SLGI Personal Autopilot Vehicle Project

[Anaimfinity]

For many years, various residents have said to me things like this: 

I dream of a vehicle that I can rezz, tell it where to go and drive there by itself. 

After I tested many various ways to do this, I came to the conclusion that it is possible. I have almost finished the scripts needed for this. However, before I release it into public, I want to know what others think about, so that it would, indeed, benefit our virtual world. Your advices are very useful and I need them. 

SLGI Autopilot is intended to be an autopilot navigation system for personal use, which can be installed on personal cars, boats, trains, airplanes, helicopters or submarines, based on pre-programmed routes. 

Parts

The SLGI Autopilot will consist of: 

• An Autopilot HUD interface and scripts that will enable your personal vehicle to go by autopilot when you chose to; 
• A giant Public Library of routes stored on notecards at SL Geography Institute, where anyone can upload personal routes or download new ones; 
• An  Editing HUD for anyone that wants to write a new notecard route; 
• A Navigation HUD for those who prefer to pilot their own vehicles but want something to guide them on the way. 

Each route is stored on one notecard and is only one-way. The routes are designed for any type of vehicles: cars, trains, boats, airplanes, helicopters, submarines, anything. 

Principle

The principle is simple:

Autopilot drive/fly/sail:

• When you activate the SLGI Autopilot HUD, it checks if there is any notecard route starting from the sim where you are. 
• You can chose the one you want and relax while your vehicle is on autopilot. 
• At the end, you can chose a different route or decide to pilot yourself. 

Manual drive/fly/sail:

• Follow the navpoints provided by the HUD but drive/fly/sail yourself. 

Interactive project

Anyone can write a route notecard. It is now very simple to do so: 

• Wear the HUD for designing a route. 
• Drive/fly/sail your own vehicle with the HUD active. 
• Listen in chat to navpoints as the HUD identifies them. 
• Write them on a notecard. 
• Upload the notecard to the SLGI library for anyone to use. 

For those who might find useful, like around airports, ports, railway stations, gas stations or GTFO HUB facilities, they can store their own libraries with route notecards starting from their own places, to make navigation easier. 

Project Size

I hope this project will be public, with residents willing to edit route notecards and upload them to the route library and a large database that would slowly cover the whole mainland and maybe also private land. I estimate that a list of 10 thousand notecard routes would be stored in the end. Merchants and builders can take advantage of this and design their vehicles compatible to SLGI technology. 

Limitations

This technology will not be suitable for all vehicles. No-modify vehicles might not accept the scripts and HUD control, while some vehicles, with different rotation settings, might not work or move strange. 

THERE IS NO WAY to make something like Google Maps. This is because LSL script limitations: 

1. HTTP related scripts are the most high-lag of all scripts. If you design a vehicle controlled by an external server you will eat all sim resources. So, there really is no way to use something like Google Maps. I tested external servers on various occasions and ended-up with incredible lag levels. 
2. There is almost no way to make the script chose itself from hundreds of notecards to find the best way towards a destination. It will either take a lot of time (minutes) or end-up with a 'stack heap collision'. I tried it for years and failed. That's why I spent 8 years until the SLGI Taxis SLGI Taxis | SLGI Wiki | Fandom have finally been released this year. 

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So, what do you think? 

Shall I release the SLGI Autopilot project? Will it be helpful to you? Or should it cause more harm than good? Shall I release it for free or shall I put some parts on marketplace? What are your expectations and what should be needed to improve? 

[diamond Marchant]

Two thoughts.
The vehicle drivers I know like to operate their vehicles. We use nav tools but we expect to be the pilot/sailor/driver.

Once you get off of protected water and roads, the grid is in constant flux, due to fact that residents build, terraform, make banlines, and deploy security orbs. Route maintenance is an issue.

[Aethelwine]

Maybe there should be 2 classes of routes. One that is entirely protected route, that with care setting waypoints would be dependable and a second class that at least partly relies on passing through private land.

I like the idea it is not necessarily something I would use all the time, but I can think of some uses like making a taxi route from your log cabin to a railway station or water rezz area, or a water taxi route to go to nearest airport. And for more public tourist routes.

