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animats

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Posts posted by animats

  1. If you're a paid member, you can send in a support ticket and ask that an abandoned parcel be auctioned off. I've done that and bought a parcel. That's probably where most of the abandoned parcel auctions come from, which implies someone wanted that parcel.

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  2. Yes, that's it. I'd been looking in wireframe, and they don't show there when "highlight transparent" is not on. Some mole was trying to patch the region crossing, but they didn't get it right.

    One of my planned projects is to build an inspection truck which drives around and finds road problems like this. Then make it self-driving and log the results to a database.

  3. There's something strange at the point where Robin Loop crosses from Juanita to Grote. Vehicles get knocked off the road at the region crossing. There are some nearby encroachments involving a private parking lot, but I can't see the problem even in wireframe mode. Go to http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Juanita/150/15/85 and head southeast in the left lane of Robin Loop to see this. This may be new; I ride around Robin Loop regularly and haven't hit this before. I've tried different motorcycles and Firestorm versions, and it's the same every time. Logging out doesn't affect it. Even moving at very slow speed, the problem appears. It's a small bump, not a solid wall; going fast enough will get through it. That's the reverse of most region crossing problems.

    Sinking at a region crossing is a general problem and well understood, but this is something else. The last time I hit something like this, someone had put an invisible prim across a road.

  4. 21 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

    It's extremely simple. There's an LSL function that can get the keys of all avatars in a sim - llGetAgentList - and another LSL function to send an IM to an avatar's key.

    That's throttled, but the throttle level is high: "All object IM's are throttled at a maximum of 2500 per 30mins, per owner, per region in a rolling window. this includes IM's sent after the throttle is in place". Maybe that level should be much lower. Or there should be also be a limit of the number of unique destinations per minute.

    New avatars might start out with a limit of maybe 3 destinations in 30 seconds, and that increases with avatar age and/or paid account. It should decrease with the number of people who block that sender.

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  5. More technical stuff.

    I commented previously that network lag can cause region crossing failures. I now have more precise tests for that.

    Network lag of 1000ms (1 second, lag meter turns red) will produce a quick fail at a double region crossing. It may take a few tries,
    but a few minutes of driving in a circle around a 4-way region crossing seems to trigger it consistently. Even in an empty sandbox.

    I'm on Linux (Ubuntu 16.04LTS), and Linux has a command for introducing network lag for test purposes. The shell command

    sudo tc qdisc add dev eth0 root netem delay 1000ms

    adds 1000ms of delay to every packet, and the next double region crossing on a vehicle fails quickly. Even in a quiet sandbox. Failure means the
    avatar ends up in the air, can't unsit, and the next teleport produces locations such as "Vallone (-156721, -71944, 100)"

    You turn this mode off with

    sudo tc qdisc del dev eth0 root

     which stops the lag, and region crossings start working again.

    It takes a lot of lag to trigger this. 500ms (viewer network lag meter goes yellow) won't do it, but 1000ms (network lag meter goes red) will. Most SL functions can tolerate a 1000ms lag; they just become sluggish. But not region crossings.

    This is pure packet delay. No packet loss, no reordering. I've tried forcing packet re-ordering; that doesn't seem to cause trouble.  Basic SL operations still work with 1000ms delay; you can walk around, but it will take a second or two for any response to controls. Avatar-alone region crossings still work. But not double region crossings with vehicles.

    In regular usage, a 1000ms delay is unusual but possible during moments of high network load. If you watch the viewer's network load meter, you may see it flash red occasionally, especially on slow connections. If one of those slow network moments happens to coincide with a double vehicle region crossing, you're toast.

    I'm trying to diagnose the problem well enough that LL can fix it. Their resources are limited, they admit. This bug has been outstanding for years because it was hard to reproduce. Now it's easy to reproduce in a controlled test situation. This makes it a repeatable, testable bug. Such bugs are fixable.

  6. I've seen encroachments into roads, but not often. I've seen Linden roads that encroach on private land. The latter is really annoying when the private land has a ban line.  You can lose a vehicle while on a Linden road with a guard rail.

    A common encroachment in Kama City is to fill in the 4m x 8m hole at each corner of each intersection. The buyable parcels don't include that, probably so that the buyable areas are multiples of 512 m^2.. Sometimes the moles put a big flower box or a tree there, but often it's just bare ground. The ground is lower than the sidewalks, so something is needed to bring it up to sidewalk level. Just extending a pavement slab is most common, but I've seen landscaping, big rocks, and a fountain used as space fillers.

    The most impressive encroachment I've seen is one waterside owner who put an entire reef with a lighthouse off the edge of the world. Well off the edge of the world - 20-30 meters.  It's off one of those beachfronts which goes right up to the edge of the world.  The result looks like a good boating channel, but it's not traversable.

    Overrunning your parcel with a building is kind of tacky.

  7. 4 hours ago, Xiija said:

    I've set up repeaters to carry messages between sims and as long as all sims are contiguous it should work . The repeaters are placed about 5mfrom the sim boarder, and about 10 meters from each other, then they shout the msg over the border  to the next sim's repeater, and it gets region-said thru the sim to repeaters on the next boarder, which shout it on... etc.

    I could see that for the SLRR, with microwave relay towers at each sim boundary along the right of way. Railroads once did that. microwavetower.jpg.d35a75e3dbe2bd80e9d1cfd9e540e8b2.jpg

    It would be amusing if someone set up a system of cell towers in SL, allowing grid-wide in-world communications for a small monthly service charge. No service to islands, though.

  8. 3 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

    Most of the Linden routes do indeed allow object entry, but Zindra is conspicuously different. Some of the Kama City sims were changed to permit it (specifically to allow unmanned Yavapods to circle some of those regions) but for example the road bordering Vallone on the north is no-object-entry on the Selano Beach East side, as is the case for the majority of Zindra.

