animats

Robin Loop clearly had a lot of Linden and mole effort put into making the road work well. Every region crossing has a patch to prevent sinking. The ones for ordinary region crossings seem to be OK. The loop has three double region crossings. All three are a little off, enough to kick light vehicles around. Here are the other two. Neumogen (8,246). Four-region intersection just left of the road Just enough of a bump in the patch prims to knock a bike a little off course. Oslar (15,249). This four-way region crossing has some very thin patch prims. The patch prims are both thin and not all in the same plane, so getting caught between them, or with them inside an avatar or vehicle, is possible. Then you're stuck in the ground. Virtual worlds do need occasional pothole repair. (I look at this so closely because I'm debugging various region crossing fixes. Some are in the viewer, some are in the bike, and some are in an attachment. When something goes wrong, I have to figure out exactly what happened, because it may be a bug in my own code.)

I don't worry about it too much. I've had one jerk, but that's life. My parcel in Vallone has a cafe and a bike workshop, obviously public. I don't have a residence in SL, just an office.

Kimika Ying's office in New Babbage. This is part of her workshop, which has working engines and machine tools. One of the best builders in New Babbage.

Here's my office in Second Life. That's where I do scripting and vehicle work.

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.

Gazebo/ROS, the robotics simulator, and my own system from the 1990s, Falling Bodies.

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.

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.

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.

Do you use only organic prims?

The advertising photo shows more water space between parcels than the seller provided.

That's useful. If you're authorized to query "Top Scripts", that should tell you where to look.

Wh Not so isolated. Ah, real estate ads.

Far too much script time being used there. Less than half the scripts finished during that time step. Not much network traffic. What's the location? SL needs a performance tool which shows which scripts on a sim or parcel are using the most time.

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.

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.

Is "LIFE Properties", which holds a huge amount of land full of placeholder buildings, separate from Linden Labs? Or is it just a name Linden Labs uses for real estate?

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

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.

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. 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. 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?)

SL still has moles? I thought that was dead. Where is there substantial LL-funded building going on?

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.

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.

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?

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.