Besides waypoints is there a facility to indicate velocity? For aircraft\submarine altitude? And any scope for adding comments to point out things to look at like the yavapods have?

Edited May 10, 2023 by Aethelwine

[Aethelwine]

You indicate routes are made by hud  it might be better to allow setting the route through waypoints from a slurl list? There would perhaps be more control over the placement?

[Anaimfinity]

3 hours ago, diamond Marchant said:

Two thoughts.
The vehicle drivers I know like to operate their vehicles. We use nav tools but we expect to be the pilot/sailor/driver.

Once you get off of protected water and roads, the grid is in constant flux, due to fact that residents build, terraform, make banlines, and deploy security orbs. Route maintenance is an issue.

I also like to drive/fly myself sometimes. However, while going on long journeys (like sailing from Castle Valeria to Ahabs Haunt) the route is tricky. The HUD can be used to show you the way to the next navpoint, making everything easier. And yes, route maintenance is an issue. I am also worried that, as the project will be public and anyone can upload route notecards, there will be a lot of griefer attacks that would insert wrong route notecards. And yes, many routes might no longer work if drawn over private-owned land. You pointed some of my biggest concerns about long-term feasibility of this project. 

1 hour ago, Aethelwine said:

Maybe there should be 2 classes of routes. One that is entirely protected route, that with care setting waypoints would be dependable and a second class that at least partly relies on passing through private land.

I like the idea it is not necessarily something I would use all the time, but I can think of some uses like making a taxi route from your log cabin to a railway station or water rezz area, or a water taxi route to go to nearest airport. And for more public tourist routes.

Besides waypoints is there a facility to indicate velocity? For aircraft\submarine altitude? And any scope for adding comments to point out things to look at like the yavapods have?

Good points. The HUD allows you to set speed. I can add the feature to show you current speed, altitude, elapsed time and distance passed. And I can add the option to say comments on the way (and to go silent if the pilot wants it). Talking about sets of routes, it will work like this: Each route notecard must have four types of information in their name: maker, start point, destination, description. An example is this one: George,Ahabs Haunt,Blake Sea,Safe sailing. If you decide to use the system from Ahabs Haunt sim, the HUD will display all available routes starting from here and will show you this one like: Route to Blake Sea made by George. Description: safe sailing. This allows you to judge if you chose it or not. 

1 hour ago, Aethelwine said:

You indicate routes are made by hud  it might be better to allow setting the route through waypoints from a slurl list? There would perhaps be more control over the placement?

Unfortunately that is impossible. SLGI scripts need navpoints in global coordinates. The use of a SLURL, world map link or local coordinates does not work properly. I tried it. 

[CarlaWetter]

Please remember that certain vehicles out there are very vulnerable to collisions (and meant to be so), like N&K tall ships or Shergood Helicopters. And of course there's that ubiquitous sailboat racing with an expectation to not be actively disturbed by mindless vehicles crossing their path.

So I wouldn't really want to see an autopilot system without a very good collision avoidance in place, as fun and potentially helpul as autopiloting is.

[Teresa Firelight]

I would probably use something like this if it were not expensive. However I doubt I would be willing to pay $L 2000 or more

[animats]

4 hours ago, CarlaWetter said:

So I wouldn't really want to see an autopilot system without a very good collision avoidance in place, as fun and potentially helpful as auto piloting is.

Yes. Unless you're going to turn vehicles phantom, like Yava Pods, you have to avoid collisions. Or your vehicles will be a nuisance.

Many of you have seen my NPCs running around. Those are solid, and keyframe animated. They'd be a terrible nuisance if they didn't have good collision avoidance.

The first step is automatic braking. Do ray casts into the area you're about to enter, and stop before you hit something. One ray cast is not enough. The vehicle has height and width, and you have to cover that area. That's the minimum. That's Tesla-level autonomy.

Dealing with other fast moving vehicles is more complicated. My NPCs detect vehicles as an avatar sitting on a physical object, and give them a lot of clear space. More than you could on a road. You could have your scripts understand road lanes, stay in lane, and ignore moving objects outside their lane. But most SL drivers are not good enough to stay in lane. Slowing way down in the presence of other vehicles is probably the best you can do.

There's a history of automated vehicles in SL. If they drive badly, they're a nuisance.

