Let them stand up: Fixing vehicle auto-return

[Extrude Ragu]

I talked to some of the leaders of the Drivers of SecondLife group the other day at the community exhibition event, who informed me that vehicle LI always counts towards region impact, regardless if sat on or not.

I will have to test it to be sure myself later. I do keep a small parcel on the mainland, so maybe I can  try filling it up with prims and then trying to drive a vehicle into it to see what happens.

 

Edited February 2 by Extrude Ragu
impact* not input

[Qie Niangao]

16 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Like, is it physical, is it in "vehicle status", etc.  

No, I just edited non-physical sat-upon assemblies around as if they were vehicles. I suppose that might be worth testing.

[Eowyn Southmoor]

7 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

I talked to some of the leaders of the Drivers of SecondLife group the other day at the community exhibition event, who informed me that vehicle LI always counts towards region impact, regardless if sat on or not.

That is incorrect. As has already been mentioned in this thread, when in a parcel, the moment you unsit from your vehicle, your vehicle is now simply another object, just like any other object that might be in the parcel, and therefore the LI of the vehicle gets included just the same way as any other object currently rezzed on the parcel.

If this wasn't the case, then every vehicle owner could simply keep 20 vehicles rezzed out at home without them running out of prims in their parcel.

The only exception  to that which possibly gets around it is if your vehicle is scripted to automatically turn temporary the moment you unsit from it.  I'm personally not aware of any vehicles scripted like that - if they are out there, then they are rare.

[Love Zhaoying]

17 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

I talked to some of the leaders of the Drivers of SecondLife group the other day at the community exhibition event, who informed me that vehicle LI always counts towards region impact, regardless if sat on or not.

I will have to test it to be sure myself later. I do keep a small parcel on the mainland, so maybe I can  try filling it up with prims and then trying to drive a vehicle into it to see what happens.

 

Did you discuss your proposition(s) with them, and did they have feedback?

[Extrude Ragu]

Honestly the easiest way to put this to bed is just going to be to test it. I'll do some experiments later and report my findings.

[Extrude Ragu]

12 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Did you discuss your proposition(s) with them, and did they have feedback?

I didn't discuss it in depth, just briefly mentioned. There was some interest, but the group primarily focuses on weekly rallies on set routes rather than exploration or lifestyle. For them the biggest issue they seemed to care about was sim crossings.

I did go on a rally with them. It was fun, sim crossing crashes were definitely a big problem, but funnily enough they all happened on corner crossings. I didn't have any issues going across regular crossings. I'm also not a fan of driving a car with keyboard. I can't wait for the upcoming gamepad support. 

[Love Zhaoying]

6 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

the group primarily focuses on weekly rallies on set routes rather than exploration or lifestyle.

I can see their potential responses, "Park and go shopping? Lolwhut"? 🙂 

 

[Qie Niangao]

54 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Like, is it physical, is it in "vehicle status", etc.  

I tested again, this time with a proper physical vehicle, using the same test parcels, and got the #1 results that I originally found for entry from within the region, this time also for entry from the adjacent region. Tried again with non-physical objects and got the #2 results (forced unseating and return) again when entering from the adjacent region.

[Theresa Tennyson]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

I can see their potential responses, "Park and go shopping? Lolwhut"? 🙂 

 

In RL I live in a college town where parking is limited and expensive. If I could keep my car in a parallel dimension and only get it out when I was going to be driving, I would.

[Love Zhaoying]

6 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

In RL I live in a college town where parking is limited and expensive. If I could keep my car in a parallel dimension and only get it out when I was going to be driving, I would.

At my college, the "on campus parking" was in huge lots far away.  "In-Town" parking wasn't bad.  (Small country town, big state uni)

[Rowan Amore]

6 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

vehicles couldn't have LI over 32,

Person over in the Land section looking for a place to rent so he can dock.his 400LI yacht.  😂

[PheebyKatz]

Sorry I don't speak perfectly, guys.

