Vehicles and SL

In their pimping of XStreet on the man page, one of the ads is "More than 7000+ ways to get around."

Given the state of sim crossings, do you think this is wise?

Not to mention "No-Object-Entry," "Parcel is Full," "You're not on the access list for this parcel," "You have been teleported home by LandSecurityDevice 12.3.5.8." and other joys.

Not to mention the "where'd the road go" factor.

I suppose it sounded catchier and more persuasive than: "More than 7000 ways to almost get around before hitting any one of the more common problems that we haven't managed to solve yet, and then crashing out of the viewer. Look - it's a Brave New Cyber World; what d'ya expect? Pfft, some residents are never happy."

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Aes

Well, there's also hundreds of thousands of places to go, but 3/4 are either lagged to hell by the idiocy of users or by LL itself. Just saying.

Marketing is wise in wicked ways.

* * *

As a long distance road traveler in SL...let me say: Good Luck!

-i

Last week. 60+ sims. Three crashes.


Dogfight action over the gulf of lauren. Were 3-4 planes up here at the time, no sim crashes (though I did end up dumping mine in the drink on accident)


Flying me and three of my friends over the mainland. Roughly 10 crossings without incident.


All with an out of the box 20" iMac.

I do commiserate with the OP, especially over full time, parcel access, etc. Been there, dealt with those. But it seems that sim crossings have *always* been a chore. At the least, I've heard people complain about them since I started in February 2006. I could not even begin to use a vehicle then, given my system at the time was below SL spec.

Some places are worse than others. I guess some vehicles, too. The roads in Zindra are practically useless.

A blimp over Blakes Sea is pretty good. A car on the roads in Zindra is awful.

I do a lot more walking than driving or flying.

I've heard that. Never got the chance to run a vehicle down em, but the "middle of the sim border" set-up can't be the best of locations for a road.

I'll stick with Route 66's placement.

sometimes i think linden labs is what will evolve into sirius cybernetics corporation.

I swear we used to have their Nutrimatics Drink Dispensers in the offices at the first company I worked for! Didn't matter what you chose; what you got was "...almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea."

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Aes

Try sailing. There's some great little boats on the market for as little L$250, and an earlier version of an SL classic is available as a freebie. There's no shortage of open water in SL, though the wind can be a real pain when it choses not to cooperate (but then you can always cheat and set up your own fake wind).

There seem to be fewer problems with access on the water, and region crossings, while frequently spectacular, are rarely fatal.

The roads in the "City" area of Zindra, where they split the sim borders, are the worst that I have ever encountered in all of SL. Once you get away from the "City" they moved the roads off the borders, and those seem to work passibly, except at sim crossings.

I have found extremely few roads in SL that are designed to eliminate or minimize sim border issues. It can be done, but most people either are unaware of how to do it, or don't want to spend a few extra prims to ensure safe crossings.

I have better luck with water vehicles than I ever have had with ground or air vehicles. I really enjoy taking a hovercraft for a spin on the canals in Bay City, for example.

For the most part, however, SL has too many problems with vehicles to make it worth using for me. If transportation from point A to point B is my goal, I just teleport. If I am just "sightseeing", I'll walk, or fly without a vehicle.

Do you have a link to some info on this? I'd like to stop being unaware of how to do it

The info on how to do this has been discussed repeatedly in the Building Tips froum, over the last several years, with detailed explanations of how to do it right. Look here for the most recent discussion:

/8/ef/326120/1.html

Also, take a look at the roads in RUCE 1, RUCE 2, RUCE 3, and RUCE 4. Where those 4 sims meet edge to edge, I built roads straddling the sim borders, using the above techniques. The issues with any sim edge crossings on those roads are almost zero. Even at the 4-corner intersection, you can drive diagonally across the corners and not fall through the road.

Search the forums for "sim border cross" to find more threads.

So simple and so impressively effective. Thanks for that.

There's an Off Road group in SL, maybe join that and they will keep you up to date on where and how you can still drive vehicles in SL.

theres a definite irony there.

Me and my wife were always rideing our horses all over SL, its just great fun going allong the road and pulling into a store still on the horse, new meaning to drive thru The sim crossings are just an annoyence, set up your av to make it easir, if your in a car lose your 100+prim hair go bald or wear a hat, same goees for anything take anything you dont need off and wear your lower primmed clothes, it makes a huge difference for me..

That's a nice big glass of "WTF were they thinking?"

Vehicles go odd (not to mention just walking on foot) just getting near the sim border, let along driving ALONG IT.