Region crossings and avatar placeholder prim thingies

[Cerise Sorbet]

There may not be practical uses for these details, but here they are anyway, just because I've ended up with a few of these objects and was curious.

Maybe once every few hundred sim crossings in a vehicle at speed, there is a silly kind of hiccup. The vehicle crosses without you, and sitting in the vehicle in your place is a prim. This is only supposed to be a placeholder until your avatar gets across, but this is Second Life and you don't always get across.

The placeholder may be left in place if you are a driver or passenger. Even if you don't own the vehicle you were riding on, or have edit rights to the vehicle, that prim will belong to you. If you get to the vehicle before it goes back to inventory, you can unlink your prim and keep it.

The prim left behind is a basic box. All textures are set to NULL_KEY so it appears gray. The object name is the same as your legacy name, but it does have a separate UUID. You are its creator. Its dimensions are the same as your llGetAgentSize() at the time you were on the vehicle. It's physical, and has its llSetStatus() set so that it only turns around the Z axis. Physics material is flesh, gravity 1.0, friction 0.6, density 1000, bounciness 0.5.

Real avatars have some artificial forces added to keep them from sliding around, so the box won't behave exactly like an avatar if you push it around. It can be shoved with relative ease.

[Whirly Fizzle]

I have a collection of those.

There was a cool bug last August ( BUG-3547) that allowed those "Avatar physics primitives" (does anyone know the correct term for them?) to be created pretty easily and in large numbers when crossing from a BlueSteel to a main channel region.

A neat side effect was being able to create linksets with more then 256 prims. Each time you crossed the region while sitting on an object one of those "thingies" would be linked onto the object for each avatar seated on it, even if the object already had 256 prims or greater.