And sorry for implying that fearmongers might be less than honest when trying to express dominance on the forums, and get annoyed when others are imperfect, like me.

At least I have a valid excuse for using the Ignore feature now, because I'm sick of bullies talking smack, and I don't care to see any more of it for a while.

Shoving peppers up their flaming backsides only amuses me for so long.

Oh, but I'm still right. It's paranoid fantasy and fearmongering. Having a vehicle sit on the road for a few minutes, outside a rezz zone, does not magically allow it to spawn griefer prims. I'm sorry, but it doesn't work that way.

Prove me wrong sometime, if you think you can. We can go out on the road and you can demonstrate it to me, and I'll believe you. Until then, I won't. I'm not calling anyone any thing when I say someone isn't telling the truth, I'm just saying they need to think before they spew vomit at me.

If someone is atomically paranoid that everything in SL is just going to be used to grief them, maybe they should try being nicer than all of those people whose grief they fear. It makes for a lot less grief all around.

And if all a person can do is talk about how awful all of this is, and how all of us suck so bad, and how LL is a monstrous propaganda machine, and how everything is harmful and to be feared, maybe they should just log off.

Or are you scared of that, too?

At least I try to be helpful, and not just smear digital feces on everyone I meet. And if anyone is so superior that they can judge us all without being subject to the judgements of others, maybe they should show us how much better they are, instead of just telling us.

We're building a world and enjoying it together, what are you doing?

Edited February 3 by PheebyKatz

[Quartz Mole]

10 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

I talked to some of the leaders of the Drivers of SecondLife group the other day at the community exhibition event, who informed me that vehicle LI always counts towards region impact, regardless if sat on or not.

I will have to test it to be sure myself later. I do keep a small parcel on the mainland, so maybe I can  try filling it up with prims and then trying to drive a vehicle into it to see what happens.

 

They were correct.   When a vehicle has someone sitting on it, it's a bit like a temp-on-rez object, in that its LI is set against any spare LI on the region that's not being used for anything else.    

When Abnor and his team are calculating the LI budgets for Linden Homes regions, they have first to set aside enough LI to cover every parcel owner on the region choosing the house with the highest LI and then using all their parcel's LI for decorating.

They subtract that from the total region LI and then draw up a budget to cover the region infrastructure and decor -- roads, pathrways, rocks, trees, bushes, flowers and so on -- and also leave a margin to allow a small number of vehicles to pass through. 

In practice, of course, there will generally be more spare LI available for vehicles than the budget allows, since not everyone is going to choose the most expensive house and not everyone is going to max our their parcel LI,  but the total region LI of 22,500 is a hard limit, and it includes all vehicles on the region at any given time.

 

[Eowyn Southmoor]

10 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

I did go on a rally with them. It was fun, sim crossing crashes were definitely a big problem, but funnily enough they all happened on corner crossings. I didn't have any issues going across regular crossings.

Region crossings for most people are substantially better than they were several years ago.  Code changes LL made prior to the cloud uplift (and documented on these Forums if you want to search for it) now allow vehicles to cross with far less delay and rubber-banding, and more reliably as well.  Hundreds of people per week participate in those Grid Drives, with the group scheduled times being the most popular, often getting at least 30 all doing the drive at the same time.

The start can be a bit chaotic, but as drivers spread out things become much smoother.  In most cases, over 90% of people complete the drives without any region crossing issues, the only exception being when an occasional region is actually off-line.  However, there are always a few that may encounter some issues, but for the most part it comes down to their own limitations rather than the performance of the grid itself (poor internet, heavily scripted avatar, bad viewer settings etc).

The reason corner crossings are such an issue for many simply comes from most people not understanding how SL works, and therefore not knowing how to avoid potential problems.  A corner crossing is no different than a regular crossing, it just happens to be two regular region crossings set close together.  A person crosses from region A into region B, then only a second later attempts to cross into region C, whilst region B is still in the middle processing the previous crossing - that's when someone is likely to get unseated from their vehicle.

