The case of the disappearing aircraft

Nearly every time I go out flying in my Klingon Bird of Prey or bi-plane or (soon) a British Spitfire I run into some kind of barrier. Some bot ejects me or I hit some "forbidden" zone. I don't go around "griefing" or anything like that. Still I inevitably wind up falling from the sky, and the craft winds up missing, usually being returned by parcel auto return.
As a paying customer I find this to be unacceptable. Tonight was the worst, when some bot ejected me because I flew overhead (twice) while looking for the Bird of Prey it downed. Your advertisement which says that SL is user created, well that should be amended. It seems that SL is more like first life than I could have imagined, with so many rules that having fun is "virtually" outlawed. Who does own the airspace anyway? This is garbage. I suggest a safe passage altitude should be enforced for all SL. We need to have some sort of action. Sheesh!

I wonder if a boat would be afflicted by the same problem.

I like leaving my aircraft there, because if the clown owning the parcel with no object entry won't even leave autoreturn on , they deserve a view of crashed aircraft hanging in the sky.

to the OP...there's another recent thread on water and air space for rezzin your boats and flying machines. Blakes Sea was mentioned. I'm sure some kind person will post the link.......I'm at work at the moment and my boss is........................

Get 500M above land and you should be fine unless there are orbs in the sky to eject you.

I have found a partial (though less than elegant) solution. I "wear" the spaceship. You have to use an animation that paralyzes your avatar so the ship cannot flop around. Then I use my own flying powers. It is better than nothing. You cannot take passengers; the ship is non-physical. I will also try the suggestion about flying high above.
At least when I fall from the sky, the ship falls with me.

The Blake Sea area is quite interesting, and decently large.

I'm glad to hear you've found some partial solutions, Arti. However, I must still take issue with some of the things you've said. Apologies in advance if any of the following sounds at all harsh, but it would be disingenuous of me not to admit that I found your apparent attitude in your original post to have been inconsiderate of all stakeholders in the situation. I feel a certain obligation to stick up for landowners' rights.




It appears that what you're saying is you believe your own wants should trump the rights of others, specifically land owners, who share the SL grid space with you, and you are offering up the fact that you happen to be paying money to Linden Lab as some sort of justification for that attitude, despite the fact that all of us who own land are also paying, just like you. Precisely how do you expect us, especially those of us who are landowners, to respond to that sentiment?

Allow me to explain how I, as a fellow paying customer, see it. I pay around US$200 a month for my mainland sim. I choose to leave my land open to the public, for the most part. But if for any reason (or for no reason), I decide tomorrow that I want to close it off, are you honestly telling me I shouldn't have the right to do that, just because you might happen to like flying airplanes over it?

Look, regardless of whatever you are or aren't paying to LL for your existence in SL, the fact is you're not paying ME a dime. You have no inherent right to access land that belong to me. That said, I'm happy to grant you or anyone else the privilege of access, at least until and unless you abuse it. But you'd do well to realize that it is just that, a privilege granted to you, absolutely not a right of your own.

If you don't like that, make me a good enough offer, and maybe I'll consider selling the land to you. Then you could decide how and whether the land can be accessed. Until then, what you do or don't find acceptable is frankly none of my concern.




To whom are you speaking when you say "your"? Understand, the Lindens do not read these forums. These boards are just for us users. If you want the Lindens to hear you, contact them directly.

In any case, how exactly do you feel the term "user created" does not apply to the situation you described above? These bots you refer to, if that's indeed what they are, were created by users. So where's the disconnect? How is the world not user-created, just because not all of it happens to be how YOU might have wanted it to be?

With just a very small handful of exceptions, literally every single thing you see in SL was created by a user. Security devices that crash your planes are no exception.

What you need to realize and accept is that SL is a community. Every parcel of land in it is owned or rented by somebody just like you, just like me, just like anyone. Some people will welcome you to fly your little airplanes across their land, and some will do everything in their power to prevent you from doing so. In either case, the landowner is free to make decisions as he or she sees fit. Any owner can close off or open up access to his or her land at any time, for any reason, or for no reason.

This notion of yours that your desire for unrestricted access should somehow trump a landowner's right to control his or own land is naive at best, and very selfish at worst. The main grid, especially its mainland, is a shared space. If you're not a sharer by nature, then maybe you'd be happier elsewhere.

If you don't want ever to be restricted by someone else's rules, you've got a few options. One would be to purchase your own island or group of islands on the main grid, and impose whatever rules on it you see fit, just like every other land owner already does. The other would be to run your own private grid on your own computer(s).

As long as you're going to continue to utilize other people's land, you have to be aware that you are a guest, and a somewhat uninvited one at that. As such, you cannot reasonably expect that your own wants, needs, and desires will the only ones to come into play.




The only rules imposed by Linden Lab are those explained in the Terms of Service and Community Standards, which you should have read before joining. If you neglected to read those documents, I'd suggest you take a few minutes to do so now.

Other than that, SL is the wild west. Individual land owners decide what can and cannot happen on their land. If you want to have that same degree of control, get some land of your own, and do on it as you see fit. But kindly don't expect other land owners to just let you do whatever you want whenever you want on land that they, not you, are paying for. If you don't like the way a particular land owner is doing things, stay off his or her land. It's that simple.




