Learning To Fly

As far as this aspect of SL is concerned, a vehicle is anything that an avatar is sitting on.

I am sure you both knew that was a reference to Have A Cigar but to be honest, I didn't think there was an actual answer.

Yep, we know lol. Both of us having been listening to Floyd from way back when, me even before they were popular probably.

Syd Barrett was their founding member; or one of them anyway. Went downhill with serious mental illness and drug abuse (LSD for the most part). Lots of speculation as to whether some of this craziness was on purpose. If I remember correctly, in the middle of recording "Wish You Were Here", (which has several references to him - the whole album is sort of a tribute to him more or less), he suddenly walked into the studio, out of the blue after many years.

Creepy

I have one of his solo albums, not bad but odd. He passed away a few years ago, after spending the remainder of life as quite the recluse.

So concludes our rock and roll history lesson for today

The End.

Incorrect. A chair is not a vehicle, unless it's scripted to be one.

Oof, that's gotta suck.

Somewhat different situation at any rate. Linden roads aren't owned by private residents, so you don't have the prim count issue to deal with (you have other lovely things, like sim crossings and lag).

Since I really don't want to restrict my flying to roads alone - although, I think I'll go looking for a hovercraft today - the full parcel problem really hurts flying by vehicle a lot.

Would the vehicle register first with the new sim being crossed-into, if it were designed so that the centers of the foremost prims of the vehicle were slightly behind where the avatar sits?

(I'm just going by what I know about prims placed over property lines--the rule that lets them sit over a line if their center is on the 'right' side of the line. I've no idea if this is true at sim borders, too...)

IF this were the case, then wouldn't it solve the 'separated from vehicle at border of a full sim' problem?

(Granted, it would be a constraint on vehicle design/appearance.)



((This has been educational for me....somehow I never realized that 'full sim' refers to prims, not avatars, nor that there's such a thing as a Full Map [mentioned by Damien...or was that Damien being facetious?] Anyway, nice to learn this...)

Not mentioning any sim names but it happened the other day somewhere near Governor Linden's Mansion. Don't get much more mainland than that.

As far as parcel and prim restrictions are concerned, it's treated as a vehicle if you sit on it. If you're over prim limits it won't be returned until you stand up.

Prim locations don't matter, only the root prim does, and for this situation it's not even the root prim (remember, the avatar is a prim in the linkset as far as the sim is concerned), it's just the order in which the objects, as a whole, are handed off.
Again, it all depends on where the root prim is.

You absolutely do, and I've had teleporters broken when some griefer has found an abandoned parcel in the same sim owned by governor linden that had build left on. They LOVE filling such parcels with prims to screw up Linden Roads.

Good topic Ghosty,

My newest thing in SL is hot air balloning, however I'm plagued with the same issues being discussed here. One of the things I like about the balloon is "drift mode". You can control your altitude but your direction is at the mercy of the wind.

It would be a lot more enjoyable if not for the various problems associated with flying.

Looking at the scripting wiki there are functions that when given a region coordinate can tell you if the parcel is full. Its possible to build a radar-detector type box that warns you about parcels you're about to cross over. I don't know if they'd work across sim borders, though - but that can be resolved by having a separate drone vehicle that can detect your craft's speed and direction and fly 10 or 20 meters ahead of you.

OK, outside of a griefer purposefully filling a region with lulz cubes, you don't have a prim count limit to worry about on Linden roads because the Lindens aren't usually filling their parcels to the brim with prims, and you're driving a vehicle, not dragging Grendel's by a prim rope across the continents. I've been on the same road with six other drivers in the same region and not hit the prim limit. Please, let's leave acts of God and griefers out of the conversation.

Now, if we're done splitting hairs, I'd like to get back to the issue of aircraft, which do not rely on roads in the first place.

If you are in a vehicle and fly into a full parcel (I can't speak for driving, because it's never happened to me with my cars), your vehicle will be returned to you and you will find yourself seatless. I can attest to it, and several other people who have flown with me can attest to it. You get a nice blue box that says your thing was returned because the region or parcel is full, and you get to deal with a stuck sitting animation and the lack of visible support.