    I believe object entry to roads and water of the Horizons regions (attached to Zindra) are similarly restricted.

    This probably doesn't substantially matter to your project, but just FYI in case it comes up.

    Yes, I just looked. Half that road allows object entry, and the other half doesn't.

    Kama City's road construction is strange. A region crossing in the center of every street, of course. Even stranger is how intersections are put together. Try de-rendering one layer by layer. There are three circular translucent objects below pavement level which cross region boundaries but don't seem to do anything. It's not clear whether someone was trying to fix the "sinking into the ground" problem incorrectly, or had something else in mind.

  9. Using RLV/RLVa for this is essentially stupid... many of SL's inhabitants do not use either, and many do not use a viewer that supports either. SMART thing would be to use EXPERIENCE code, which can sit an avatar without RLV, even in the Official SL Inferiority Viewer.

    Only on land enabled for that experience. There are some LL-sponsored grid-wide experiences, but LL had to enable that. In the early stages of this, RLV seems to be the way to go. Or having the avatar wear an attachment which uses llTeleportAgent.

     

    Why the hell are you using llShout? You should be using llRegionSayTo, which isn't range limited, and runs fractionally faster too ( no range checks to execute).

    llRegionSayTo is limited to the current region. llShout can cross a region boundary. This problem always involves at least two regions, obviously.

     

    Actually, a prim vehicle entering a parcel is considered to be "object entry" regardless of it having an avatar sat on it, it's a common cause of vehicle failure, you are flying along, you cross a parcel boundary,  but your vehicle can't get in and you go through the windscreen or over the handlebars... Hehehe...

    A few places are set up to have this problem. Go to sandbox Bricker.   This is a four-sim Linden sandbox. (Adult, paid, usually empty) Rez a vehicle. Drive it across a region boundary. Get out of the vehicle. The vehicle will disappear and be auto-returned. If you get out in the original region, the vehicle stays around.sandboxbricker.png.c7551c84c22164d1d6bb87df82883ea3.png

    Sandbox Bricker.  Object entry for Everyone is OFF. But Build for everyone is ON. Vehicle disappears after crossing a region boundary and driver gets off. This is an unusual permission combination.

    sandboxastutula.thumb.png.1040f53b709f341b6f3420f260bcd5f2.png

    Sandbox Astutula (General, non-paid. 4 regions). Object entry for everyone is ON. Vehicle stays around after crossing a region boundary and driver gets off. That's reasonable for a sandbox.

    Roads are usually Build OFF, Object entry ON, which doesn't create this problem. It's mostly a limitation of that particular sandbox. It may be for griefing protection.

     

    Another reason NOT to use RLV, the need for an extra attachment. And let's not even start on the fact that some people will ALREADY be wearing a relay and there will be conflicts.

    That's what channels are for.

    (Does this person even program?)

  10. 5 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

    Rather than using an external server you could look into Object to object HTTP Communication although, as it mentions on that page

    That's a good idea. But at the moment the scripts really need to communicate, one party just did a region crossing, and the other didn't. Or worse, at a double region crossing, both parties did region crossings, but not in sync. So communications have broken and are hard to reestablish.

    How the SLRR does communications is insane. They have messenger prims, green spheres at 1000m, zooming around passing messages. That they went that far indicates how hard this is.

  11. 5 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

    You might try wearing a HUD that always sends your vehicle a quick ping message by llRegionSay (or llRegionSayTo) whenever you cross a region boundary.  If the vehicle responds, then it has clearly made it across the boundary with you.  If not, have the HUD issue its error message.

    Yes. I've been thinking about doing more in an attachment and less in the vehicle. Ideally, the attachment would notice that the avatar was no longer seated properly, but hadn't explicitly done an unsit. Then it would teleport the avatar to the vehicle's current location and re-seat it, without any help from the vehicle. The problem is finding the vehicle from the attachment. In the half-unsit situation at a failed region crossing, the avatar is still a child prim of the vehicle, but the vehicle is no longer the root prim of the avatar. This inconsistent state occurs briefly at every region crossing. When a crossing goes bad, it persists. In that state, the avatar can't find the vehicle.

  12. As part of my work on workarounds for region crossing problems, I need for a vehicle script to be able to talk to seated avatars during the semi-broken condition of a half-unsit, where a region crossing has failed. I want to tell the avatar to teleport itself back to the vehicle. This works when vehicle and avatar extension can communicate. The communication is a problem:

    • llShout will work up to 100m across region boundaries, but sometimes the avatar is more than 100m from the vehicle. Seldom if ever more than a few hundred meters, though.
    • llEmail has a lot of open bugs dated back to 2005. Discussions consider it broken.
    • llTeleportAgent will work if the avatar is the owner of the vehicle. Otherwise not.
    • llInstantMessage can't talk to an object.
    • llRegionSayTo is only useful within a region.
    • llMessageLinked can't talk to an attachment (and might not work when avatar and vehicle are in different regions, which is what this is all about)
    • Setting up an external server for HTTP communication is a bit much. This isn't some big coordinated system under one owner.

    Have I missed anything?

  13. Here's a potential feature for the viewer. At present, if a sim has to be displayed, but it's outside the draw distance, it displays as water. That always looks strange.

    A first step would be to display the texture from the world map. That lets you see roughly what's out there.

    But that's flat. So a second step would be to use the ground elevation data (which is only 64x64 for an entire sim) and texture the world map onto that. Then you could see mountains in the distance. Much like Google Earth at low level of detail.

    Then, when you were flying a plane, you'd be able to see the airport and runway.  You could see for miles. Like looking at the world map, but in perspective and relief. The world would feel bigger.

    This could be done entirely in Firestorm, without any help from Linden Labs.

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