Does anybody drive/ride vehicles across sims?

I recently bought a $4000 custom motorcycle and quickly grew tired of riding around in circles on "riding" sims. I have noticed there are roadways all over SL that stretch across numerous sims. But every time I cross sims, I end up flipping through the air, spinning around a few times and floating underground before coming to rest on the next sim. A few times times I have gone off-world and watched the coords at the top hit the 4000+ mark! (I need to make a movie of my travels!)

It would be nice if the avatar handoff to neighboring sims could be handled better.

Sundbuns

Yep - this has been a problem for a long time.

The less stuff you have, the less the sim has to pass off to the next sim. Might not help a ton but any HUDs or attachments that you can do without should get detached before you start roaming the grid. Also, I think it helps to slow down when you get to a sim line. If nothing else, you don't go so out of control when the handoff happens.

Well, my bike uses 29 prims......

http://youtube.com/watch?v=i68RyfFXa8s

Is this what SL is supposed to be?

Sundbuns

If you try to ride a motorcycle as fast as you can thru old mainland sims then yeah, that's pretty much it. Try going slower on the sim lines.

Yep, all vehicles crossing sim lines have been bjorked for a long time, hopefully mono might help and later upgrades to Havok4, but other than that LL don't seem to rank it as a pirority.
I have 2 Roadside vehicle platforms and one Seaside one that I charge $5L for 24hours usage.

Sundbuns,

This is a long existing problem. It also happens to everyone sailing across sims (the type of vehicle doesn't matter actually). Crossing a simborder is actually the same a Teleport. Teleports work better with less prims attached (this is what Sindy meant). This not only apply for your bike, but any other prim attached to your body also. The less objects to transfer between servers, the better it works. Huds with telemetry usually do not improve things either.

Ride with the wind for as long as it works. Fall down and get back up again and enjoy the rest of your ride. Happy travels!

Lisa Lowe
SL Mentor

Do sim crossing work better if you are wearing the vehicle rather than riding it? I've noticed some vehicles you wear.

Nope, I don't wear this bike. It's an object I must first rez (after finding a place to rez near the highway), then right click and choose ride.

I've seen some beautiful horses that you wear (and can TP with).

The worst problem so far is hitting a sim that is full of prims. My bike just disappears since it is made of (29) prims.

Sundbuns

That's a negatory...

I have to wear the visible parts of both of my yachts and of my jetboat when I go boating. I've been doing a lot of boating and jetskiing in the open water sims like Adriatic and Hollywood over the past month or so.

Over the past two weeks, or since I got the newest "stable official" viewer, EVERY SINGLE TIME I have gone out boating, within three sim crossings I have gone flying off into the wild blue yonder. With no warning. No "your boat has been returned to lost and found" message. No nothing. Just all the sudden I am 15K feet in the air and then going through mountains and through the ocean floor and then after 15 minutes of that I end up (sometimes) standing on the bottom with the superstructure of the boat still attached.

It happened last night with my helicopter too, which I don't have to wear. I took off and went up, but the second I went off my own land the chopper spun out of control and went completely out of the region over the water, and then got returned to lost and found. This is on estate property btw on a so called class 5 server or whatever.

I'm sick of this. What is the point of allowing vehicles if it's gonna be little more than an obstacle course where we dodge banlines and tiptoe over sim crossings? And God forbid you have a passenger of any sort because the only thing that's gonna be left of them after one sim crossing is their ghost.

I have only really been a regular for about a month and a half (because I was stuck on the tutorials which don't work...I should have seen the frustration coming then!) and I have noticed it getting worse. I hate teleporting and love exploring in a vehical. There is no enjoyment in endless use of the search and teleport facility. Besides, the search only seems to show a fraction of what is there, and it can be misleading (e.g. I visited a "traditional british outdoor pool" today, that was nothing but a porn shop with a tiny pool and the only thing british about it were the many flags!).

It is definately getting worse. I am finding the same as you. I go driving/riding/sailing/flying wearing minimal cloths, no HUDs or anything, and it gets very frustrating. In fact, EVERYTHING seems to be getting worse. I tried 2 copy a single prim today when I was building and ended up making a replica as it was too much for the system to cope with, it seems. And it wasn't the first time. Makes you wonder why they give us these facilities if they don't work. This week particularly I seem to have spent lots of time waiting for my inventory to open. Today I got stuck and bounced around so much it would be funny if it wasn't so frustrating. One time when I came back SL decided I was a woman!

