Roads.. huh?

Roads... I know this has probably been ranted about too many times for this thread (at least for some people).

But I just finished watching my friend Plenipotientiary go tooling around from our group plot in Arena and heading westward. It's actually pretty possible to simulate a cycle going flat out using a helo script rather than what passes for ground vehicle scripts... much better control and damn fast speeds. It was a great ride... for a while.

Anyway... this post has to do with what can only be described as poor planning on LL's part. We got to Cresecent and the road just stopped... Not a hole. Not a fallen bridge. It just stopped. She flew/drove right over the edge of the road because we thought it was a dip... right into someone's build!

Pulled up the big map to see what gave and found that, nope, we weren't mistaken. Poor planning has left a HUGE sim plus a bit gap between the Crescent sim road edge and the nearest westward possible connecting road --- you choose, in either Epimethus or in Janus. Epimethus is shorter by a bit and more directly to the west, but one could argue that the connection should be in Janus.

Now, I would like to know if LL wants to encourage vehicle design, use and sales in order to develop the world and its economy, what teh hell were they/you thinking by not connecting the roads? Its one thing to have a cute thing like a allen bridge... (without a drive aroound, it's kinda a pain tho); it's something else competely when you tease us residents like this - sure we have roads... they are just in poor repair, they don't connect... and, oh, we haven't even completely terraformed them so that the ground on the side flows down over the road walls and road barriers into the roads themselves....

And with the land in between the obvious connecting parts of the world already sold, is LL going to play "right of eminent domain" to buy the right of way back so the roads can be connected? Or is this it? That road gap is just going to remain?

I really want to know. What the hell were you thinking?

i really agree with you Korg!

What is the point in a road if it only covers parts of SL and cuts off willy nilly all the time??? If flying was restricted to older members, this would encourage the use of roads, vehicles would b more popular and people would put more heart in going places, instead of just flynig past and not taking a second glance at a different build to the one they r going to.

Feature suggestion: Have the roads emit a message every 60 seconds containing the coordinates between points of the road in the local vicinity, so we can make cars that can drive along the roads automatically.

-Adam

Well, I know that other than Boardman and one other Sim from the *early* days, roads were not put in any sims until the introduction of the southern sims that were released a few months ago (before the snow sims and such).

I remember the day those sims came up, and groups of us were driving around the roads and loved them! Phillip Linden came by and ran and rode with a lot of us on those roads and listened to our praises of them. He seemed to be facinated by how much we enjoyed them. Roads seemed to be an after thought. And the city sims came along with roads as well. And a trolley that is never used and often broken. hehe .. I have a feeling LL figured neighbors in Sims would make their own roads. And some did. But not enough to give that continuation feeling.

I think the roads are where LL is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Either the world is ours to create or it isn't. Right? Where does LL step in, where do they step back? I have to imagine it is a hard choice to make with each Sim just how much LL defines the parameters of the terraforming and how much they leave up to the future owners.

Personally, I would love for at least one "highway" to run and connect every sim. But I'm a city gal. Just as with the railroad crossing more sims. And the various waterway connections. I have a feeling that if we want more roads in already existing sims, it is going to be up to us to convice the land owners in that sim to help with the project.

And it doesn't have to be a highway! It could be small dirt roads even that connect to the main ones. All that is needed is a little creativity and motivation and we could connect the whole world in time.

Yeah, I'd love to see more roads, better connected roads, more useful roads. There are some really scenic areas, and some of the newers stone bridges really make the road look like a part of its environment.

And how about allowing rezzing of cars on any Linden-owned road with 5-10 minute auto-return? That would certainly make them more useful.

Now there's an idea! Rather futuristic, but I bet this could be done to great effect in SL -- mapping out the whole road network would be quite a herculean effort. This reminds me of the realworld Japanese experiments of making cars with beacon sensors to detect where the boundaries of roads are, for safer driving.

My hand-eye coordination is questionable, but I don't think I'm the only one who has a problem with cornering when it comes to long and winding roads. With most cars, seems to be that even a light tap of the key will make the car veer at a sharp angle, like 30 degrees. :|

Okay.. rant mode off. I have calmed down some.

Let's see. The early SL didn't have roads. Nothing we can do about that now.. the past is the past.
Newer sims sometimes have roads. That also is a fact.
Not all newer sims have roads. That also is a fact.

So far, I don't have a problem with the facts.

What roads there are do not all connect. That is also a fact.
Now I begin to have problems with the facts.

The suggestion was made, albeit indirectly that residents may need to band together to buy right of ways and make our own roads. Hmmm. Conceivable. The problem, of course, is that land counts against someone's tier. Donate it to a group you say. Sure. Fine. Great. Until that person withdraws the allocation... then SL gets stuck until someone else donates... So, you constantly face inconsistency with the status of the road network.

