Roads Please!

As far as roads generating passing trade is concerned; never going to happen as long as people can TP everywhere. Now if SL were my creation and I had my way (which it isn't, and I don't) TP's would be limited to being able to TP to a hub - basically fulfilling the role of a local airport shared by several sims - and there would be a functioning mass-transit system, such as exists already but on a larger scale (subways or surface trains basically) covering the whole world.

What can I say, I like atleast some realism in my Second Life. I think this kind of system would have a few beneficial effects. First, it would encourage more exploring; in real life how many times have you got on a bus to go to a destination and seen something that looked interesting en-route? Lots probably. How many times has this happened to you in SL? Not so often I expect. Second, it would break the tyranny of the classified ads. Ads would still exist, but people would have other opportunities to attract customers in the form of passing trade. Third, this would encourage the building of communties within a sim. A lot of people don't even know their neighbours and fellow sim-dwellers - and they never will, as long as they don't have to pass them on their way somewhere.

Just my $0.02. I know it'll never happen, but that doesn't stop me wishing out loud.

No passing trade for you. The future is developing flat green from which every square inch must be packed with buyable plots instantly accessible via tp. Land must be severely cramped and overpriced. Taking a gamble on getting disconnected for every 256 meters you travel is a good thing. Linden knows best, right?

http://vidken.skaarj.com/images/paradise.jpg

Having a road gives everyone a front and back to build to, otherwise you get the chaos fo faicing the side of your neighbours house. I'm just waiting for someone to build a sim full of cube appartments where everyone shares walls and you enter through the ceiling or only by teleport.
The road surface in Hantu dissappeared 6mths ago, I have sent a few bug report thingy's but nothings been done, it will remain the same till they pull the plug on the server I guess.

What's frustrating to me is that there are probably at least 3 or 4 people in this forum alone who would be willing to donate a couple of hours a week to building the SL roads. If LL is taking volunteers, why can't it take builders as volunteers? Set all road areas to whatever group is appropriate, make all volunteers members of that group, and give the volunteers some specific rules and regulations, and let the volunteers go to it. There's got to be a better way than to pay some guy to sit around making roads.

[Edit: For that matter, why not improve, expand the SL train system, like Conan up there suggests? I personally have a fetish for trains....]

I for one love the follow the roads we DO have. And every time I do that I find something interesting. Lovely places to visit, shops where I actually buy something. You should try it!

I have also followed some of the wannabee-road stretches of Linden land, always flying because the terrain is too bad to walk on, but that is not really the experience I am looking for.

Besides all that: I want to use my car before it rosts away in the harsh climate of Yeodeol.

I regularly ride my horse along the roads of SL. I never meet another living soul on any of my little jaunts. What does that tell you?

Submit a support ticket

That there must be even more roads to explore than I did.
Otherwise we would have met

I rarely meet other people on the roads. But it does happen.

Another place to try is the railroad track. Even though there are no trains, I ALWAYS meet other people there who are, just like me, exploring the track.

I'm heading to a bug triage at 10 am SLT at Benjamin Linden's place... I'm going to see if I can squeeze in a request to make a road building group that residents can join (after approval). The Lindens could just give us copyable road pieces and we could throw them down on the roadsites... any one care to join me?

Count me in!

That people don't want to look at the ad farms that line some roads?


I had (paved) roadside land in a nice sim. There were three 16m plots in one spot in that stretch of road, but certainly since January last, they were always empty.

I did notice that avatars flew along the roads. I do, and I drive along them.
From sampling profiles from my visitor logs, I would guess that most of them were newbies coming from the Linden hub down the road in the next sim.

It could be that longer term residents mainly TP from place to place - and those aware of the joys of slow low-level exploration being the exception.

Woot! I talked to Benjamin, Torley, Iridium, Logan, and Jesse Lindens about this. They suggested I put up a proposal in JIRA so I did: it's MISC-602 if anyone wants to vote for it. They said that no one is currently making roads as no one has time, and I said that a few people have volunteered to do it. They thought it was an interesting idea... dunno how far it'll go, but at least someone heard it. Apparently Jack Linden is in charge of land and roads. The ball COULD be rolling!

