Pesky vehicle

This has happened to me twice in the last few days.

I get in a vehicle and start exploring, then the thing gets our of control and zips away, taking me with it...

...and next thing I know, I'm facing a crazy flashing screen and can't do anything but log out...

And when I come back, I have no idea where my vehicle is.

In both cases, parcel owners returned the thing to me. But I feel kind of embarrassed, because now I know why I sometimes see floating cars over the buildings of SL, and I know that a few of them now list me as their owner...

Is there anyway I can use vehicles and avoid this problem?

If they're modifiable, you can make them temporary. Then they'll poof by themselves after you stand up.

On the ban lines, border crossings, etc. that make it happen in the first place, don't drive there

ok we been testing....

Try taking off all scripted items then drive most times it helps the crossings and stuff.

Dont know but might help you.

Yes, BIGTIME.

Lose the scripted stuff. Resizeable shoes, color-change hair, AOs, Mysti ... I think the Mysti is a BIGGIE with the Av radar running all the time.

Prim attachments are fine, its the scripted stuff that causes problems.

Once I had a vehicle returned 6 months after I crashed it... several dozen sims away no less.

I just shrug and rez a new one when they get lost.

This just happened with a jet ski. I was having fun and the thing was fairly in control, I mean I wasn't flying over any parcels and was staying in the water. Then, some fairly cluttered sea came along around a corner, and I was trapped either at a sim crossing, or due to lag, or maybe under a pier. I couldn't really tell. The camera was stuck UNDER water although glimpses showed my av and ski were on the surface of the sea.

The screen spun round and round very fast, and I tried and tried to get it to stop, or to stand up so the item would be auto returned to me, anything to get out of there and not leave a ski behind. But, nothing worked, and after about ten minutes I gave up and logged out.

Sorry, landowner, whoever you are. :/

I don't know about that; they have to pass the handoff, too.

Primcount, even without scripts, can make TPs horrendous. Granted, neighboring sims get a glimpse of what's coming, so the prim data can be pre-loaded, but there sure seems to be some kind of housekeeping that happens when unscripted objects move into a sim, and whatever that is can't be helping the script handoff.

It's just subjective from my vehicle testing, so perhaps it's superstitious, but I sure have the impression that it helps to reduce the count of assets inside objects that are handed off. I never put sounds nor textures in my vehicles, instead referencing their keys in the scripts. Can't do that with animations, unfortunately.

But yeah: scripts are the biggies. We're all supposed to be promoting Mono, but for scripts that have to move from sim to sim (by TP or teleport), LSL-compiled scripts will be better.

A well-scripted vehicle won't have more than one script in any one prim. They'll also have as few scripted prims as possible, but unfortunately that's difficult to for an outsider to judge because some effects (particles, rotation by texture animation or llTargetOmega, localized sound, etc.) have to execute inside the prim, not from a central script--which is exceedingly annoying for vehicle scripters.

(Completely unrelated to sim handoff: I never use sculpties in vehicles, and try to minimize the size and number of textures. I can get away with it because of the style of vehicle I like to make, but it's more than that. I don't know how many times I've turned around to see a rider approaching, apparently driving a basket of gray cucumbers that ever so gradually morph into a motorcycle. It's an effect, I guess, but not the one I'm going for. )

Well if people want to have no object entry turned on with no auto return, they got to expect to have a sky full of helicopters

They might not realise things can get stuck there, since they often have no build and no object entry enabled also. I didn't realise, but I found out when I got griefed. Lol

Also sometimes if you mess with land like reparcel it etc. or one of your officers does, it can reset it and they may not realise their auto return is now off, unless they thought to look again.

As someone who spends a lot of time driving in SL, I can certainly
relate to the experience of flying away in some kind of weird timewarp
crossing a SIM.

One thing that works fairly regularly is that as I am spinning uncontrollably
in blue space....I periodically tap the up/right/left arrow keys. And often,
after perhaps 30 seconds (which is a long time), I'm right at the place the
problem started, in the vehicle, intact. But sometimes at this point I
can't move, but I do have an opportunity to take the vehicle
back to inventory.