[CarlaWetter]

23 minutes ago, animats said:

Unless you're going to turn vehicles phantom, like Yava Pods, you have to avoid collisions. Or your vehicles will be a nuisance.

As sailors can't easily see if some random vehicle is phantom, any vehicle heading at you seemingly crewed and oblivious to you is a nuisance and its use should really be avoided. Not such a big deal for the yavapods because we know them by now. But when you can't tell if some upsized cargo ship does its GTFO run human controlled or autopiloted, you don't really gamble on it being phantom.

See if you can get @animats avoidance system. 😉

[animats]

1 minute ago, CarlaWetter said:

See if you can get @animats avoidance system.

What I do won't work for road vehicles. First, it uses llGetStaticPath to get a path around static obstacles. That's only useful on land, and the parcel has to be prepped for pathfinding. Linden roads are not set up for that; they're not marked as "walkable".

When a non static obstacle is detected, the NPCs stop. A 20x20 grid of 0.5m squares is laid out ahead of the NPC. llCastRay calls are made to find out which of the squares are empty. Then a path is plotted through the clear squares. This can take a few seconds. If you see one of my NPCs with their arms folded, that means they're waiting for the path planner to find them a way past an obstacle.

Avatars are roughly cylindrical, can turn in place, and can stop and start quickly, so this simple world model works. Road path planning for vehicles with a minimum turning radius requires a different approach.

If you're going to work on this, the first step is to get to Level 3 self driving - stay in lane, don't hit car ahead. When in trouble, stop and call for human assistance.

[Qie Niangao]

16 hours ago, Anaimfinity said:

Anyone can write a route notecard. It is now very simple to do so: 

• Wear the HUD for designing a route. 
• Drive/fly/sail your own vehicle with the HUD active. 
• Listen in chat to navpoints as the HUD identifies them. 
• Write them on a notecard. 
• Upload the notecard to the SLGI library for anyone to use. 

There's a brand new development that was confirmed at this weeks Simulator User Group, that the Experience persistent storage (128 MB each) will be made separately available, no longer relying on land scope Experiences. That means we'll finally be able to read and write to those stores regardless of the land settings where the script is running. This may be an option for reducing reliance on notecards and manual scribing of coordinates.

Incidentally, I think navpoint identification might be an interesting technical question. When I've done it, I've been very profligate with the waypoints (especially when plotting ray casts rather than travel paths), but I wonder how smart the auto pilot may be in navigating between waypoints, such that fewer of them are needed. I don't have anything useful to suggest, just observing that there might be a cool engineering topic here.

To the actual topic, though, I don't really know if I'd use it. But I'm weird. Usually when I'm using a vehicle in SL, it's to play with some script thing, so I rarely have any destination in mind at all. On the other hand I sometimes hop on a passing autonomous vehicle and read its "tour guide" commentary. Long ago, I puttered around on a script that offered a selection of nearby "scenic view" cam positions as visitors wandered a region; maybe something like that, plus the tour guide commentary, could be a fun add-on—even better if somebody wanted to concoct some Mainland Lore for the "Haunted Heterocera" tour, etc.

[Anaimfinity]

Thank you all for your advices. 

5 hours ago, Teresa Firelight said:

I would probably use something like this if it were not expensive. However I doubt I would be willing to pay $L 2000 or more

Actually, I was planning to make it free. However, this would damage the marketplace. So, a price between 100 and 200 L$ should be ok I think. Still, I might make a more simplistic version for free. 

9 hours ago, CarlaWetter said:

Please remember that certain vehicles out there are very vulnerable to collisions (and meant to be so), like N&K tall ships or Shergood Helicopters. And of course there's that ubiquitous sailboat racing with an expectation to not be actively disturbed by mindless vehicles crossing their path.

So I wouldn't really want to see an autopilot system without a very good collision avoidance in place, as fun and potentially helpul as autopiloting is.

That is a very important point. There would be no physical collisions. Just like the SLGI trains, ships and taxis (SLGI Transportation Systems | SLGI Wiki | Fandom), which are phantom and non-physical, these scripts will make vehicles phantom and non-physical during autopilot. When autopilot is turned off, vehicles can become physical and non-phantom again by pressing a button in the HUD, allowing pilots to manually drive them. However, the point is right, a sailor has no way to know if an oncoming vehicle is indeed phantom or not. Especially that almost any personal vehicle can be equipped with an autopilot. 