This is not the case with the waterways or the skyways. Those have been provided and protected by the Lindens. To some degree, and there are notable blockages, these transportation routes are protected.. with protected rights of way. Now, some waterways have low bridges... can't really get around that if you have an aircraft carrier height vessel. My response to a bitch about that case.. too bad.

OTOH, roads are different. They serve as distinct connections between sims ... the only connections in some cases... island sims are just that islands.. you can't even boat out to them... or fly out to them.. in some cases. But as far as the "mainland sims" go, the road network IS, I argue, the connecting tissue ---- not teleportation, no mere flying. Roads.

Roads are tangible - ariways are not. Even airports/heliports just act as islands for stop and go behavior. Fly in/fly out is not the same as across-the-world-driving.

Ulimately, once LL began to put roads down, did they or did they not have any responsibility to the world to connect the damn things to each other. I don't mind volunteering tobe part of the road crew/road repair crew.... I do, however, think that LL had a responsibility to plan on connecting the roads... not leaving them hanging (and I know there will be some dead ends; it's the nature of a 2D road system).

the lindens could start a road tax to support the highways?




I'd be in favor of the ground having a road texture - would cut down on prim usage.

Why drive when you can fly?
Think outside the box, people. You are too attached to the real world and its unefficient ways of doing things
Roads in SL are just silly.

Because sometimes driving can be more exciting. Why do you suppose there's so many land vehicles in the first place? There's a certain thrill you can get from following the flow of the road that you simply can't achieve with flying.

If you simply want to get from point A to point B, flying is obviously the most efficient solution. But sometimes people are more interested in the journey than arriving at their destination quickly and easily.

Driving and flying are both valid transport systems in computer worlds.

The difference between the two is a matter of perspective. You see structures completely differently when on the ground than you do even at a relative altitude of 30 feet. Things that you can easily see in the distance when flying at 100 feet/meters simply don't exist for the ground bound traveller.

So, road travel is something I appreciate because of the perspective it offers as a sight-seer. If I need to get somewhere quickly, that's a different story, especially in the current state of SL travel options in terms of reliability and speed.

I love flying down canyons - it's immersive. But driving down concrete canyons is or can be a similar experience. The cheap thrill threat of a high speed run up or down a winding hillside road is indescribably but palpably different than that of computer flight. The threat is the potential that you will not make a turn and go tumbling down the hillside. This is inherently different than flight in SL - in this mode, the threat is unrealistic to the extreme. The flight threat is that the software will screw up and you will crash due to no fault of your own, usually at a sim crossing. That is an unavoidable, no skill invovled, threat. The fact that you may drive yourself unintentionally off a cliff is a skill-related threat.

The closest non-thrill comparison between flying in SL and driving for sightseeing is tooling around at slow speed in a blimp or a helo at low altitude. Still, flight vehicles tend to be larger and more enclosed than ground cehicles - on the whole. So, there is still no direct comparison - that altitude perspective difference you remember?

Finally, my question/opening post about the roads has to do with what is... what was planned and implemented in actuality, not with whether or not there should be ground vehicles. There are and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Let's deal with that.

the content of new media is old media.

Excellent point there Korg!!!

How the hell I'm posed to get my "Biker Boyz" to mount up and ride if we're gonna pull a "Pied Piper" into someones living room? Oh yeah we can all "fly around", end up lookin like the goons from Superman

*seriously - a moment of silence please.


Thank you folks,
Yes Christopher, you are and always will be the one and only "Superman" in my book! And a "REAL super hero"! Love you man!

Aight, hope everything can get worked out and that the Ls can rectify this. As stated before this definately hampers peoples ambitions of hittin the open road and wanting to make bigger, better, sweeter vehicles. I was seriously thinkin of makeing bikes, get a little gang together and even talked to my home slice Neil bout slaving the bikes together so we'd look GOOD rollin up on people, but NOWWWWWWWWWW think that's on hold.

Get over it! In the meantime, dwell and dance folks! woot!

Okey Dokey,

Just throw out the vehicles I got, scrap the sripts, and get my f*ckin' Tinker Bell on!!!

Wheeeeeeeee I'm cool, got a tutu for me?

Excellent idea, parhaps if the lindens couldn't take this on they could grant permissions to a team willing to do so?

Meh, I don't drive IRL and I sure wish I could fly for real.
I've always hated the fact that everyone stays on the ground. It has always been my stance that in SL we are essencially humanoid avians.
It would certainly be more interesting (to me at least) if more people had houses on a pole or tree, or cloud, or mountain side, or whatever.
More fantasy please! I get enough reality in, you know, the real world

Eggy, I haven't seen any shortage of airborne builds.