Roads and Rails

First off, I am a huge fan of railways, and would like to play with them in SL.

It seems the road and rail networks are very rarely used, which is a pity.

Perhaps it would help if the scripting language included calls that would take advantage of road / rail type linear features.

For example:
- Allowing a vehicle to snap onto an invisible "guideline" that will keep it on the track, with or without physics
- Adjusting vehicle rotation to keep it pointing down the track
- Providing standardised movement rates set for a given route
- Allowing a vehicle to navigate across "switch" points at junctions
- Adjusting the rendering preference/range of a client that is "riding the rails" so that it preloads scenary ahead of the track rather than to sides
- Something to handle collissions on single-track rail. I would rather the vehicles just phantom past one another if this happens.

With predictable movement, it should be possible to handle sim transitions much more smoothly, as you get some significant warning that the transition will occur at a known time.

I'm ambivalent about whether to allow users to create their own routes. My first objective would be to get the existing Linden road/rail infrastructure working. But player-created routes would certainly be interesting.

This is not about racetracks, its about well-behaved movement of traffic through the world.

My initial thinking was for the road and rail network. However, something similar could be done as Airways. Perhaps the "line" of an airway could be made to rise and fall based on land and building heights, so you can explore without colliding.

What do you think?

Oh, please, don't get me started on the problems with running physical vehicles as public transport.

You might wish to take a look at the tram in Caledon (and perhaps also my touring balloon). Whilst I am sure there are numerous examples that put my humble scripting to shame, it is the only one that I have scripted myself, and whilst the route is short it is infinitely customisable. A larger heavy rail system is also being planned, though when this will appear I cannot say.

Hmm... I can think of several implementations that would make public-transportation vehicles work (assuming I ever figure out the intricacies of vehicle scripting). If I come up with a decent system, I'll open-source it for you guys.

The main problem with rail is that they need a LOT of land to run along, and that's not very profitable at all in our increasingly economics driven virtual world.

It becomes a viscious spiral, without people paying to use the transport, it's too costly to run, but with a cost people are even less likely to use it since they can just teleport for free.

It would be AWESOME to see transport taking a bigger effect for when you don't mind how long it takes to get somewhere, but this is a virtual world and the mentality is that if it's run on computers, it should be FAST.

I went exploring a while back, couldn't TP to where I wanted for whatever reason so I flew the full 8km and explored everything on the way, found several of the rail links including one of the tramways. It was awesome fun to ride on, but slow and took me away from the direction I really wanted to go.

I would like to see the roads links being more complete, and having something like you say, a comprehensive scripting tool allowing vehicles to see the Linden added roads would be excellent! That way if the roads spanned the whole world, you could run a Linden approved tramline on the roads and go anywhere.
Although, I'm not 100% certain a new scripting tool is necessary, it's possible to do it well now, what we'd really need maybe is a dedicated road development team who's job it is to add road sections and lay the scripts used and setting the LL land auto-return higher so that trams don't just randomly disappear (or having the land group-owned so tram-line owners can join and not fear auto-return).
The development group could really be used for any in-world development, and I reckon a whole load of people would happily do it, just assign them a sim to develop and make the appropriate land owned by the development group and away they go! Free premiums or other incentives would be neat, but I suspect many people would volunteer.
This way you could have an open source scripting resource in all the roads so people can interface with it, then someone could apply for permission to set-up their tramline or bus route using scripts with some kind of standard (to cope with other vehicles nearby and blockages or such).

Same goes for waterways, I want to see boat links to places, maybe even private islands that allow public access! I would use the public transport links for the sheer fact that they are public, it would be cool to meet other people riding the train between sims and such. Teleporting is great if you need to be somewhere quick, but it's so impersonal!

/random garblings.

I didn't make the proposal with a view to running a public transport business, but simply to allow builders to create vehicles that can use the infrastructure logically. If someone could turn that into a business (I have my doubts) good luck to them, but that wasn't what I was asking for.

I would just like a chance to create vehicles that run on the roads and rails.

Still, point remains, while a specific thing for scripting would be neat, we can do things like that now, the issue really is that no-one really seems to care much about updating the roads, so having a group of people do it would really help. Even with a new feature for it I'd imagine such an update would need to take place anyway.

Really? How is my vehicle able to find the road and stay on it? I dont want to just bump along looking for collissions. I'm not sure there is something we can reliable Sense either. We cant shoot invisible probes or drop user-created beacon objects on roads as they are all no-rez areas (which seems dumb in my mind - a moderate return time would seem more useful).

You can do it if someone plots out the course of a road in global co-ordinates, and releases it so that anyone can use it. I've thought of doing that myself, but it's quite a long job. There's no way to automatically detect Linden roads though (that I know of).

You don't even need that, you can use a listen or sensor to find road sections (the only ones that actually concern you are corners or junctions) and use information they give on their type and position to decide what direction(s) you can now go in.
So provided the listens or object names have some convention then you can find pieces easily enough, check that they are owned by Governor Linden (or "SL Development Group" or w/e) and follow the information it gives you.

Provided someone puts that information into them, but that's the same problem that your proposal would face anyway, since to have the road sections possess a 'track' you can follow, would require all roads to be updated anyway.

Looking for more closely at sections of rail track, I can see an invisible set of prims called Guide down the middle, plus periodic "barriers" across the track with additional scripts in them. I presume this is part of an existing Linden infrastructure for running their trains. I note that there has been some discussion of SL Commuter trains, though I have never seen one running myself.

Do the train scripts for these still exist somewhere? Are they useable by mere users or was this system reserved for Linden use?

Its possible there may be something similar on the roads though I haven't had time to look yet.

I don't think the roads have anything, the trains though are physical so the prims are likely for them to bump into to find edges, iirc they float above the tracks so any collision will always be with a guide or a blockage I think.

As for open source I dunno, though I've seen non-Linden railways with the same script running in their trains.