How to find decent places to start creating AL?

Hi. I joined SL very recently. I'd like to work on some AL critters like Surina's fish. I've started learning scripting and how to build, but I'm starting to wonder where to do it.

Obviously my own island would be perfect, but that's a lot of money if you don't know exactly what you're going to be doing.

So I started shopping for land, but the 512 packages are tiny and generally surrounded by ugly and chaotic buildings. And if you're buying a larger package with lake access, the prices are high enough that you may as well just bite the bullet and buy an island. I'd also be worried that my creatures would get out of control and harm the neighbors.

I could work in sandboxes, but it's not very private or permanent.

Where do people go to work on their projects? Do you get a little bit of land and then build a skybox in the clouds for privacy? Buy lots of land? Band together and buy an island?

If you're sharing a sim with others, do you have problems with out-of-control wildlife? Is lag from other places generally a problem? Do the neighbors end up hating you because you have a swarm of cats or fireflies roaming over your tiny parcel?

Ok, I realized I'm being silly about land. $100 and $25/mo is a long way from $1000 and $195/mo.

I think I'll get a largish parcel on a slope and build a cave there for privacy.

If anyone has hints or gotchas about working on autonomous moving creatures when you have neighbors, please post.

The best way to avoid P***ing off your neighbours is to prevent your creatures from straying onto their land.

There are three main ways to do this.

1) The simplest, most effective but least "realistic" method is to enable the "sandbox" param within each of the creatures. llSetStatus(STATUS_SANDBOX, TRUE). This limits the movement of the creature to a maximum 10m from the point it was rezzed. Beyond that physics is turned off and scripts are disabled, freezing the creature.
Chistopher Omega has posted an LSL version to the wiki here that allows you to set the distance at which Sandbox is activated.

2) Hard code your own "sandbox" limits into each creature. Rather than simply disabling the entire creature, give it a set of co-ords that define an area which it must stay inside, or a centre and radius. Then if the creature approaches the edge of the area make it turn around and head back inside.
A variation on this is the "beacon" where a named prim is placed in the centre of the desired area and the creatures look for it with llSensor(). The creatures are still hard coded with max allowable distance from the beacon and should be scripted to turn around and head back towards the beacon if they stray to far.

3) Emergent behaviour. Once you reach the point where your creatures are reliably feeding, breeding and dieing you can use emergent behaviour to limit their movement. This is what my fish are currently doing.
The fish need food to survive. If they don't feed they die. The food dispencers are in fixed locations and though the fish are free to wander anywhere their little hearts desire, their instinct to feed will keep them where the food is. If anything goes wrong with a script and a fish ends up wandering away randomly it will simply starve and die. The emergenct behaviour means the fish stay roughly where the food is because they need to, not because they're programmed to...


The three methods should be used in sequence as your creatures develope and you trust them more.

An emergency overide is very important, especialy if you introduce reproduction. Each creature should have a script with a llListen() that deletes the creature with llDie() on hearing a code word. The Listen should be on a channel you can easily remember and the codeword should be simple and quick to type so you can shout it in an emergency and all your creatures instantly die.
To make it even safer, have the creature shout the codeword before it dies. That way any creatures that are out of range of YOU will still get the self destruct message passed to them.

Thanks, Surina. I think I'll start with one of the sandbox options and then work on the emergent behaviors.

I decided to start with fireflies, since they're just little floating balls which should make it easy to focus on the behavior first. It's harder than it looks though! The first time I turned on "hover", the firefly headed for the moon. I had to chase it down before it escaped. Then later I accidentally backed into it and it shot off past the neighbor's ban lines. Luckily I managed to retrieve it.

Will post in this forum as I get things working.