At least, ads and billboards look RIGHT on a roadside - that is where one would expect to find them!

I consider myself very fortunate to be (a) fronted by a lovely road in Rosieri and (b) living in Azure Islands, where there are roads, and fronted by one there. A landscape of houses and buildings with no roads is just . . . all wrong.

Good luck on the volunteer group. Maybe hell will freeze over and they will allow that. I know a builder friend who volunteered for this sort of thing, or even just cleaning up trash along the roads, and was met with no can do.

(Not that I approve of the way they run the volunteer groups.)

coco

Wait...why do we need roads?

Doesn't the phrase, 'Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads!' apply to Second Life?

Technically the roads could be rivers but I figured they just never thought about this.

We (I?) need them because they are a very interesting way to tour SL.
If your roving is based only on search and TP, then you miss out on an enormous amount of creative work.

I really like wandering along the paved roads, or getting together with a bunch of friends on our carefully nudged BMW motorbikes

But.........you can fly. And the majority of fascinating content is off in the "wild." And if you try to connect roads to interesting traffic hubs or cool content, you're going to muddle up some of the beautiful creations and attractions—just like we did in real life.

I figure, a lot of the “functional” items in real life that we no longer need as function, can be done away with…usually they just get in the way of the potential esthetic beauty one can find when exploring.

I've tried exploring areas and folloing roads. More often than not, if I *do* find a road, it never continues for very far, and it's nigh unto impossible to find anywhere near one to rez vehicles. Where I could rez a motorcycle or some other vehicle, I'd hardly get moving in any direction before the road ended at a sim border. And I rarely ever met anyone along a roadway.

The one useful thing to me regarding roads is that it generally marks a safe place to travel, on the ground or in the air. A path where you won't constantly run into ban lines or security devices blocking your way.

For the most part, I just TP everywhere. And when I am exploring, I fly, with no vehicle. The only vehicles I have found to be worth using are boats, as there do seem to be some nice lakes with open access. And even then the places to use them well are very limited.

Having roads is about the only way of exploring without constantly bumping your head against banlines. Plus, where else can you ride vehicles. I am trying at the moment to find a place to fly my airship, but can't because so many regions have Scripts disabled that if I accidentally float onto one I get stuck and can't even reverse. Following the roads is about the only way to get any use out of my expensive blimp.

Michael, the road parcels already exist.
The Lindens designed many sims with roads running through them. Most of them are completely undeveloped, which is fine I guess, but they're not smooth either. Many are extremely bumpy, which makes driving impossible. They could at least put down rustic dirt roads or something, or smooth the land. As for muddling up current builds; hello! It's Linden land, NO one can build on it.

Yep. I had many interesting hours following the SLRR, flying down the tracks and chatting with random people who had their homes next to the tracks. It really is a good way to get out and do some random exploring.

I'd love to see this expanded with roads. /me votes.

I want to vote for this but where the hell are the JIRA proposals?

I'm not very interested in LL bashing - it's just the same as every other game forum I've ever been on - but the SL website REALLY sucks!

Oryx, please post the url to the jira proposal, I am unable to find it. Thank you.

I found it eventually;

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-602

Disappointing turnout though - only 2 votes registered (well one actually if you don't count mine).

It occured to me this could be a useful test case. There must be other basic functions which volunteer groups could take over if this works. An example example might be 'maintenance' land. It seems to me there is an increasing incidence of small parcels in the Govenor's hands for short periods but which nobody actually goes near. Some of these have existing Ad Farms & other litter on them but they sit around for weeks without being tidied up until sold. A volunteer group could tidy them up some, taking basic, time consuming litter picking off the hands of those busy people at LL.

You can go to jira.secondlife.com and enter the issue number, MISC-602, in the search box.