Does ROAM still have a future?

I know that Rathe Underthorn is still nominally in charge of ROAM during Francis Chung's (possibly permanent?) absence. I haven't seen a post about ROAM from either one since early July, however.

Anyone know whether ROAM will continue to be a supported and evolving product?

I certaintly hope ROAM development continues. Ever since LL fixed teleporting, I haven't really had to use the teleporting functionality of ROAM, however the mid-air jumping script that's included in ROAM is one of the greatest Second Life inventions ever.

My ROAM is what is making me do that flip in tha air? I couldn't figure out what the hell that was.


I hope ROAM has continued support. I use mine everyday.

It's made me uber lazy about flying. If I want to go somewhere, I copy the location, teleport to the closest hub and the /roam [paste] and then command tab to the forums and come back after I land.

So I hope they still continue it. I find it ver very useful.



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A proud member of PIC = Pudding Inner Core
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I use mine constantly. Considering it seems to still function with some of the newly-added sims, I assume its still receiving a degree of care & feeding.

I'd hate to see it go - its worth every penny.

Hiya

ROAM will continue to develop as always. Rathe is one of the most amazing code hackers I know and I have the utmost confidence in his ability to maintain and further improve the ROAM system.

Part of the advantage of the ROAM business model is that we can keep track of people's subscriptions. Should we ever decide to stop developing ROAM, we will issue refunds to everyone with outstanding subscriptions. We'll never run off with your money. But we have no plans to ever stop development.

Although I'm not in-world, I'm still active in developing ROAM behind the scenes. Right now, I'm working on a new pathfinding algorithm for faster traversals

*hugs Francix*
Hope to see you soon.

As Francis has already iterated we are definatly still supporting and maintaining ROAM. I have been keeping the map updated as new sims are added and handling tech support. We are still continuing development on the beta and should have some very interesting new features and upgrades soon, especially regarding navigation. Thank you everyone for your support!

Where can I get ROAM?

I think we can read Control PgUp and a few other keystroke combos that don't seem to get used very often, how bout using a few of those keystokes to activate some additional flip, jumps, tricks, etc. for the ROAM device?

At the current Welcome Area you can have a nice time jumping from building top to building top. There really ought to be a bunch of folks spending a bit of idle time in ROAM jumping sessions there. It's fun enough by yourself, jumping in unison or in a competitive manner would be even better.

Francis and Rathe: thanks for the response, and it's good to hear that this nice tool won't die on the vine.

Since I have your ear, I have one small enhancement request/bug fix to pass along. If you use /roam simName (x,y) to travel, and the target coords are a damage-enabled plot, you die upon landing because the descent speed is so fast.

Could you tune your code to slow down the flight speed as you near, say, the 60 meter level (if not even higher up)? That would give the user time to notice that the parcel was damage-enabled and type /stop to manuall kick in their Fly mode and hover down a bot more gracefully.

Even better would be to have ROAM check for the parcel status before initiating descent and doing some smart descent to progressively slow you down or even stop at 100 meters or so, put you into Fly mode and tell you that you should descend the rest of the way manually.

Other than this one little aggravation (which has killed me three times in the past week, LOL), the unit is great.

Keiki: If you can't find anyone with a ROAM unit to give you, IM me. I can point you at a casino that has the unit available to copy (where I got mine, but your 10% referral will go to the casino), or I can give you a copy. The only questionable thing in my mind is this pyramid scheme marketing model. I'd like to recommend the unit to more friends, actually, but I feel like schmuck knowing I get the stupid referral from my friends. That actually *prevents* me from talking up the unit to friends or acquaintances unless they explictly ask me what the heck I'm wearing.

I know Francis and Rathe are trying a different marketing model that can reliably pay for the cost of maintaining external servers, but the current "multi-level marketing" structure for referrals leaves a bad taste in some people's mouths. I almost think you'd do better to lower the subscription amounts and not offer the referral bonus at all. Let the unit sell itself rather than forcing people to feel like Amway salespeople everytime they show it off to friends. Problem is that the subscription cost is high enough that people feel somewhat compelled to recommend it to a handful of friends just to defray the subscription cost for themselves.

It's a great product but I think you'd be well-served to reevaluate your price point and the details of your referral model before you go "live" with it.

I also use it every day. It's especially useful for me to get back and forth to my shops, saving my fingers from having to hold down keys for a g e s. Plus I like to watch my progress on the map

You know, the behaviour you're describing with the damage enabled-plot - I've never actually experienced that problem myself. I was kind of surprised that it didn't happen to me when I tried it, but I thought I was lucky that I wouldn't have to code around that special case.

PM me the coordinates where you're experiencing this problem, someone will look into it. The fix you suggested seems like it would be a good solution.

One thing you can do in the meantime is to set an explicit landmark or specify a 3-d coordinate when you /roam by saying "/roam simName (x,y,z)". I manage a little store in Jessie, and I set a landmark to the place I want to land. (/roam opfor if you want to try)

This will stop your transport at the exact spot, so you don't have to worry about slamming into the floor.

As for the referral model, I was kind of surprised at the mixed reactions. Some people love it. I figured that most people would accept it without raising an eyebrow, because Second Life uses a referral model, and we're all here What I do when I refer someone to SL is I just give them their referral bonus. Maybe that would be a good solution for your dilemma?

Our thinking was this: The way the ROAM system is distributed, we don't need to pay for a store/rental/point of sale like every other product in SL. Rather than to just take advantage of customers to distribute ROAM, we'd like to pass the savings on, and reward those people who do help us out

Hi Francis,

I, too, am a big ROAM fan. I was a late adopter

I was at The Shelter one night, and was carrying on enthusiastically about how impressed I was by the coding, etc. Suddenly somebody shut me down fairly sarcastically (and publicly) about it.

I was kind of shocked, and then I realized...they thought I was trying to push the thing for a referral fee. Really, all I was doing was babbling about how neat and ambitious I thought it was

So, yeah, I understand the surprise on your part...I was caught off guard too. But I haven't tried to sell it to anyone...I think that leaves people with that same slinky feeling they get when they suddenly realize the neighbor's "get-together" is an Amway show

Here's something I'm wondering...I'm thinking of upgrading my walk and flight animations. Is it possible to get the ROAM to work with the enhanced Superman-style flight pose? Or does that just automagically happen if I have the AO active when ROAM kicks in?

Inquiring minds want to know before they empty their wallets at Reverie

Thanks!

-- jj

Open-Source Hypertelporter (aka same thing as ROAM, but no outside or inworld servers involved) can be found here: /54/b1/58149/1.html

Well that's a GREAT way to hijack a thread, BTW, did this come partly from the hacked scripts??

Nope

Yeah, geez Hank. Hijacking a thread in the general forum about a commercial product to talk about an open source alternative.

Whatever were you thinking!

I'd say not... going from sim to sim via attachment, seat, or vehicle is nothing new under the sun... I even have my own 'transport kiosk' system between set locations.. Garth Fairlight has various vehicles that travel to different sims - I think it was Cubey that had an automated taxi service at one point.

What ROAM is doing with an offworld server working out your best flight plan for you, and other bits and bobs - now that is new and nifty.....

Accusing someone of using hacked code just on that basis is a lil over the top - especially someone with the breadth of LSL knowledge that Hank does.

Hijacking - I can go with that..

Siggy.