Road's

Dear Residents

I am going to sign up to Second Life on Friday and star exploring the world. But I was really interested in the Road Network. Please can someone tell me how Linden Lab created the road networks and what they are made out of. Because if you have too much of roads would you not get lag.

Thank you.

...or cheese, maybe its cheese. No, I'm pretty sure its pixels. I dont think they are using any 1028x1028 textures on em, I dont think they have pothole scripts in any of em', so I'm fairly certain you wouldnt get more lag than usual even if they covered the entire SL planet. What would start laggin' you out is if everybody started using the roads at once. Put a few complicated vehicles in a sim, then you will begin to feel the effects. GET OUT THERE AND ENJOY!!

But be careful...........some of those textures are covering phantom prims!! I call them booby traps.

and when your cpu gets hot those tarmac roads melt, so it's like driving through treacle.

If I understand the OP correctly, it may not be completely obvious that SL "roads" are for recreational purposes only--nobody actually travels them to get around. For that, one just teleports. But roads (or even paths that might someday become roads) can be fun to drive on, and even kinda romantic.

/me makes a note to graft his H4-tolerant junkwagon script into the crappy convertible.

If your posting in the forums your already signed up, why wait till Friday to start exploring when you can go do it now? Have a blast and welcome to SL!!!

So Linden Lab used prims. By the way, what are prims anyway and what shape of prim did they use.

Prims are the building blocks for nearly every creation in SL, prims are available in a few shapes, cube, cylinder, sphere, torus, tube, ring and others I forget the name of right now. Taking a cube, when rezzed it is 0.x0.5x0.5 meters in dimension, you can alter the sizes in any combination from 0.01 to 10.0 meters in size, you can hollow it up to 95% but only on one axis, you can taper, skew and twist the cube too. and much, much, more.

So why aren't you in Sl discovering this for yourself, what is your obsession with Linden roads?

Oh Winter! You know there are pot holes at every sim boundary! LL doesn't need scripts for them! They are part of the SL experience. Fortunately avatars don't get hurt falling down them, even if sometimes they don't get up above ground again and crash.

Welcome to SL Litho Yes there are some beautifully built Linden roads and it is fun to explore them. They are all made out of prims - visit the Ivory Tower of Prims to learn how to build, you can find it easily using the Search function.

But watch out for the old country roads in Heterocera. Some of them are badly in need of road maintenance and there are huge gaps between the prims - but you can see how they are built by using your camera to look underneath the road surface.

Are you the same person who posted in another section of the Forums that you are planning to construct "Second Life's biggest cruise with can hold up to 90,000 people and has luxury rooms and facilities inside. The Ship will have thousands of prims and textures for the interior and exterior" ?

But in this section of the Forum, you ask "what are prims" ?

Perhaps you need to actually spend some time in-world, wandering about and seeing just what fun SL can be, Litho.

By the way, welcome to SL and the Forum!

Litho, relax and have some fun.

When you're in-world I suggest that you spend some time at the Ivory Tower of Primitives to see what a prim is and what you could do with it. Also, do drop by at NCI to play around and examine some of the freebies there. This will give you some feel for what's doable in things vehicular.

You could also wander along the roads, if you like. Don't be afraid; the traffic will be rather on a Backwoodsville level than up to Central London standards.

Central London traffic hardly moves, much safer there really

I've done a LOT of driving in SL. Here's a thread I started some time ago which has a map of some of the roads I've traveled.

/327/ff/250702/1.html

As for lag, the two tips I can recommend is turn the draw distance down a bit, and use the Mini Map to watch for sim crossings. Sim crossings are the main hazard for driving.

-i

*giggles*

Since Congestion Charging was introduced it is moving again

see when i go over a bump does the physics engine simulate that movement of the vehicle and the pothole on the road.

Husha-licious, Neko-licious!

*grins*

Glad someone else saw the giggle in that!

the physics engine can barley understand that your standing on a prim

if you go over a huge seam gravity will drop you, or maybe shoot you 8 sims over into the sky, or maybe forget theres even land there and you will see "the underworld", thats about it

After a fashion, it does. As Osgeld rightly points out, in-world physics is a bit temperamental. It's extra nasty at border crossings where sim-to-sim hand-off has to occur. That handoff is particularly visible with ground vehicles because one often "coasts" high into the sky or deep underground--or sideways into a banned parcel--before the next sim catches you.

Also, vehicles use a special set of scripting functions that manage most of the interaction with the physics engine as a kind of black box. This makes vehicles among the easiest things to script--badly. These special vehicle functions contain dozens of interdependent and not entirely intuitive parameters that can take a long time to tweak into desired behavior and relative stability. Many such scripts that worked well for the old physics engine, Havoc 1, don't behave at all reasonably with Havoc 4, so climbing into an unknown vehicle now is a chancy undertaking.