* * *

I agree with disabling/detaching any worn scripts you can live without
while driving. That certainly helps. I keep a mini-map open in the upper
right corner of the screen so I can see sim boundaries. On bikes I
have found popping a wheely right at the crossing has good results.
You'll still go flying a bit, but will recover more successfully.

Another thing, which I haven't fully proven: I find that the roads
on the two old mainlands are more forgiving, especially Sansara.
The snowlands (big white area on the map in Sansara) are generally
a good place to practice driving.

I have been cruising around Zindra a bit and in spite of its newness,
it lack of residents and few builds, it's still difficult to cross sims.

And who's ever idea it was to put intersections at 4-sim intersections
and set nearly invisible center dividers on the roads near the city centers
has most certainly not spent much time behind the wheel unless they're
using a hot machine in the Linden Lab data center. =)

There's an earlier post of my travels in SL with a map showing
some of the roads I've traveled in the south:

/327/ff/250702/1.html

- Infrared

Yeah lol been there. Sim crossings can be nasty.

Even with a Linden vehicle like the Bay City Water Trolley:

The other day I was flying a craft in western Heterocera continent. I swear I would log back in and another two regions later the same thing happened. I dont know what's with the servers used for that area but it could explain the low land rates.

Most SL roads have the famous "rezz zone" signs on the sim's borders.

The trick is to slow down and cross sims slowly. It works well.

If you need scripts in your avatar, and you can modify them, recompile them as non-mono: mono scripts take longer to transfer between sims.

I used to think that, too. I've seen evidence to the contrary.

Here is an experiment I have done: two people, fully dressed in all the usual things, come to a sim crossing (in the snow sims mentioned above). Stop the car at the very edge of the sim border, as close as can be without the bumper actually being over the line, and wait there for 15-30 seconds hoping some sort of communication will go on to make handoff smoother. After waiting I'd tap the forward key with the tiniest, most gentle tap I can muster only to see the car go careening into the void, spinning and leaving the passengers unable to stand or TP, eventually crashing their clients or forcing them to logout due to boredom.

Next, both avis removed all scripted attachments and repeat the attempt. This time the same border could be crossed nonstop at a slow-to-normal driving speed, suffering only a brief "twang" in the camera view.

These results have been consistent through multiple trials.


I.W. - r.e. tapping the arrow keys: thanks, I'll try it.

could yuo have been orbited by security orbs in those occasions?

From my experience, sim crossing over protected land may throw you underground but you can eventually bounce back. What cannot be overcome, however, is crossing a border into ban lines. I have never once been able to overcome that. Short of a complete restart, I can usually tp home leaving my car, boat, vehicle at the border. I always follow up to remove the vehicle if it is not returned to me immediately.

Mainland is full of prim litter like this. Just about every region has a plot with ban lines up and an absentee owner who has not logged on in years - aircraft hovering at different levels, cars in the water.

To make matters worse, LL will do nothing about this. if IMs to the owners of land and vehicles go unanswered, any ARs, Support Tickets, Live Chat and phone calls are ignored. Some vehicles are frozen in place for years now and probably will be until the owner stops payment to LL and the land is abandoned.

IMO this is a mainland problem similar to ad farms. Ugly stuff in the air no one wants to look at with no possible hope of getting away from it other than moving. LL should launch an effort to clean up this visual blight.

They COULD choose to make Ban Lines 'opt in' on some semi-regular basis. Even if it's as long as 'once a month'.

But I suppose they fear a lawsuit by someone who put up the ban lines and hasn't been back for two years (with tier paid by some auto-debit arrangement...."PEOPLE HAVE BEEN WALKING ON MY PROPERTY OMG!1!!!!!!!!1!1!!!!" or the like).

OOOOOOO we have a car hanging on the neighbors ban line been there for quite some time have tired to get ahold of teh car owner and the land owner but no answer. Tried the ticket nothing. So we call it our Pontiac tree.

It's really a question of how much data the sim you were in has to ship over to the sim you're going to. If you've wearing a few thousand prims, that's gonna be a lot of data to move around even if they are all unscripted.

/me wonders how much better (if at all) sim crossings would be if LL didn't use XML to ship data around between sims...