Two mysteries.....

Mystery 1:
I live beside an unmade Linden Road, so I'm used to seeing occasional vehicles bumping their way along the uneven route. But the other day I saw a car go slowly past my window, up the road and cross into the next sim, where it continued. But this was a driverless car. There was no evidence of an avatar driving it and no green dot on the mini map. Today I was setting a piece of land for sale further down the same road, in a different sim, and another driverless car, of a different type, appeared, going in the opposite direction and following the route.

Mystery 2:
As I said above, I was setting a piece of roadside land for sale - at a very low price to sell quickly. I stood to watch to see if anyone turned up - then I discovered the land had sold despite no green dots or visible avatars appearing. It was group land so I didn't get a blue cash pop-down. It was around this time that the second of the driverless cars I mentioned above appeared.

So - what are these driverless cars roaming Linden highways? Are they some sort of land-buying remote-controlled bots?

LL set up a driverless transport system a while back - I forgot its name. It moved above the road, and not on it. As far as I know, they removed it after a while. Maybe someone has created a similar thing that checks that it's on the Governor's land.

In Ceilostomo there is a guy who until recently was sending odd little unmanned vehicles up the road every several seconds, and they headed up Route 8A for at least a few sims. They were odd objects like olives. I believe that he was selling or giving away that stuff at one point, so maybe someone put the scripts into a car or wrote workalikes. IIRC he was using sensors and the naming and ownership patterns of Linden roads to keep the olives on course.

Virtual Harlem has a driverless trolley that trundles about that sim endlessly, providing tours for the interested. But I can't imagine that it could interact with the environment in any meaningful way.

I would bet that the driver-less car and the land sale were unrelated. Was the land bought by a real estate group? I'm thinking a bot popped in and bought it quickly and you didn't notice. Maybe the map didn't update quick enough to ever show a green dot.

I forgot about the land buying. The bot was probably high in the sky and out of sight from the ground.

Perhaps the driver got knocked out after hitting a banline.

Right-click the next one you see and check the Owner.

LL have had driverless trains doing test runs on sections of the SLRR.
Some residents have driverless vehicles running.


I've seen a landbot buying land while hovering high in a neigbouring sim.
The damm thing was beating me on buys of 16m parcels even though a Linden was giving me a count-down to when she was clicking the set for sale button.

I've seen the same thing. Hopped aboard one for a trip

If you inspect it it says its an experimental tour vehicle. Click to start or stop, click hood to reverse direction.

The one I road in did a fairly good job of navigating the road but had a little trouble on an elevated section, kept banging into the guard rails. Region crossings were not bad either.

One promising parallel development is that a stretch of unmade road near my property which used to be the usual assault course is now nice and smooth. Still unpaved but actually usable for walking/riding now.

Hardly seems ethical.

This was after the ad-farm crash. Abandoned 16s were being recycled all over mainland. Despite Lindens being 'invisible'. The bots were magically turning up where Lindens arrived to set abandoned 16ms for sale.
I got some 16s set to me because of the boundaries. Some nearby 16s could not technically be set to me because of only one boundary match.

I think the Lindens were a bit exasperated that the bots were picking up all the abandoned 16s ahead of landowners in the sims.

It was quite interesting to see how blindingly fast the bot was.
In order to beat me, they would have to be continuously checking all of the parcels until they came up for sale. That's *continuously* for all the parcels.

She could have booted the bot so you had time to get the parcels. If it was just one parcel though, she wouldn't have expected such speed.

I was not aware that Lindens put any parcel up for open sale. I thought it was direct sale, auction or languish as maintenance.

Rime

Lindens will set abandoned land for sale specifically to you, if you border the land on 2 or more sides and you submit a ticket and wait. It sounds like the Linden in question was bending the rules a bit.

Are you in Corsica? I saw the driverless car there too, and assumed it was a tour. In the past, Corsica had a bus with bus stops on the unpaved Linden road that would take you on ramdom tours (I don't know if it still does), and an unmanned boat that circled all of Corsica--you could tour and get on and off at will. I've been on both the boat and bus, but didn't try the car.

Yes. I got some 16's on the two-boundary rule, but she was not allowed to set any others for sale to me. They had to go for sale to Anybody.
They were working flat out to resale the abandoned 16s. I sensed that the were regarding the activity of the bots just snapping them up instantly - as in under a second - was getting a bit 'old'.


Oh! By the way, I completely forget the name of the Linden involved.

It sounds like Sling had 2 sides of the parcels were set for sale to her, and that she was getting a countdown on parcels that couldn't fairly be set to her.

There's a 512m limit to how big a parcel can be and it be set for sale to a specific person, but I'd imagine it's better for them to set microparcels for sale than to put them through the auction.

When the dust settled down, the landowners adjoining the old ad farm worked together to repair the 16s into rectangles that could be tacked on their boundaries.
We were lucky that it was one of Elan's bots that picked up a lot of the 16s. He didn't try to profit from it.

When LL sell small parcels to 2-boundary neighbours, the price is L$1/m.
The 16s that had to be set to Anybody were also set at L$1/m
That meant that the bots were like flies around the Lindens. They could resell the 16s at market rate to the neighbouring landowners and still make a fat profit

I've had many a return of my boats from other sims because of a bad sim crossing. The boat keeps going, but my body gets stuck somewhere, usually diving 20000m under the sea. About a half hour later, I'll get the autoreturn message from some place I've never heard of.

Driverless car, could be Christine, could be Herbie going bananas.

The vehicles I've seen have been on Route 10 and the unnamed/unpaved route to the south of that on Jeogeot.

One had a real problem with this obstruction at the Nha Na/Sunwi Do region crossing....

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rimewirsing/4276600309/



... just kept driving into it, backing off and trying again

That's odd.

When I had a Linden sell me land as a result of fixing ad-farm and 16m micros, they set it for sale to me if I recall right.

There's another 16m abandoned on my sim, right inside another plot of land. Back before the plot its inside was owned by one person, the Linden who forced the doughnut hole on the inside over to abandon told me as he did it that whoever owned the land around it could put in a ticket to have that 16m set for sale specifically to them. I've been waiting months for someone to buy that land... and when someone finally did, she lacked the tier for the final 16m plot... But still, I assume that Linden was speaking truth.

I don't know about driverless cars, but this thread makes me want to buy land by a road. I once almost bought a great spot beside a Linden road, but was talked out of it becase then ad farms were still in vogue. Now, I'd bet it's a lot better. I'd love to wave at driverless olives going by - if I had hands that is.

But I'm at my limit on tier budget and the land I currently have on the old continent probably wouldn't sell quickly . . .


.

Ees haunted.

I saw one of the driverless cars this morning go by my store in Sabre too, perhaps they are taking over the grid.