When are Lindens going to do something useful for aviators ??

I have a hint for crossing sim boarders in physical vehicles...

Wear as few prims on your Av as possible. The server has to reattach all those prims - yes, it is only happening serverside, but it still takes time. I've seen a huge difference driving in my no prim av compared to my normal one which is about 600 prims or so.

I get very little of that flying off into nowhere and then zapping back again the lower prim I am.

It's also a major source of lag in busy places - not that people have prims but the sim takes a big hit when a prim-heavy person TPs into the region. In general, a region that's averaging 25 people with one coming & going every minute will have a lower sim fps than a region with 40 people and no comings & goings.

For the geeky types out there, this is all done via xml serialization. The source sim serializes all the 'stuff' that goes with the avatar to xml and sends that to the destination sim, which deserializes it and reconstructs the needed objects...

(sarcasm on) No, wear no av at all! This would make it even faster (sarcasm off)

(and in my case, detaching all prims would be exactly the same as having no ava at all, because it destroys my av).

This has to be fixed so we can drive with our prims *on*!

I'm sorry for upsetting people. I don't like the way SL is coded either. I don't think we should have to have no prims to drive. I was just offering a suggestion. Of course LL should fix it, I'm not defending them in the least. I'm just trying to help I understand it was all said with sarcasm, but I was just trying to help.

Also something to keep in mind. LSL was designed from the start to be easy to serialize. All scripts compiled using the LSL compiler take 16k, but they take little CPU time to package up and unpack. Mono wasn't designed to be easy to serialize, so the sim has to run down all the separate chunks of memory allocated to the script and package them up separately. That's more expensive, and increases the cost of sim crossings and teleports.

When an avatar crosses a sim boarder it takes time for you to rejoin with the linkset that is the vehicle. This time is increased with the number of prims you are wearing. This is because you, and your prims, and the vehicle are as one (as in a linkset) even though you cant see it.

During the time spent rejoining/relinking with the vehicle the user/av experiences lag. The symptoms of this include falling through the map, flying into the air, and not being relinked with the vehicle.

I was able to create a system to measure the amount of time it takes for you to become relinked to the vehicle. If you get the count of objects in the linkset immediately after crossing a sim boarder, the count will be the count of the object alone, and not include the drivers/passangers. After some delay, the passangers and driver will be relinked. This can be easily measured.

I found that one prim (a naked av) takes a max of 0.8 seconds to relink with the vehicle. This means you will experience the symptoms of lag, while you are relinking, for that amount of time, if your av is naked. As the prim count of your outfit increases, the time to relink with the vehicle (and the time you experience lag) increases. 900 prims takes a maximum of 17 seconds to become fully relinked with the vehicle.

All this information confirms fr0zen's original statement. The less prims you haul across sim boarders, the more enjoyable your experience will be.

With all the variability, it's difficult to know if it really matters, but it kind of makes sense: I think I can get more successful sim crossings with fewer assets inside the vehicle itself. So I've been careful to minimize the number of scripts, and use UUID references (not embedded assets) for sounds and textures that the vehicle uses during operation.

Absolutely. Less stuff to pack up and send to the destination sim = faster transfer time.

oh so forget the 1000 prim battle cruiser and fly nakie then.... well Im sure there'll be some of that on the adult continent....

All this doesnt bode well for the multi prim beautiful flying machines of sl does it...when the best advice is travel light - if not naked.... great....

the irritating thing is this problem has been around for ages Ive been here nearly two years and its a bad as ever it was...

and the irritating thing is theres never any indication of it being tackled despite all that hoo hah some time back about jaunting between worlds (that seems to have been a flash in the pan too)

its the same story as the problem with transparent textures very little seems to be done there either...

In the meantime crashing into ban lines is something that could be easily dealt with - TURN THE RUDDY THINGS OFF.....

Naa, I am not upset. I am always like that.

Yeah. I wonder if it would do any good to come up with a kind of priority ranking of improvements, and present those things requiring development to Andrew with the reasoning behind the rankings.

A strawman ordering:

1. Full parcel at sim crossing (SVC-22). This kills me more often than anything else, and unless it gets fixed, I bet the script limits thing will bite just as badly as prim limits. (The idea would be to leverage the resources currently working on script limits to first solve this "prerequisite" bug.)

2. Slow serialization / de-serialization. No idea how this can be sped up, but it makes sim crossings hazardous and clumsy not just for vehicles. Come to think of it, it's probably a factor in slow and failed TPs, too. SL is hardly the only application caught in the trap of XML bloat, and there's not a chance of backing out of XML at this point. LLnet probably will help with inter-sim bandwidth, but I have no idea what share of the time is spent just forming, transmitting, and consuming the XML, as opposed to the necessary work of traversing the existing object structure on one side and reconstructing it on the other. I'd suppose that SL is using state of the art XML processing, such as it is, but perhaps the object representations could themselves be streamlined. Or something.

3. Ban lines. I think this won't be handled by Development, nor is it something that LL is likely to change by policy, so probably our best bet is some effort to educate landowners about what little effect is achieved by access restrictions. I'm not sure how best to do that--we don't want it to backfire, with residents learning about banlines and deciding to try them out--so maybe somebody can think of a good way to communicate this effectively.

4. Navigable void. Although this is kind of a "nice to have", I distinctly recall Philip saying (perhaps in a Town Hall--it was that long ago) that he was very interested in getting something like this to work. It's entailed by a central LL design philosophy of "contiguity" (or something like that) that gets invoked as a reason that the SL world architecture should not be based on "portals." Anyway, I'm thinking that just maybe we could tempt Philip into pushing some development in this direction following from the http-textures work--especially if some open source developer starts moving viewer-side support in that same direction.

What else am I missing? Or does this all sound like the wrong approach?

Qui, that is a wonderful idea.

These problems have been around as long as I can remember. I can't think of a way to handle ban lines other than education, as well. The problem is that educating your average resident is a little hard, especially when they have the "this is my land and only my friends are allowed on it. I don't drive or fly so I don't care how it impacts others" attitude.

I've nicely requested people to take down their ban lines after I crash into them. Every once in a while they do. Maybe if we all just sent a nice IM saying, "Hi, I crashed into your ban lines while flying/driving through. Would you mind just restricting the bans to individual people? It makes it hard for me to travel. Thanks" or something along those lines when we crash more people will become aware of the problem and not in a really harsh way.

With mass education, you also have the chance for misinformation. People misunderstand, misread, or sometimes just out and out repeat bad info. I'd be afaid that it could do more harm than good. I can't believe some of the myths I've heard in regard to scults, flexies, particles, etc.

Other than the JIRA are there ways to bring things to the Lindens' attention? It feels like if you're not part of a multimillion dollar corp they don't want to hear about it.

The Sailing folks seem to have worked well with the Lindens. In my mind, there should be similarities between the sailors and the fliers. Maybe the fliers should become sky sailors, and join the sailing organization.