Encouraging Travel By Roads

While it's great to be able to teleport point-to-point, and I love being able to fly... years of road tripping in RL has led me to make use of the roads in SL to get from place to place - at times. Road use in SL should be encouraged because it allows for the discovery of new things through serendipity. If I go from A to B by road rather than flying or TPing, I might just meet someone cool on the road, or pass by a great shop or build that I might never have otherwise seen. Beside the fact that there are many areas isolated from roads and the street network is not well interconnected, there are two principal drawbacks to the system that limit their use:

First, you can't rez a vehicle in the right-of-way. Unless you own land along the road, you may have a tough time finding a place to rez that motorcycle. And even if you do rez on private property, often there are some difficulties getting onto the road surface due to ditches or raised road beds.

Second, vehicle physics and most driving scripts often don't allow for good control on the roads. I often zig and zag across the road and into ditches and buildings. And when traveling at high speeds, I outpace the rezzing of the road itself!

Currently my favorite way to travel by road is to fly close to the ground at slow to moderate speed in Mouselook... it's the closest to a windshield experience I've found. Perhaps two enhancements could be made to the system to promote more use of roads:

1. Allow vehicle rezzing on roadways. Perhaps, this could be set so that someone could rez but would automatically be made to ride - and the vehicle would de-rez if the AV stepped out... This would keep the roads from becomming sandboxes littered with abandoned vehicles.

2. Add something to the scripting language that would allow vehicle programmers to force their creations to stay on roads. This could serve to put "virtual guardrails" along the roadways to keep folks from driving off the road and into the neighbor's living room.

There are so many cool vehicles out there, but I rarely see them in action except in sandboxes (or in the air). Maybe these enhancements could increase ground vehicle use, encourage exploration, and increase Resident interaction.

-Electic Golem

It'd really be a Holy Grail once the persistently troubling problem of crossing sims (be it by road or other means) is smoothed out noticeably.

It especially baffles new Resis, because I've heard many times when they believe it's a problem with a CAR, their logic (understandable) being that if they walk across a region border, it's considerably smoother. So they take it up with the creator, and hopefully gracious explanations ensue for why added attachments and particularly scripted primsets (like vehicles) will behave far more jerkily across "state lines".

Also unnatural is how SL is organized, as a grid, like graph paper, into squares. That by itself is fine, insofar as an internal cartographic system goes, but the fact we have to consciously avoid corner crossings is highly bizarre, even moreso when many roads have been designed at twisty angles and slopes.

I once tried in vain to go on a road trip on a fancy trike by IronChef Cook. I was going to do it from one end of the mainland to the other (which was a lot smaller than it is now). This, unfortunately a couple sims into my travels, failed miserably, because I kept getting buried under the cement after passing from one region to the next. Was rather embarassing, actually.

You do point at one thing I'd like to see tons more of: AUTOMATED VEHICLE TOURS. Like in some of those anime flicks, how there's a controlled car with adjustable velocity and how it is locked to the road and doesn't kill anyone. I'm surprised there's not more AUTOMATED VEHICLE TOURS in SL, period. One of the longstanding finest would have to be the planes and airships from Abbotts Aerodrome. There's also a mini-hot air balloon ride in Ambleside for that whole Linden Village thang.

I think a more important consideration would be caching. I'd say that common road-pieces should be kept in the cache (or be included with the game) as my main gripe with road travel or any travel by vehicle is that I reach a point where I am rezzing too slowly to see what I'm passing.

But yes, I'd love to see more emphasis put onto the road and rail system, or whatever 'real' transportation systems come up in future.
I have a 'road' type piece of empty Linden land near to my shop, and I'd LOVE to see it become a proper road or railway.

*Posting to make thread at top of list*

This would be awesome, I would love this! Perhaps also... charge TP travel, so that it's discouraged. I mean, when you play Morrowind.. which is more fun... taking stilt striders from dagon fel to balmora... or walking the whole way there?

Maybe I just haven't explored enough, but the few times I have encountered a road that I could rez a vehicle on or near, there simply wasn't enough length of road there to be worth driving something on! I'd just get up to speed, and the road would end. Presumably this was the edge of a sim, or at least the edge of the land that the person who built the road had building rights on. I don't know.

If there was a system of usable roads in SL, roads long enough to really go somewhere, and where you could rez vehicles as needed. that would be interesting to explore. Until there is... I'll stick to flying low, in mouselook mode, when I explore.

It would be neat if LL got a load of volunteer builders and was able to 'allocate' them land on which to build road. This way the team of road constructors could quickly improve the 'real' transport system of SL. Not to mention the same thing for piers etc which seem to be left undeveloped.

Bump! I totally love travelling on the roads.

I also love travelling in the giant water sims where nothing can be rezzed... Just go into the neighboring sim where someone has turned on rezzing and rez your boat, then go sailing! Wonderful.

There needs to be more emphasis placed on such things... LL ought to see if there are any ways of syncing servers to predict sim crossings before they happen. E.G. If someone's avie is within X metres of a sim boundary and is moving at X speed, that neighboring sim should predict their passing and ready the variables necesary, so as to reduce lag. Yes, it would be a little more taxing on the servers, but not by much...

How about a SL Interstate, or Intersim? Might even raise the property value of stuff surrounding it if people are going to be doing a lot of exploring alongside it, just like the communities built along the railways connecting the North American continent east and west.

I love this idea. I just wish LL would sell me the tiny triangle of land between the edge of my property and the passing road so I could actually drive from my property to the road without going 'cross country' - it gets a bit rough.

All it has to have set is the 'return objects to owner' after, say 30 minutes, so that it doesn't get cluttered, and bingo all is sorted.

I have enjoyed flying my little plane around SL too (as far as the rezzing goes), and the Linden Village Balloon Tour is quite relaxing.

We have the ability to make realistic vehicles of many kinds... it's a shame the use of them is restricted so much.

Lewis

I find it funny, really...

Everyone's talking about how SL is based on Snow Crash.

SO

Why not have one giant road that goes from the top of the map to the bottom of the map?

It could go through that crazy underwater pipeline thingy, or anything really.

It wouldn't be THAT hard to make a giant sim-long road...

And BOY-OH-BOY would it be FUN!

Heh heh.