Vehicles

Please forgive all my newbie questions. If there's a better place to post this, let me know and I'll go there.

So I'm wondering what advice y'all have to give on vehicles. I have tons of freebie ones and I'm absolutely entranced with them. I can proudly say that I've crashed every freebie vehicle Yadni and Gnu Inc have to offer. My last plane ended up nose first at the bottom of the ocean and then proceeded to burrow into the ocean floor, which was a little disconcerting at first but no worries -- it came back to my inventory a day later. Much love for the whole lost and found thing. And since I was in the ocean I immediately rezzed a sailboat which floated to the top as soon as I got in. Crashed that into a house. WTF is a house doing in the middle of the ocean? I have even crashed the mammoth once or twice and that's hard to do. The flying teacup is one of my favorite things to crash -- it is very hard to control. But being in a flying teacup is just so cool! I can't help myself.

But these mishaps have not put me off vehicles. Oh no, quite the contrary. I shall persevere in the face of adversity. Besides they are way too much fun.

So is it me? Is it that I just don't know how to control the vehicles yet and I need to practice more? Is it the vehicles? Are the free ones, by and large, big pieces of crap and I need to actually buy vehicles that work? I've heard that land vehicles stink but air vehicles are ok. I've heard the exact opposite as well -- that air vehicles stink but land vehicles are ok. I bought a flying broom (and a friend gave me a thing that makes me say "ill get you my pretty and your little dog too!" so all I need now is a tattered black dress and a pointy hat and I'm all set for Halloween) but the broom seems to have a mind of its own. Once I'm on it, it kind of takes off and goes where it wants rather than where I tell it -- which is a little odd but very adventurous.

Also, any tips for sailing? How do you manage to keep the map up and also watch where you are going all at the same time? The minimap just isn't doing it for me. I'm ok with sailing for the most part and out of all the vehicles I've tried, I crash boats the least. But it would be nice to actually know where I am going so I can learn the map as well as have fun.

Any advice you can give is appreciated (well except for the kind where you tell me to back away from the vehicles slowly and no one will get hurt).

All vehicles can be temremental, but the free ones tend to be older, and therefore more so..

Land vehicles tend to fall through the ground a lot and are very bumpy, in my experience..

The most fun I've had with vehicles are Jetski's and Quad Bike type things...

Best thing to avoid crashing would be find a boat with sensitive stearing and find some open water..

Those are my tips for the moment anyway, ask again if I missed anything

Practice, Practice, Practice!!

This was a great post btw it brought back many memories for me. I have a feeling that everyone who reads this will feel the same way. This is one of those things that everyone goes through and its part of learning SL.

I eventually saved up and bought a couple vehicles that I consider my favorites.

MJ

Did you grab a Flying Tako over on the coast in sim Gray yet? Forgive me if you have.

It's a L$1 sailboat that's professionally scripted, operating on SL's own wind pattern (or predetermined wind patterns). It has extremely comprehensive help notecards if you need them, but the boat itself is relatively simple to operate. While getting the most of out of the wind requires a little practice, it operates like RL sailboats, so any experience there immediately translates to this boat in SL.

If I had to pick one universal vehicle tip that everybody must know while operating any kind of vehicle, it would be: DON'T GO THROUGH SIM CORNERS. That is unless you like being forced to relog. :>

yes MJ i agree

i have a number of vehicles tucked away -- loved that cop motorcycle and the jetski.... -- but i'm really putting any type of driving/flying/boating on hold until havok2 comes out.... someday... over the rainbow...

You are so cute in your mouse AV riding the police bike

No I haven't yet and thanks for the advice. I assume I can get there by yanking up Gray in regions on the map and then teleporting there and looking for a coast?

What is a sim corner? I've not heard that terminology yet. Are they obvious to the eye of the beholder?

Because the sims are arranged in a square tile pattern, each corner of each sim can have up to three "Adjacent" sims...

If you pass through a corner on your way from one sim to the one placed diagonally from it (an admittedly tough feat unless your vehicle is large...) then you could be present on up to 4 sims at one time... The Grid doesn't like this and tends to make life difficult.

If you are lucky, you crash to Desktop...
If you are not, you Freeze your Client...
If we are all unlucky, you crash one or more sims...
Please don't do this...

You may notice that once in a while, say on a boat, that you sink for a small amount of time before *popping up* back on the surface. This happens with all vehicles, and it varies.

On the minimap, the sim that you are currently in displays as a slightly lighter square than the sims you aren't in. Try flying around while watching the minimap, you'll notice that as you move between sims (most noticable if you're flying through pure water sims), whatever sim you are presently in displays as a lighter colored square than the rest. You'll also notice that they form corners, and the corners are what you want to avoid.

Could someone else explain this a little better? I'm not sure on the technicalities behind this, just that driving a vehicle right through a corner results in partial disconnect and requiring a relog.

My experience has been more than partial disconnect...

..but my machine is also not "High End".
That comes later this year...

What if you don't have the map up? What if you are just flying or sailing around on eyesight. Is there anyway to know then if you are approaching a sim corner?

At any given moment you are connected to one sim. Let's say you fly in a jetplane across a sim border: the sim you were in has to hand your conenction to the next sim. If the sim you're entering lags, your connection is only handed over after a few good seconds. During this time, your SL client receives no update on what's happening, so it simply does what it's told to do in such cases: it imagines what happens next. And the problem is, in its book, things continue to go on their inertia and fall because of gravity... and because your client does never handle any collision (only the server does), your jetplane, and any passenger, just keep falling through the ground...


... until the connection is handed over, and the new sim starts sending updates (that's generally the moment when your jetplane pops back up in the sky).

The trouble starts when you cross a corner: you get across ANOTHER border BEFORE the connection is handed over... so you're not connected to the old sim anymore, but you're not connected to the new sim either. You're lost in SecondLimbo, litterally.

Use the mini map, I nearly always have it up..

Also, surely sims can have up to 4 adjascent sims? or am I missing something?

Don't recall ever having the Limbo thing...
just crashes...
but like I said, my machine isn't really "Above the minimum specs" by very far.

I don't, i try to have a passenger on board who is good at reading the minimap and plotting a reasonable course, and also very patient when i get all confused about wind and sail angles and slow the Tako to a crawl.

Vehicles are great fun in SL, as long as you don't expect to cross sim borders at high speed.

My advice: you won't find anything more fun than creating your own vehicle. Take a look in the Scripting Library in this forum for free vehicle scripts that you can use, or beg, borrow, or buy a copy of my DIY airplane kit -- it comes with illustrated instructions on how to build a plane and all the parts you need. If you can't afford to buy it, it's full permissions, so I'm sure someone has a copy that they can send your way for free.

cheers!

Well for great fun:

Get a Corsair ( a very fampus WWII plane. Fly ir up to about 600 meters or more, and rip along. So far i have had no trouble ripping sim corners at high speed, but every now and then I hit someones oh so usefull home secuirty system (what is the point of these anyway?) and get booted from the plane. For some odd reason the Corsair seems more stable than any of my other planes, but it could be in my head.

I Love Cubey's Terra Pods 5 and 6, as well as his air balloon. They'r both easy to fly. The balloon is fun to float around slowly and check out the grid.