I planned to avoid this kind of problems by the fact that the pilot has three options: increase/decrease speed (to allow other vehicles pass or overtake them), stop (and wait for a clear path) or turn off autopilot (which allows the pilot to manually take over). 

The best way should be an autopilot able to work around obstacles, while still staying on protected land. Someone, over 10 years ago, has tried this various times and has caused huge problems to everybody. I talk about Annmarie Otoole (may she rest in peace). Although she had a huge experience on computers and scripting and understood how things actually work, her obstacle avoidance systems never worked properly. And her vehicles were extremely high-lag, my measurements at that time showed they were over 20 times more high-lag than the VRC opensource train. I tried to make a script able to avoid collisions. At some point, the SLGI trains and ships were equipped with one that turned on in emergency situations, but I removed it because of high lag and lack of efficiency. Instead, I re-programmed them to hover above roads and waterways or even to fly at high altitude, to avoid any problems with other passing vehicles and avatars, although they are set phantom. 

Still, I believe that, the fact that pilots/drivers/sailors can stop the autopilot HUD and let other vehicles pass or turn to manual navigation would be of great help. In fact, it is your responsibility how you drive your own vehicle and what you crash it into. 

If I find a way to make a low-lag and safe obstacle avoidance script, I will do it. But for now, given the past experiences and all the trouble from similar vehicles, I will just leave it up to the pilot's responsibility to stop and wait for other vehicles to pass through or pilot manually. After all, in manual mode, the HUD can show you the direction to next navpoint, which is also useful. 

[CarlaWetter]

17 minutes ago, Anaimfinity said:

these scripts will make vehicles phantom and non-physical during autopilot

As I explained in a later remark, that's not really helping a lot with random vehicles we don't know as phantom. Which would, by the very definition of this autopilot idea, every normal vehicle with this kind of script.

Initially I sort of liked the idea, but the longer I think about it, the more I see it used in ways that will only upset the rest of the vehicle riding users. We can cope with Yava Pods and your automated SLGI vehicles because they're easily identified, not very large, limited to specific known routes and tend to fly a lot of the way.

Having half a dozen 'superyachts' roam around the Blake Sea with people down in the cabins doing "cabin" stuff would just be a desaster. That they are phantom and we can sail through the master bedroom if we like isn't much of a deterrent and not something that actually helps cooperative, social behaviour on the seas a lot. Or on roads. It might work for airplanes if people would agree on flight corridors of sorts, mainly some flight heights for autopiloted flight. Currently not that many vehicles have a meaningul automation that they'd require some actual regulation. Give your autopilot away and I can see calls for regulation coming up really fast. Lots of random automated vehicles on roads and seas are not going to be a positive experience for us at all.

added: Use of the script would require a feeling for responsibility way above the average capacity of vehicle users. Sory if that's snotty, but this is a point of view I got from experience.

Edited May 11, 2023 by CarlaWetter

[Zalificent Corvinus]

On 5/10/2023 at 3:11 AM, Anaimfinity said:

For many years, various insignificant number of residents have said to me things like this: 

I dream of a vehicle that I can rezz, tell it where to go and drive there by itself. 

Fixed that for you.

 

On 5/10/2023 at 3:11 AM, Anaimfinity said:

However, before I release it into public, I want to know what others think about, so that it would, indeed, benefit our virtual world. Your advices are very useful and I need them. 

Advice: Please DON'T.

 

On 5/10/2023 at 3:11 AM, Anaimfinity said:

The SLGI Autopilot will consist of: 

• An Autopilot HUD interface and scripts that will enable your personal vehicle to go by autopilot when you chose to; 
• A giant Public Library of routes stored on notecards at SL Geography Institute, where anyone can upload personal routes or download new ones; 
• An  Editing HUD for anyone that wants to write a new notecard route; 
• A Navigation HUD for those who prefer to pilot their own vehicles but want something to guide them on the way. 

