Wandering objects?

Over the last few weeks, I've been working on developing birds that can fly around the world under their own guidance. With the old system, they are just objects where I pay L$5 in taxes for each bird I've got flying around. The new system, however, provides prim caps based on how much land you own in a sim. How will this new system affect my birds, and other non-land-bound projects? The new system adds the concept of "temporary" objects that vanish after a time, but the birds' half-life of 30 hours before going off-world seems to be much longer than a "temporary" object should last.

I've asked this question several times, and the most I've gotten for an answer was "We'll have to consider this, and figure out how to allow things like birds, while keeping 'grey goo' out". As a subscribing non-lifetime member, I will get a grant of up to 1024 sq. meters of land and at least 156 non-temporary prims, depending on where that land is. What if I could convert any unused part of this grant into a "floating" allowance of prims that are not tied to any one piece of land or any one sim, with the option of increasing that using either L$ or US$?

Simply allowing changing your prims to global prims would be bad... imagine a few 1/16 owners taking all their objects into a single sim. Ack!

What would be cool, is if they set aside a small chunk of the 10,000 prims or so in each sim to be global. Then when you buy land, you get a percentage of objects in that sim AND a much tinier percentage of permanant objects in the global space.

That way you avoid people being able to hog all the sims all over again, and your objects can freely move from sim to sim without ever worryign about prim usage. Just like attachments currently do.

I liek your birds! One was flying around my land the other day in Freelon.

A related question... if I display a vehicle on my land, will I be blocked from taking it for a spin, because it's "tied" to a particular parcel of land? Is there a limit on how far a prim can be moved from the parcel it's tied to?

We don't have the answer to the wanding object problem yet, but we're thinking about it.

As to the vehicle problem: you will be able to ride it wherever you want. As long as you are using it it will be immune to any cleanup pass. When you disembark then it becomes fair game for cleanup like any other piece of temprary content (see below). I think most objects will be deleted into your inventory on cleanup. Bullets will be able to be specified as "expendable" via scripts such that they are not pushed to your inventory.

Suppose you were a casual SL user with no land, so you were taking advantage of the no-cost access. Could you still build stuff? Yes, however anything you build will not be permenant, and will be cleaned up automatically when:

(1) you wander too far away from the objects you built

(2) and some time has gone by

I'm not sure what the thresholds are right now, but you can be sure that the objects will not just disappear while you are manipulating them or if you quickly turn your back. However, a sim that is operating beyond its prim allocation may be more aggressive about trying to claim back objects, and we don't necessarily want to give casual users an unlimited prim allocation within their local sandbox. That is, we will prevent users from sitting on a local wall of 10,000 marbles; another user coming in on a vehicle would probably be able to bring the vehicle with them at the expense of some of the more distant/older marbles.

Hence, the "wandering object" problem. Birds are cool, but would eventually be harvested under the above scheme. We're looking into possible solutions.