viewer) might be implemented; the idea at the moment is to gain feedback on the proposal as it stands. Furthermore, the Lab is still examining how they might ensure that any current settings for Damage people have on their land are correctly preserved when any changes are eventually rolled-out (although it is likely some people may have to manually readjust the Damage settings on their land once changes have been made, even with the best efforts on the Lab’s part to avoid this).

Once the changes have been finalised and time tabled for implementation, the Lab will hopefully communicate them ahead of release via a blog post / announcement and through the viewer’s MOTD. I’ll also be covering the changes when they are ready to be deployed.