Members of "Fanatical Vehicle Users Against Property Rights" already scream blue murder when their DELIBERATE attempts to harass home owners are stopped by banlines and orbs, creating a tool that will cheerfully fly them through proscribed space, because of a list of badly maintained waypoints that don't take private property into consideration, will only make things worse.

Who is going to pay the team of professional route librarians to constantly update the route cards every time somebody buys a parcel, build a home and sets up the Anti-Home-Invader Flak Battery? Nobody.

 

On 5/10/2023 at 3:11 AM, Anaimfinity said:

Will it be helpful to you? Or should it cause more harm than good? 

If you have to ask that last question, you already know the answer is "EVIL!", and shouldn't have asked.

[Anaimfinity]

Thank you all. 

9 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Fixed that for you.

 

Advice: Please DON'T.

 

Members of "Fanatical Vehicle Users Against Property Rights" already scream blue murder when their DELIBERATE attempts to harass home owners are stopped by banlines and orbs, creating a tool that will cheerfully fly them through proscribed space, because of a list of badly maintained waypoints that don't take private property into consideration, will only make things worse.

Who is going to pay the team of professional route librarians to constantly update the route cards every time somebody buys a parcel, build a home and sets up the Anti-Home-Invader Flak Battery? Nobody.

 

If you have to ask that last question, you already know the answer is "EVIL!", and shouldn't have asked.

 

15 hours ago, CarlaWetter said:

As I explained in a later remark, that's not really helping a lot with random vehicles we don't know as phantom. Which would, by the very definition of this autopilot idea, every normal vehicle with this kind of script.

Initially I sort of liked the idea, but the longer I think about it, the more I see it used in ways that will only upset the rest of the vehicle riding users. We can cope with Yava Pods and your automated SLGI vehicles because they're easily identified, not very large, limited to specific known routes and tend to fly a lot of the way.

Having half a dozen 'superyachts' roam around the Blake Sea with people down in the cabins doing "cabin" stuff would just be a desaster. That they are phantom and we can sail through the master bedroom if we like isn't much of a deterrent and not something that actually helps cooperative, social behaviour on the seas a lot. Or on roads. It might work for airplanes if people would agree on flight corridors of sorts, mainly some flight heights for autopiloted flight. Currently not that many vehicles have a meaningul automation that they'd require some actual regulation. Give your autopilot away and I can see calls for regulation coming up really fast. Lots of random automated vehicles on roads and seas are not going to be a positive experience for us at all.

added: Use of the script would require a feeling for responsibility way above the average capacity of vehicle users. Sory if that's snotty, but this is a point of view I got from experience.

I understood your points of view very well and thank you for writing it. The reason I started this topic is that, at least this month, I got 11 calls on me to launch the autopilot project (plus others over the years). 

Well, if such a thing will cause more harm than will do good, I will not do it. I will still leave this topic opened for a few days to see other comments. It is also very useful when other people will ask me again to build an autopilot, I will direct them to this link so they can judge themselves. 

Sorry if this disturbs anyone, but the best way to check if an autopilot is a good or a bad thing was to start this topic and see what you think about it. I could see a lot of advantages and problems, but it is better to see what others think, to have a more complex view. 

It would require months of work as I would need to map the whole mainland and build an estimated 7000 route notecards. Honestly, I don't believe there would be significant help from others creating route notecards for this project. If it were a beneficial thing for our virtual world, I would still have done it. I will never do something that causes more harm than good... and I will not scan all protected routes on mainland just for the pleasure of doing so. 

[CarlaWetter]

3 minutes ago, Anaimfinity said:

Honestly, I don't believe there would be significant help from others creating route notecards for this project.

While that may be reasonable true as an expectation, we sailing folks in SL tend to create many cruises every week. But not down to the micromanagement level an autopilot script would require. That's more what the Drivers of SL group does in their nav hud. But neither sailing cruises nor DSL drives actually work decently well without permanent human control.

Generally I may be too pessimistic about the eventual use a generalized autopilot scriptset might find, when its practical use would be very much limited to some short to mid range ferry services. But even those I'd not let this loose on general sailing areas like the Blake Sea other than in single well maintained and within the area coordinated service.

