Project Suggestion: Governor Linden's Freeways

Suggestion for a tax-free, government sponsored free-way system.

Goal: to use between 10-20% of the land of most sims on a simple, low primitive free way system.

Advantages:
a) Lots of places to drive vehicles.
b) Will allow the Lindens to modify the prim/land ratio upwards in most sims
c) Help provide a more ordered landscape to some of the sims.
d) Provide a more obivous distinction between urban and rural areas. If you want to live where lots of people will stop by, live on a freeway. If you want to live on the mountain top, go ahead

Obviously, some areas should not have this---Darkwood would be a little weird looking with a superhighway through it, as would Shangri-la

Nexus Prime, whoever, would be a-okay.

Suggested plan of attack:
A) Initial Linden approval: A go ahead indicated that if a proper proposal was formulated, the land cost/tax-costs would be subsidied. This decision would obviously be provisional, but there is no reason to begin planning if the Lindens have NO intention of allowing this.
B) Development of a pilot project in lesser used sims. We need mockups of road signs, freeway textures, and sizes for freeway sections. Vehicle tests, etc . . . Perhaps we can even come up with a standardized road encoding system that we can 'open-source', so we can have autopiloting vehicles.
C) Acquisiton of land in more heavily populated areas. Plenty of land is avaliable in Freelon, Hawthorne and Da Boom. Just no prims. If we can absorb some of that land, and make sure it NEVER fills up, the 1.2 prim allocation system will allow all the other plots in those sims to have a high prim allocation
D) Design of appropriate themes. A nexus-prime freeway should look different than the Da Boom freeway.
Dore's should look different than Shang-ri la.

But with appropriate themeing, we might even be able to make an extension that runs off into Darkwood (think spooky trees, dirt roads, and wooden road signs)
E) Convince the Lindens to give up on the telehubs. No reason that you can't teleport to a 'mass-transit' station right on the freeway. Would be a cool tie-in

I'm ready/willing to organize such a project, if we can get some kind of subsidy.

The costs associated with doing this on an individual or even group level or utterly ridiculous, and the design decisions would take for ever to work out as a serious of inter/intra-group partnerships.

Basically, the government needs to step in and fund this one

I think we can come up with a building plan that the lindens would give approval to, so lets get an inital go ahead

Nexus Prime has a street system leading to an elevated highway in Gibson and Jessie has a beltway of sorts but both are, to my taste, far too narrow to comfortably drive. This is a good idea in my opinion but it would likely require much more land and prims than you might expect to make it worth using.

Aren't there Lindenmade walkways going through some sims already?
Like the one in Tehama? Tehama's is bulky and rather plain looking. Don't know if I'd want that in every sim.

Heh, Camille, that is the OLD walkway system. Back in early beta, they created a walkway system, which started at the Natoma welcome area, and went through the entire world (only about 16 sims). Hopefully, with this new idea, it'd look better

Ooo linden objects in tehama? A remnant from early beta even? OMG I gotta get IW fast!
James if you have any pics of what it used to be like I would be very interested

I dunno---I was thinking of this being more for a linden sponsored construction crew type thing......

We would develop sets of linked objects which would comprise roadway sections.

Theme them differently for different sims.

Make them large enough to drive on

I understand it will take lots of land. I think the prim density, however, will be probably be much lower than what each 4x4 square is going to be allocated.

As a result, it would allow the prim density in other areas of the sims with roadways to increase.

I would also like it if there was a large 'national' highway network, which linked into smaller 'state/city' networks---i.e. the national network would have a turnoff that linked into the nexus prime network.


Obviously, there isn't even any reason to talk about this project unless there is some hope that the lindens would sponsor it.

The land usage requirments are FAR too high for even a maxed out group to be able to afford it, come 1.2.

Why drive when you can fly?
Seriously. What the hell is with these people? Mankind has dreamed of flying since the dawn of time. Now that they can fly, they instead moan about not having roads to drive on. Free yourselves from firstwordly preoconceived notions. and start thinking outside the box more often.
As an aside, I started rebuilding the walkways... Yeah I know youre not supposed to build on linden land... ban me
A small part of their former extent was obvious since gov linden owned narrow strips of empty land. Other parts are less obvious but the terrain shape seems to point out a path in some places. If any old timers out there would like to give me some more info, I love SL history. And archaeology hehe.

Eggy, everyone flies. Nothing is going to take that away and no one is advocating that individuals boycott flying. It's just that ground vehicles are fun too.

Sorry guys it's not gonna happen, unless you guys get HUGE support. I had worked on this idea with Phil I believe last Feb (2002) And they would simply take up too much space and too many prims. Phil didn't like the idea of roads in SL because they took up too much of your space, and the creative aspect of the game would of been brought down... but if you want to try again be my guest... you can put my name on top of the list!

Wouldn't you eventually run into a situation where you'd just have to plow through somebodies house?

I'm not saying this will ever happen, but here's how a highway could be made to work: put the roads between the sims. How's that for thinking outside the box, eggy?

Phillip indicated that sim shapes are purely arbitrary. OK, make one that's 16 meters wide and 16 sims long, and run it right down the middle. Better yet, since prim counts would be low, make one server that hosts three of these sections, and build a sort of uppercase 'i' structure, with parallel horizontal roads in the upper and lower sections of the map, and a vertical road connecting them. Bam -- there's your interstate highway, costing only one sim's worth of land and disrupting no current builds. Then if local regions want extensions of the highway system, they can build them. QED.

This would be a huge change, of course -- as one example, it would totally break current getSim() functions. It would also break that pretty grid layout. Still, Lindens -- 16 meters wide, 256*16 meters long. That's a lot of multiples of two. You know you like it.

That would break ALOT of scripts. Yuck!

Yeah, I hear that. As I said, probably too big of a change to happen.

On the other hand, if your script assumes a given sim shape, it may well break one day anyway -- Daddy Linden didn't take that option off the table. If such a change is going to come, it might as well come now as later.

Why not just build it up in the sky, or if you are worried about prims, make it something like from Back to The Future 2. Just make floating pylons to show how the higway system is suppose to flow. It would take up less prims in that process. And it would be up high enough where it will not interfear mostly any other user objects. Plus why do we care if it does effect others object space, the best way it implement this in would be for a linden to buy a long section of land on the borders of the new sims comming in, so their for this huge project would never be a problem with other and other sims created with allow the hwy system to flow inbetween the sims in the long run. Just my ideas worth.