More and more often I seem to be waiting for very little to happen. It's like the servers are ZX-Spectrums or something! A friend I have made has told me that they are cutting back on lots of things, restricting more and more...less bandwidth...things he has made don't work anymore too. Not very nice when you have spent a lot of time on something and 3 weeks down the road your customers are complaining. And do we get cheaper prices to reflect the devolution of SL? I found out last week that only last year residents were getting free money and that was taken away. It is like they have thought of a great idea, made it, seen it is successful, got greedy and are now offering less and less each day for the same cost to us!


They need to change the log-in messages...here are my suggestions:
Detecting user frustration level....initiating lag sequence...disabling 50% of the functions...ensuring no neighbouring sims have the same version...hiding inventory...disabling scripts that worked yesterday...


Oh, and you know how there is a button in the preferences for deleting cache, and when you click it, all it does is tell you that it clears automaticaly when you log out and won't when you click the button...well duh...why give us a button? Besides, it doesn't delete the cache automaticaly anyway. Look for yourselves...I looked at mine and found 1GB of crap sitting there...it took about 20mins to delete and clear the recycle bin!

I'm beginning to think of trying one of the many competitors...can't be any worse, surely!


I never had problems with Runescape. Actually, they respect their users and improve things rather than ruin things.

That's very funny hehehehe

Don't forget these:

Bugs=False...Detecting availableRAM...Isolating...Locking....Complete...Initializing memory leaks...compl

Your computer is out of memory. Shutting down unneeded processes to free mo EXITING...

Two years ago when I joined, I thought the vehicle/roads were cool. I quickly found out flying or TPing is the only practical way of transportation, vehicles of any kind just seem pointless, they do have fun values sometimes for a laugh, but eh. They seem to create more problems, lag, harder to control, etc. The roads they've laid out in SL LOOK pretty, but thats the only good they are to me. But I am on the lower end of the computer-powered spectrum.

Again....

"<Runescape> is an online game where 90 percent of the stuff is pre loaded in the software you run on your PC, instead in Second Life is the opposite the (small) viewer needs to download 90% of stuff: textures, sounds animations, videos, music, scripts, objects, etc etc etc. That gives to the serversa big resources load that you can't compare with something like WoW or Runescape"

I usually just walk or fly slowly along the roads at low altitude. The couple times I've tried a vehicle no disastrous sim crossings but it was also too fast to be any better than flying for taking in the world around you.

As for the rest of the problems, I have rez/take delays and various issues when working in some of the major sandboxes but elsewhere it's all but nonexistent. Teleport acts fussy once in a while but not enough to be truly disruptive. Otherwise I rarely encounter any real problems that interfere with doing what I want to do. I know I don't run into a lot of the issues people describe, or it's a very rare occurrence when they do happen. Using the RC client might be a factor, but surely that can't account for the entire difference.

I think SL is a nice environment, but the computer and bandwidth resources just don't allow SL to work. So I think that SL needs to change into more premade and limited fashion. Players should be allowed to create things, but with some limitations. The limitations will be dictated by computer and bandwidth resources of course.

That button sets a flag to dump cache on log out. And it generally does, if you click that button just before you log out. If you don't click it, then it doesn't clear anything. And it doesn't take long in-world for it to fill up.

Just like any browser cache, there are some cases where you need to manually clear it out. Most web browsers also give you a similar button for purging cache. But since the next page you go to does a full re-load of what it needs, it can clear the cache right then and there. While Sl is still USING a lot of what you have in cache, until you log off. Asking SL to dump cache while it is running is like asking your car for an oil change while driving down the freeway. Can't do it while you're running.

Imho, your best bet is to turn down your draw distances and cut down your graphic effects when you are out cavorting around sims. What is occurring is, your client and the server (which is what a sim is), is trying to play catch up. So, if you're running in a high rez state, the new server must update your client with everything within your draw distance, and you end up being sent into oblivion. This also occurs when you walk/fly w/o a vehicle btw. And testing both (vehicle & sans vehicle) with my other computer (which has a very low draw distance [96m, iirc] and no atmospheric effects), I have not run into this problem. Ymmv.

There is a trade-off between draw distances and vehicle speed. If the draw distance is low, so is my top speed. I don't want to ride faster than my viewer can draw. I want to see the road in front of me before I ride on it, especially curves.

In response to the cache questions: Your cache is everything in your inventory - cached (stored) on your computer, including trash. Clearing the cache deletes everything from your computer forcing it to reload your inventory from the main SL servers. You have to manually purge your trash folder. That gives you a second chance to save something.

It's a kind of ironic that the Lindens have spent a lot of time recently 'improving' the roads. They may look better, but there are still pretty useless. What they did is the equivalent of giving your car a paint job and thinking it will run better.