As we see in certain participants in this discussion there's enough general animosity and outright aggression against the use of vehicles as it already is. And while I'm not interested in supporting their polemics, I'd still want to keep vehicle travel in SL as a friendly and responsible social experience to all actually involved user groups.

[Anaimfinity]

Conclusion 

After a week since I started this topic, my conclusion is as follows: 

1. General interest is low. There have been only 7 people commenting here. Which means that there is no significant need for this. 

2. There are some technical problems. Making a script able to avoid other vehicles and people on the way would work in large sea areas, but it will never work on narrow parcels like roads or tight waterways. A complex system with sensors, cast rays and functions to detect where protected land ends and not end-up on private land would be high-lag and not too safe, as I tried it. 

3. My first worry before opening this topic was that griefers might use this to purposely send objects on collision course (like an iceberg through protected waters). Releasing the autopilot engine would allow griefers to target private land and rage havoc too. 

4. I never imagined that someone would dare to think about a route crossing private land. Even while walking, I don't enter private land unless it's a shop, a park, a road, a railway, a land for sale or a GTFO place. 

Because of all these considerations, I believe that this technology is too dangerous to be released. While there might be people wanting an autopilot, for me, it seems that the overall result of this technology would be negative. 

On the other hand, there is another technology that can be used and I was planning to. It just consists of a navigator HUD that shows you the way to go to the next navpoint along a route, letting you to chose the vehicle you want (or go by foot if you want). 

The system seems to work for long routes. A notecard can host all navpoints needed for a sailing route from Gaeta 5 to Jeogeot Gulf. 

Although it is only a HUD that shows you the way to go and NOT something that can autopilot your vehicle, I set a few safety features. The way navpoints are identified allows the system to see if they are on protected land or not, allowing for the server to sort routes in 5 categories based on their safety and also to remove corrupted or double routes from database. 

There will be a library for routes for anyone to upload or download them. However, as mentioned, these routes are only to be used for a navigation HUD and not an autopilot HUD. Similar things exist on the marketplace, but this one will allow people to share routes they know. It will be free and available from the SL Geography Institute inworld or by cost from marketplace. 

One extra feature: The navpoints are written in such a way that they CANNOT be used by an automated vehicle (unless massive reverse engineering is done). Over time, I released on marketplace some scripts for automated vehicles. However, none of those scripts can use navpoints in the format given for this navigation HUD. My fear that a griefer might try to use the route notecards for an attack. 

Thank you to all who commented here. 

Why did the Titanic sink? Because the iceberg was on autopilot. 

[John Codesmith]

I know this is a year old, but I can give you one of my Guided Tour Systems it can cross sim lines and even teleport past "bad areas" within a sim only - it can, and has gone all over the grid and is very easy to make routes with the global HUD. You can make one point per sim on really long routes, and it stores all the points in script memory to be very low lag and the memory scripts can be copied and added. I have taken 2-1/2 hour tours across mainland. It is a fixed route but as you say, if people made a library or routes from rez points, it would be very fun! - I do sell my scripts at my company though and they are not "open source" if that is a downside.  IM me in world would be happy to show it to you and give you one to try!

You can stop by my store (in my profile) to try some of them if you like.

[diamond Marchant]

Is this a pod system? Is this a system that has free demos put requires payment for the real deal? Is this an ad?

[Qie Niangao]

8 hours ago, diamond Marchant said:

Is this a pod system? Is this a system that has free demos put requires payment for the real deal? Is this an ad?

Presumably this applies to the Guided Tour System described in this recent comment, not to the original proposal (which I understand to have been abandoned or at least suspended indefinitely). I have no idea about the Guided Tour System but I'm quite sure nothing from @Anaimfinity would be like that.

8 hours ago, John Codesmith said:

it stores all the points in script memory to be very low lag

I assume this is in comparison with notecard-driven systems, which is probably true in this case, but access to list items in script memory is no longer the guaranteed winner overall.