You speak as if the whole of the grid is one thing. It's not. It's a patchwork of individually owned parcels of land. The "airspace" above any particular parcel is owned by whomever happens to own the land below it.

As has been mentioned, you can be reasonably assured of unimpeded flight by making sure you stay at a relatively high altitude. But there are no guarantees. If someone wants to put up enough security devices to prevent you from flying over their land at ANY height, that's their prerogative.




Again you appear to be saying that you believe YOUR wants should supersede the rights of any and every one of your peers. I doubt you'll find many here who would agree with you on that.

Look, the world is plenty big enough for you to find enough places to fly your airplanes. There are literally millions of acres of land on the grid, above which are billions of cubic meters of space. I'm guessing that at least 90% of that is wide open for fly-over. But even if it's the exact opposite, and 90% of it restricted, that still leaves hundreds of thousands of acres, and millions of cubic meters of airspace. It's a big world. If you've been flying in unfriendly skies, simply move on to greener pastures and bluer yonders.



On a side note, I'm somewhat puzzled as to why you chose to post this in Technical Issues. This is a social issue, not a technical one. From a technical standpoint, everything you described is working as intended. If you disagree with the principles behind the intent, that's certainly worthy of discussion, but there's no technical problem here to speak of.

This topic probably would have been better suited to Resident Answers, posed as a "why" question, the answers to which could have been discussed and debated by a wide audience. Technical Issues is pretty much just a place to trouble-shoot when things aren't working, a resource for finding solutions to malfunctions, glitches, that sort of thing. Airplane crashes and computer crashes are two different things, after all.

It belongs here because he is not disupting property owners' rights to control access, more the way in which it is implemented.

The technical side of the issue is that these security bots strike with little or no warning, on land that appears to be open to the public, according to its settings.

I just got nailed by one a few minutes ago, just a few feet from a Linden road.

If there were some standard way for a vehicle to query these bots and avoid them, everyone would be a lot happier.

The way it's implemented is via scripting. All the script functions are working exactly as they're supposed to. They just happen to have been combined in a manner which you and he OP find distasteful. That, as I said, is a social issue, not a technical one. More on this below.




"Little or no warning" is, again, a social thing. If the creator and/or operator of a security orb wants it to issue a warning before it does its thing, it can easily be made to do so, using the exact same (fully functional) scripting language that controls all its other functions. If you want to call the fact that a given device does not give such warning a problem, fine. I might even agree with you, at least in some cases. The question is certainly debatable. But if it is a problem, it's certainly not a technical one. It's not the result of anything being wrong with SL. In fact, just the opposite. It's an example of functions that work perfectly, no matter how questionable their use may be. The question is purely a matter of behavior and etiquette on the part of SL's users, not a functionality problem with SL itself.




There are several ways, actually. One would be to build a scanning device, again using the same fully functional scripting language the security devices were written in. Another would be to turn on beacons for scripted objects in the viewer. This wouldn't show ONLY security devices, of course, but when you see a beacon in the middle of the sky near a property line, you can get a fairly decent indication that it MIGHT be a security device, and you can make sure to steer clear of it.

If you firmly believe that being able to detect security devices would make "everyone a lot happier", then there's a golden business opportunity here. Take a look at the most popular security devices on the market, identify tell-tale properties such as their names, any unique behaviors they exhibit, etc., and script a smarter anti-security-device, that could give you ample warning when one is nearby.


In any case, it's worth keeping in mind that neither LL nor any individual landowner is under any obligation whatsoever regarding your personal happiness when you're trying to access land that does not belong to you. LL's responsibility is simply to provide a service that works. Again, consideration for all stakeholders must be in the equation here. If a landowner derives happiness from shooting planes down without warning over his or her own land, that's arguably a right that he or she is paying for. If you don't like it, you're under no obligation to keep coming back to his or her land. You're also free to file abuse reports if you feel the devices violate the Terms of Service or Community Standards in some way (which they very well might).

All of this, once again, concerns the behaviors of SL users, not any failure of functionality within the workings of SL itself. Therefore, the discussion would have been better suited to a different than Technical Issues Nothing is broken here, nothing is malfunctioning. Technically, everything is exactly as it should be. Socially, it may be a different story, but technically, all is well.

Tell me, if I were to script a bot to run a round the grid, and shout, "Rufus Darkfold is an idiot!" to anyone and everyone, all day long, that probably wouldn't make you happy, right? As well it shouldn't. But would it be fair to say there's something technically wrong with SL because I was able to do that? No, of course not. If I did that, there would be something wrong with ME, not with SL. I would have exhibited bad behavior, bad judgment, whatever you want to call it. Your recourse would be to file an abuse report. LL would investigate, they'd determine I violated the community standards, they'd delete the bot, and they'd probably suspend me from SL for a few days.

What they wouldn't do is rewrite the whole damned scripting language to make sure people can't do the same thing. That would be ridiculous, not to mention impossible.

It's no different with security devices. If a scripter and/or a device owner has executed poor judgment in the manner in which a scripted device behaves, that's simply bad behavior on the part of that person, nothing more. Again, it's human behavioral issue, not a technical issue. Make sense?