You know, I'd never considered this before. I think I'd like to give this a go. Can you recommend a shop for nice balloons?

Now THAT would be useful! I wonder if one could get the thing to work across region lines, or would that make a difference?

I'd go a lot more than 10 or 20 meters ahead, though. At 20m/sec, a 96m warning would give me enough time to avert disaster

That only started happening when they introduced the limits on temp-rezzers. It was a bug. It has been reduced significantly since then and now only happens when you cross a sim boundary into a full parcel, and Linden Labs is aware that it's a bug and do intend to fix it: this seems to be the oldest critical bug still open in the Jira. If you want it fixed faster, vote on SVC-22*, and let the Lindens know that it's not "100%" yet.

The highest server version listed there is 1.24, that's only because the Jira hasn't been told that 1.25 has been released.

* Yes, I've been working on getting this fixed, as much as I can from the outside, for a long long time.

I spent some days trying to use those functions to provide an early warning system for my Mehve, but even at its modest cruising speed of 8 m/s (under 20 MPH) it's not possible to scan far enough ahead to do anything useful. I do have some success in having mehve detect that you've hit a ban line or been unseated, but even that's not 100% because there's still circumstances where hitting a ban line on a parcel crossing will leave you on the ground in one sim and your vehicle in another *still thinking you're seated*.

I had never noticed that crossing a sim boundary preceded my being unseated. I only noticed that I was being unseated, with a blue popup that the parcel was full. Now that I think about it, I do seem to recall that this happened at the edges of regions a lot.

I will vote on the jirc issue, because when flying across continents, one crosses LOTS of regions, and I have only made it across a continent *once* in all this time without it happening.

It would really be nice if you could check the map or mini-map and see, at a glance, which parcels had blanket bans active, which ones had object entry turned off, and which parcels were within 32 prims of being full. Then maybe you could chart a flight plan that would steer clear of such hazzards.

The idea of seperate "drones" that move ahead of your vehicle and report the status of parcels that you are approaching would also be a fascinating one to explore, for a HUD to aid flyers and vehicle users of all types.

Oh no, that would be horrible! Can you imagine trying to navigate around parcels region by region while trying to get from here to there? No, I'd much rather see things done more like real life - fly in a straight line and arrive safely, and optionally have the freedom to circle about and enjoy the scenery without constantly looking at my map to make sure I don't hit a full parcel.

Well, even in real life, a pilot needs to know about areas that have airspace restrictions: Like not flying over a military base, not flying over the White House, or not flying below a certain altitude in urban areas.

I will agree, however, that it would be nice if you could "just be passing through" in your aircraft, and be able to travel without worrying about parcel prim limits or avatar count limits or other restrictions. As long as you're more than 50 M above the terrain, and not banned by name from a parcel, why not?

As was mentioned earlier, perhaps some sort fo time-delay would help. Like one is supposed to do with a security orb. You get a warning on entering a "restricted air space", an "all clear" on successfully leaving it, and only get "bumped" if you fail to leave within the time limit?

Even that would be acceptable, long as I had oh, 30 seconds or so? In case the area asking me to leave is region-sized. 30 seconds is plenty.

Ceera, much as I respect you, I think you're going down the wrong path. None of this used to be necessary, so long as you stayed 15m above ground level. Then they increased the ban zone to 768 meters and "compromised" on 40 meters, and broke the prim buffer, and it all went to hell. We need to get back to the old days.

NO NO NO PLEASE NO, LINDENS, DO NOT EVEN THINK OF TRYING TO MAKE THE CURRENT BUGS LIVABLE.

FIX THE BUGS, SO WE CAN CLOSE OUT SVC-22.

I don't know to what extent a quick handover of the object and sitters is aided by mimimising the prim count.
Intuitively, is should help. One would have to see the logic of the code that
1. detects the object entering the sim
2. detects the avatar(s) entering
3. gets the messages that the avatar(s) are sitting on the particular object. - or I suppose it's enough for the handover-hangover-avoidance that the new sim detects that the object is 'sat on'.
Testing best configurations in black-box mode could be very hit and miss with general lag being variable.

One, some or all avatars could arrive physically in the sim before the root prim of the object.
/me wonders if that might be a good thing to arrange.