Cross Sim Teleporter

Question, why is ROAM a subscription service? This puts me off to not buying one. If it were however a one time fee, I'd be more than happy to buy one.

I have enough bills to worry about in the real world, not to mention a few minor ones in SL (Land listing fees), to take on anymore in SL.

Personally, I love this system. The open nature of the service is such that I can just drop the ROAM gear in a new object, and have it be mine to sell or give away as I see fit. I think that versatility is worth a periodic cost. I also think it's going to be vital to getting the kind of market pentration which ROAM needs to succeed.

So far, I've enjoyed the beta greatly. However, I've a small criticism: couldn't the movement be made smoother? There is a temporary halt when the av enters a new sim, and then the av lurches back into motion. Is this just me? If not, could it be eliminated or reduced? Or is it necessary to prevent the av from flying into oblivion?

Hi, Oz! Thanks for voicing your concerns. The reason that Roam is a subscription is because it is more than just a magic box that sits on your back. It is a service. The box itself is essentially free to own and copy.

Roam took months and months of development and requires regular day to day maintenance, updates, bandwidth, and hosting. This of course all comes at a cost to us. We felt that rather than charging a high price to cover the potential lifetime support of such a service, it was more resonable and practical to charge monthly (or discounted multi-monthly) subscriptions.

From a consumer standpoint it makes more sense. Rather than paying a high premium for a lifetime of service upfront when Second Life might not even be around in a year or five you pay as you go. In the event that we were no longer capable of providing service to Roam we would be able to pro-rate your current subscription and refund you the difference. This way you only pay for what you get.

Subscriptions are currently available in a 3 day free trial, 1 month, 3 months, and 1 year packages. If you'd rather not have to worry about month to month payments, you can subscribe to the 1 year package and essentially set it and forget it for the next year. You can even stack on additional time to your existing subscription at any point.

There is NO auto-rebilling. We only remind you that your subscription is expired and that you must renew to continue usage, but you are never automatically rebilled.

With a subscription you will get unlimited queries, free updates, constistanty updated mapping, unlimited bookmarks, tech support, and more.

You're absolutely correct, the temporary halt is to give SL a bit of time to "catch up with you". After adding that little halt in, (in my own personal experience, ymmv) sim crossings were much much more reliable.

It might be possible to "smooth out" the movement, and it is a problem I will reexamine later. For the beta release, I'm just concerned with getting people with different connections & systems a spin with ROAM, and making it more reliable for everyone.

Right now the "pause" is mostly just a cosmetic drawback. Most of the time is not really spent travelling across the sim, so much as waiting for your avatar to transfer between sims.

How much would this cost? I don't want to develop a thing, I just WANT this!!!

Please list the rates here.

-Ghoti

HOLY CRAP!!!!!!!

This is the single greatest invention in SL history!

That is an understatement. All I can say is WOW, and I am not someone who will normally gush about something. It is not very often that something can completely change the way we interact in SL, but this is incredible. I absolutely loathe telehubs because of all the crap around them, so I generally just stay around Mavericks. The experience of using this to travel is phenomenal - I am actually excited about this thing. Great job on it, truly.

Thanks for the positive feedback Cristiano and Red.

The current subscription rates are:

3 day free trial (new users only) - L$0
1 month - L$399
3 months - L$999
1 years - L$2,999

Subscribers receive unlimited queries, transports, bookmarks, free updates, and tech support, along with a fistful of secret goodies during their subscription. Subscriptions may be renewed or extended at anytime. You will NOT be automatically rebilled.

I do hope you change your rates by rounding them up (or down). The use of '99' is a shabby trick by retailers to make something sound less than it actually is, and also indicates that the price is in fact an arbitrary one. I am glad to say that in the UK at least one chain store has recognised the dubious practice for what it is, and now rounds prices to the nearest pound.

If you would like to view the current public bookmarks you can use:

/roam bookmarks

It currently only lists public bookmarks, but you will soon be able to login and manage your public and private bookmarks, as well as many other features.

Rathe,

Where is the place where you can buy this? Or are you just supposed to IM Torley? Could you put it out in a store for sale?

Is it different than the X-ball that makes you travel really fast between sims? Sounds like it.

Neat invention. Very innovative. Alot of $$ to replicate a feature that LL took away from us (point-to-point TP).

-Ghoti

Buy one? I figured they were all over SL by now. I had one dropped on me while I was sleeping.... by someone whom I think I do not know... I was assuming they had used Ulrika's magic spam box to get them out to people.

-Ghoti

You know, things like the SL railroad or Cubey's zeppelins or such are cross-sim teleporters, they are just a little slower than the instant sit-move.

For what it's worth, the original SL point-to-point teleports weren't free, and they weren't cheap. How much a teleport cost depended on how far you wanted to teleport. Memory's fuzzy, but I think it was L$30 to teleport between Ahern and Olive (the sandbox at the time)

I wonder what a teleport between Parce and Ferne would cost if we still had that scheme.

We're still in beta right now, and we haven't put it up for general distribution or anything. We gave it to some folks, and you know how it goes - They give it to two people, and those two give it to two more... It's kinda fun to watch it spread :]

Hi

Someone said the free trial was 3 days. I only got offered 1 day. A bug maybe?

Also I would love the chance to add this to some of our vehicles as an option.. Like you subscribr if you activate that option otherwise it is just inactive. What would I need for that?

I did try with scripts from the Roam but could not figure it. Maybe I just need a little help from Francis and Rathe.

I am thinking of just the pathfinding part as I was the vehicle to travel at normal speed to it's destination.

Yeah... don't get me wrong. I'm not putting down ROAM in the least. Its neat and amazing.

Sounds to me like the old teleport fees were a syphon for L$, else teleporting via telehub would still be a charged-for service.



Wonder who this person is that gave it to me.

-Ghoti