The correct approach is simply to slow right down, make the first crossing from A to B, then actually stop in region B for a few seconds, before accelerating again and crossing into region C.  The pause in the middle allows the simulator to catch up.  Most people don't bother slowing down, and that is the issue.  It also helps to have parcel lines enabled on your mini-map, and have the mini-map zoomed in, that way you can see exactly where the region corner is.  You can also hit Ctrl-Alt-Shift-P which will show property lines, including region borders, directly onto the ground itself  (although enabling this does reduce your FPS somewhat)

I know this is generally off-topic but I just wanted to dispel this myth that corner crossings are some kind of impassable thing in SL when in reality, they can be managed quite easily.  People also tend to complain about how many corner crossings there are on the SL mainland, but if you count them all up and compare them to how many normal crossings there are, you'll see that corner crossings are only a tiny percentage.

[Eowyn Southmoor]

23 minutes ago, Quartz Mole said:

They were correct.   When a vehicle has someone sitting on it, it's a bit like a temp-on-rez object, in that its LI is set against any spare LI on the region that's not being used for anything else.    

Not sure you read what they claimed Quartz or maybe it's phrased oddly.  They said that vehicle LI comes out of the region total regardless if it's sat on or not.

Whilst obviously every object in a region counts towards the region prim limit, I'm sure you know that when a vehicle is just rezzed out in a parcel, then it's LI also comes out of the total for that parcel as well - which was pertinent to earlier discussion about abandoned vehicles filling up parcels.

[Quartz Mole]

42 minutes ago, Eowyn Southmoor said:

Not sure you read what they claimed Quartz or maybe it's phrased oddly.  They said that vehicle LI comes out of the region total regardless if it's sat on or not.

Whilst obviously every object in a region counts towards the region prim limit, I'm sure you know that when a vehicle is just rezzed out in a parcel, then it's LI also comes out of the total for that parcel as well - which was pertinent to earlier discussion about abandoned vehicles filling up parcels.

Yes. When no one is sitting on the vehicle, it counts against the parcel limit.   When someone is sitting on it, it counts against any unused LI available on the region.   Either way it counts against the hard limit of of the region's total LI.    

[PheebyKatz]

On 1/29/2024 at 6:50 PM, Eowyn Southmoor said:

This is completely untrue. Most road vehicles in SL aren't using shells specifically made for SL, and so their land impact is generally quite high, well certainly higher than 32 anyway.  It's not that uncommon for the average car in SL to use at least 50 LI

Though unrelated to the idea of parking and going shopping, as mentioned by others, boats are also almost always more than 32 LI, especially sailboats, which can indeed run into several hundred LI.

These are common vehicles used by many, not vehicles that are "more of a decoration" as you've suggested.

"32" gets bandied about as a number because it is the physics limit for a vehicle before it stops working, so whilst a big sailboat might be in total 150 LI, only 32 (max) of that is actually physical. It still counts as 150 though when you "park" it.

See the building section here: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Limits

 

On this, I have a motorcycle I made that is 185-ish LI, because I did a lot of detail work on it and didn't cheat on the physics models. It's my pride and joy, and I designed it for SL, but it's still a showpiece, and I only ride it occasionally now, because, well, I'm proud of how cool it looks. I based it on actual RL bikes I've messed with, as a sometimes-pro mechanic. It has a plywood box as a root prim, and a mesh shell made to help keep it from snagging on stuff that are set to solid, and everything else is set to prim type/shape none.

The 185 LI aren't because of a million triangles being used for the brake cables, though; The bike is literally made with that many (172) distinct, and detailed, parts. The chain is made of individual links, and weighs in at only 2LI.

I also have my latest bike, which I uploaded at only 22 LI, and is missing a lot of the fancier details that my other bike has. I turn my LOD settings up to 3, and it looks fine from any distance, so the extra LI isn't missed one bit, and it takes less time to rezz. Sim crossings are also way easier. And like my previous bike, I optimized it for SL when I made it. While riding, I can see literally no real difference, save for the lack of saddlebags.

