Vehicle Flight

Okay. I'm an aviator. I've always been one, since I first got on SecondLife. I love flying in my little vehicles everywhere I go rather than teleport. But something that changed in 1.1 that really breaks that is the fact that, when crossing sims, you're forced to 768M altitude.

Why does this break my flying, you ask? Well.. here's why.

1: An aviator flying across sims at 30m/s or more MUST be above 1000m to avoid lagging stuff and getting lagged by stuff.

2: An aviator MUST be capable of flight at 800m and above to avoid running into sky boxes and other buildings that reach the maximum build height.

3: The higher one can fly, the faster one can go because you're not having to fight things loading. I used to fly at around 1,500M so I could go across the entire SecondLife grid and explore when I saw people below if I desired.

Now, I can't think of any "good" reason to lower the flight ceiling like that. Because here's what it does:

1: Due to the flight height being limited to 768M when crossing sims, I end up loading everything and anything down below, even if it's not rendered. This causes a massive amount of lag/loading that oftentimes puts me in "the void" as I like to call it (the space under the ground). Sometimes, my "object has been returned to my Lost and Found folder", I've noted, which means I've gotta go dig it out and try again, IF I can find land that allows the spawning of objects.

2: Due to the same reason as above, I keep running into sky boxes that haven't rezzed yet, and I very frequently end up trapped inside them 'cause most of the time, they're self-contained with no exit and an owner/group-only teleportation device. So I have to edit my vehicle (which is annoying with the focus bug) and drag it out.

3: And this is the sucky part. All that load time? All that stuff being spawned? I'm forced to fly at no faster than 15m/s. And when I wanna get somewhere to explore and explore on the way if I want, that is incredibly annoying.

In closing, this limitation is extremely detrimental on everything SL is supposed to be, for those that like to fly. I see now why I no longer see anyone else flying around, because now it's just too hard to.

No offense, of course. I'm surprised there's nothing here yet.

Holy *censored*.

I normally fly "nap-of-land" myself, because high altitude flight gets a bit too much like teleporting, so I haven't noticed this one.

Perhaps it's a hack to let people who are orbited get back down by flying in any direction until they reach a sim border? If so, they should have announced it... and it shouldn't push you down below 4096.

Hmmm.

I've had my Cubey skydiving pod returned to me from 4096+ meters a couple of times in the past week... never happened before. I wonder if it's related? They screwed something up in the high altitude code in general?

Just stating for data purposes here that it doesn't happen to avatars. Sim crossings don't change flight altitude.

Strange.. so it's only a vehicle issue, then. Thought so. I wonder why.. any Lindens got any input on this?