• Even simple search with llListFindList isn't free, and more sophisticated text search of list memory is woefully slower than regex matching with llLinkSetDataFindKeys. This particular application may access data mostly sequentially, so search may not be a consideration, but sequential access to linkset data is also very fast and synchronous, unlike how notecards worked until, basically, right now. (And of course linkset data is large and frees script memory for other uses.)
• Installing on the Bluesteel channel today is the "Gingerbread" RC that includes synchronous notecard reading. It's a very big deal for other applications (bearing in mind that at any point, the notecard could be uncached due to a region restart, if nothing else, so must always include async recovery). But for this application it could only apply to loading memory or linkset data from notecards at the start of a tour, because the notecard won't be cached in the region after the one where it was last read. That notecard reading will be much, much faster when re-implemented with llGetNotecardLineSync().
• For this application, I'd still choose asynch access to the relatively vast shared store of Experience KVP,  now that it's not limited to Experience-enabled land (as I mentioned above).

All this said, though, I think it wise to avoid a proliferation of diverse automated vehicles on non-regular Mainland routes. As @CarlaWetter mentions above, it's one thing to encounter a few easily identified phantom vehicles travelling established routes known to all drivers, and quite another to need to dodge unfamiliar, potentially non-phantom vehicles with riders who aren't driving. I just don't think we need more of those unless they're fantastically more sophisticated at collision avoidance than anything I've seen on SL roads.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Qie Niangao said:

Installing on the Bluesteel channel today is the "Gingerbread" RC that includes synchronous notecard reading.

Thanks for the update on this!!

[Qie Niangao]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Thanks for the update on this!!

I hope it's true. I notice all the Bluesteel sandboxes are offline at the moment. 😮

[Anaimfinity]

On 2/14/2024 at 3:09 PM, Qie Niangao said:

Presumably this applies to the Guided Tour System described in this recent comment, not to the original proposal (which I understand to have been abandoned or at least suspended indefinitely). I have no idea about the Guided Tour System but I'm quite sure nothing from @Anaimfinity would be like that.

I assume this is in comparison with notecard-driven systems, which is probably true in this case, but access to list items in script memory is no longer the guaranteed winner overall.

• Even simple search with llListFindList isn't free, and more sophisticated text search of list memory is woefully slower than regex matching with llLinkSetDataFindKeys. This particular application may access data mostly sequentially, so search may not be a consideration, but sequential access to linkset data is also very fast and synchronous, unlike how notecards worked until, basically, right now. (And of course linkset data is large and frees script memory for other uses.)
• Installing on the Bluesteel channel today is the "Gingerbread" RC that includes synchronous notecard reading. It's a very big deal for other applications (bearing in mind that at any point, the notecard could be uncached due to a region restart, if nothing else, so must always include async recovery). But for this application it could only apply to loading memory or linkset data from notecards at the start of a tour, because the notecard won't be cached in the region after the one where it was last read. That notecard reading will be much, much faster when re-implemented with llGetNotecardLineSync().
• For this application, I'd still choose asynch access to the relatively vast shared store of Experience KVP,  now that it's not limited to Experience-enabled land (as I mentioned above).

All this said, though, I think it wise to avoid a proliferation of diverse automated vehicles on non-regular Mainland routes. As @CarlaWetter mentions above, it's one thing to encounter a few easily identified phantom vehicles travelling established routes known to all drivers, and quite another to need to dodge unfamiliar, potentially non-phantom vehicles with riders who aren't driving. I just don't think we need more of those unless they're fantastically more sophisticated at collision avoidance than anything I've seen on SL roads.

The personal autopilot project is closed forever. I have the technology to do it and the largest database of navpoints (basically all roads, railways and waterways on mainland except parts of Bellisseria) and can do this possible. However, given the risks involved and especially the fact that this technology can be used for massive griefer attacks, I will never release it. While some people might like it and asked me on various occasions to do it, the risk is too high. 

In the end, I made a few things that might help, like the 'Commander' HUD which help people find their way. I was surprised to see that using LinksetData you can store all roads (although simplified) in the memory of a single object, although the HUD requires plenty of time to find the way. I also made a small library of routes which can be shared. People can also upload new routes there. The library is inside the SL Geography Institute and people can get a free HUD from there. However, this HUD only helps you find your way, it does not drive your vehicle. 

As for a good avoidance method, I spent years trying this and always fails. Either you end-up with high-lag scripts or your vehicles end-up in nearby parcels or both. I gave-up the idea of avoidance as it is impossible. Others have tried this too and always failed.