High LI or no, I really do wish more people actually did take the time to optimize their stuff with its purpose (to be used in SL) in mind, rather than just grabbing free stuff off websites and hitting the upload button until it finally works. I also wish more people realized that a vehicle doesn't need 100,000+ polygons to look smooth and show fine detail, if they're doing all the modeling themselves.

I think a lot of it just really comes down to whether they're making and uploading stuff because they want to give people cool stuff in SL that they can enjoy, or whether they just figure, "that looks good, I can make money off that."

Yeah, I'm blathering, I need coffee. But I mean it. Too many otherwise awesome vehicles suffer from uploaders who don't know how to decimate some geometry.

And just to ease everyone's minds, I've practiced enough that now I can (almost) drive across a whole region without going through anyone's house. I thought you'd all appreciate that. Nice living room decor, by the way.

Edited February 3 by PheebyKatz

[Qie Niangao]

5 hours ago, Quartz Mole said:

Yes. When no one is sitting on the vehicle, it counts against the parcel limit.   When someone is sitting on it, it counts against any unused LI available on the region.   Either way it counts against the hard limit of of the region's total LI.    

There may be different "region" capacities in discussion here, though. There's a hard limit of the region's total 22,500 LI that the simulation simply won't violate, and that entire amount is allocated across all the parcels in the region automatically, proportional to size. It's good region design to reserve some spare parcel capacity on some parcels so the total still-available LI across all parcels will be enough to support some vehicles. On regions with prim bonuses, it's more challenging because the estate-controlled parcels must also reserve enough that resident's parcels can all use their bonus LI and still have enough to spare for a few sat-upon or selected objects that may temporarily exceed the parcel limits where they're currently located.

The other "region capacity" is how About Land shows the sum of all parcel capacities for an owner. If an owner has just one parcel in a region, that parcel's capacity is the owner's region capacity there. This owner-specific region capacity matters because it's what determines the rezzing limits on the owner's land—and that's how vehicles can affect landowners, as discussed in this thread. While a sat-upon object (a "vehicle") is on a parcel, its land impact is allocated to that parcel owner's region capacity. It may exceed that capacity, and that excess comes from the "spare" across the whole region, but regardless, while the vehicle is there, its LI is deducted from that landowner's available region capacity, and will prevent rezzing above that unused amount.

What some of us didn't realize until this thread is that this applies even while someone is sitting on the vehicle: the vehicle's LI is counted against that landowner's region capacity, not the momentary spare region capacity across all parcels.

[PheebyKatz]

3 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

What some of us didn't realize until this thread is that this applies even while someone is sitting on the vehicle: the vehicle's LI is counted against that landowner's region capacity, not the momentary spare region capacity across all parcels.

This means that in some cases, when a person hits a sim crossing and ends up in someone's yard because they got rubberbanded, and their vehicle disappears as the security says hey, what are you doing in my yard, it could very well be that the vehicle simply exceeded the parcel prim count limit, and not that it's a vicious landowner somehow kicking people off their ride and throwing it away.

*raises eyebrow like Spock*

Fascinating.

Edited February 3 by PheebyKatz

[Love Zhaoying]

7 minutes ago, PheebyKatz said:

it could very well be that the vehicle simply exceeded the parcel prim count limit, and not that it's a vicious landowner somehow kicking people off their ride and throwing it away.

*raises eyebrow like Spock*

Fascinating.

Wow! 

I guess if there is no "cannot enter the parcel because it is full" message for that possibility, it could be "a good thing" since that message could cause confusion and give people ideas for griefing..

But also, if someone complains about their vehicle not entering the parcel (and there is no "parcel full message"), a landowner could just blame "SL region crossings"..

Cool! Uncertain behavior is Uncertain!

 

[PheebyKatz]

9 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Wow! 