Just off the top of my head, maybe there should be a kind of road connector parcel at the edge of each sim where a road crosses. When you enter this parcel, the sim passes your information on to the one in the adjoining sim before you reach the actual boarder.

If a road is built to take the sim crossing into account, about 80% of the problems with driving a vhicle across the boundary can be eliminated. Just extend a single prim from each side across the border, so each sim hands off surface info correctly. This stops the "vehicle dips or dives into the ground on crossing" types of problems. Do a forum search on "bridge sim border" for more info on building things that cros sim borders.

Vehicles can be scriped "smarter" too, so they handle sim crossings better. I have a free Nissan Sentra that has some sort of code in it that detects nearby sim edges, and does something to ensure a more flawless sim crossing. I've driven it repeatedly at high speed across a sim boundary that has a properly constructed road, and it has never creashed at the border on me yet.

I wished I could drive a vehicle on the roads in SL. Sadly, the areas I am used to, don't allow me to rez the vehicular objects on the pavement. I tried the New York City sim, the sim known as Isabel (a newbie territory) - but to no avail.

Are there any highways I could drive on in SL that I can legally rez a vehicle or a motorcycle?

See my sig for locations of 3 roadside vehicle rezzing platforms on the 2 mainland continents, $5L gets you 24 hours access

The group I'm in likes taking long road trips, 40+ sims each way, from the snow regions to Waterhead and back, over the original mainland continent. With a vehicle scripted to address touring, and not just racing, along with some driver sensitivity to the road, it's an enjoyable (if also challenging/adventurous) hour or more of sight seeing.

The two road-worthiness criteria we use for purchasing vehicles for our group are:

1) A low-speed first, second, and hopefully third gear (under 5-6 mps, between 8-10 mps, and maybe 12-15 mps respectively). If the test vehicle doesn't have anything to measure speed, we wear a personal speedometer HUD. All those cars and bikes which have 15 mps for first gear we won't touch.
2) Precision steering. We test this with the vehicle stationary, while lightly tapping the steering control (usually the left/right cursor arrows) until the vehicle has rotated full circle. We look for a maximum 10-15 degree turn per tap (ie 24-36 taps to rotate fully). Lots of vehicles out there turn 30 degrees per tap (12 taps = 360 degrees), which we find unusable for anything except fishtailing over a road after coming out of a curve.

We've found generally, that if a vehicle meets the above specs, it's quite possible to take half hour drives while staying in lane, not driving off the road, and not doing much more at sim borders than slight dipping, or having the camera view momentarilly go awry.
Interestingly, in our experience, it's easier to find airplanes which meets the above criteria than it is to find a motorcycle or automobile. Maybe they're scripted more with long distance travel in mind.

I can't disagree with the complaints folks have about SL roads; I've driven them enough to share the heartache. But there's more to SL driving problems than simply blaming the Linden road repair and sim borders.
I have similar complaints about the local RL city street potholes, which I drive differently than when I'm sliding over loose gravel on RL mountain roads. On open improved highways, I drive differently still, and have been known to floor the pedal in an orgy of speed.
SL or RL, each type of road has its pleasures, it's frustrations, it's challenges, and it's skill set. RL or SL, you find a vehicle suitable for the trip, and then prudently drive according to the conditions.




I've never seen a public Linden road which allows rezzing, but I've never really looked either. Not to sound glib, but when I really mess it up and need to rez a vehicle in the middle of some distant unknown sim, I walk towards the most unkempt gutter in the neighborhood -- something with a lot of prim litter on it. It usually signals that the owner has left the land to allow rezzing and doesn't have auto-return on.

The problem is, if the Lindens allow rezzing on the road itself, the roads will soon be cluttered with prim trash, and completely unusable.

Look for a parcel that is next to or near a road, and that allows rezzing a prim. Try rezzing your vehicle there, and then drive it out onto the road.

In the Bay City sims they have lots of city streets that are fun to drive on, and canals that are fun to run boats and hovercraft on. Marianne McCann has a store on the West edge of Bay City, right by one of the canals. Her store is called "You know, for kids". There's a lawn between her store and the canal, where she allows vehicle rezzing, and there's room to drive onto the streets from there. There's also a few places beside the streets in that set of sims that allow rezzing, but you have to look for them.

I think part of the problem is that not all the sims are on the same server. Also some have made their land private and if u hit one of those sometimes u end up whereever. It would be nice if their was a list for each server which sim allowed for touring across sims. Perhaps this is something you might look into. A friend of mine Casey Burleigh has run into the same problem perhaps in this case 2 heads might be better then one. As Casey and i use horses and buggies we would prefer open places for trail riding or places meant for earlier eras. But either way rezzer locations would still be helpful to know