I guess if there is no "cannot enter the parcel because it is full" message for that possibility, it could be "a good thing" since that message could cause confusion and give people ideas for griefing..

But also, if someone complains about their vehicle not entering the parcel (and there is no "parcel full message"), a landowner could just blame "SL region crossings"..

Cool! Uncertain behavior is Uncertain!

 

I had a lady message me all kinds of nasty stuff once, out of the blue, and I had no idea where we met. I found out later she lived by a sim crossing.

I know, I've said myself that if you hate planes you shouldn't live by the airport, but I know that what a lot of people might see as just a bad sim crossing could be taken as careless, thoughtless, bad drivers (or griefers, trolls) by people who don't drive and don't know what it's like.

I also feel that more drivers need to know how to cross sim borders without ending up in people's bathrooms. Sure, sometimes it can't be helped, you'll get jerked sideways and camera goes wonky anyway, but how you drive makes a huge difference. Seriously.

Even just using a lower gear can help; it sucks that so many vehicles go from 0 to a gazillion right out of the box. Not everyone takes their vespa out on a drag racing track. I mean, I do, but yeah.

Edited February 3 by PheebyKatz

[Qie Niangao]

2 hours ago, PheebyKatz said:

This means that in some cases, when a person hits a sim crossing and ends up in someone's yard because they got rubberbanded, and their vehicle disappears as the security says hey, what are you doing in my yard, it could very well be that the vehicle simply exceeded the parcel prim count limit, and not that it's a vicious landowner somehow kicking people off their ride and throwing it away.

My little tests indicated that this indeed would happen crossing regions into an overfull parcel with a non-physical vehicle, but they could stay seated on a physical vehicle (and if they stood the vehicle would get returned to their lost+found).

Edited February 3 by Qie Niangao
repeat that the NPV return is when crossing regions

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

My little tests indicated that this indeed would happen crossing regions into an overfull parcel with a non-physical vehicle, but they could stay seated on a physical vehicle (and if they stood the vehicle would get returned to their lost+found).

I forgot that you can have "non-physical vehicles"!

 

[Adamburp Adamczyk]

worth mentioning, that if you think an area of Linden Land has an unsuitable auto return timer, you can always ask via ticket to get this reviewed.

 

I've had varying success with this over the years of hassling them, I mean asking them.

 

One of my "projects" a few years ago was getting more rezz zones added to the roads, during this I also flagged a few with very short timers.  Some were amended, others left "as -is".

 

 

Edited February 3 by Adamburp Adamczyk

[Extrude Ragu]

So given what Quartz Mole is saying, we know a vehicle always counts towards Region LI no matter what -But - driven vehicles don't count towards Parcel LI and are instead treated like a temp on rez object.

I think it makes sense that by and large an unattended vehicle counts towards parcel LI. Nobody is using it. It's a decoration. But standing up on your boat to walk across the deck is not really the same in practical terms - You're still using your boat, even if you're not actually sat on it at the moment.

With that in mind I think it makes sense to break this into two separate features:-

Feature 1: Let avatars stand on/in vehicles:

If we're actually stood on top of/inside the vehicle, count this the same as though we were driving it. This allows walking around on the decks of boats, interiors of planes etc. It doesn't make sense to automatically de-rez the vehicle in this scenario, from a game design point of view. After all, the vehicle is still being attended and you are still using it.

Feature 2: (Optional) Park and explore setting for parcel owners.

If we wander away from the vehicle, now it counts towards Parcel LI the same as a regular object and becomes subject to auto-return like normal, but we add a new opt-in park and explore feature that parcel owners can choose to turn on and set the distance an avatar can explore away from their last vehicle. This grants an exemption from auto-return for vehicles where the driver/passengers are within a set exploration distance. This gives parcel owners the ability to provide the facility of parking to residents so long as the resident remains within the distance specified in parcel settings to the vehicle. This would be good for enabling a new mode of mainland usage where residents shop and explore that was previously not very practical.