Baloo Uriza

I suggest renaming the San Fransisco sims to the original sims, since that's a more apt description. Also, I'm considering starting a project in the style and spirit of OpenStreetMap using the same toolchain they use, in an effort to more effectively map the entire mainland and beyond as residents care to contribute. Stay posted.

Qie Niangao wrote: This may be restating the obvious, but in case there's any confusion: the Bay City SLRR (running north from the staion) is a different system from the trolleys (which run east and west on route 66). Unless I'm mistaken, that's never been more than a test track for the LDPW's latest ROW build parts.

Marianne McCann wrote: (I might suggest some of this discussion on the routes, etc. could make a good separate thread in the mainland board, aside from the discussion of the automated vehicles) Get the ball rolling and I'll be happy to chime in. Marianne McCann wrote: As far as SLRR on the Northern coast, yes there is the Bay City short line, from Inner Harbor (Bay City Station) to Manyiminya. It's not a long line, but it is there. Like the Nova Albion Streetcar, the Bay City Streetcar runs on trackage that is mutually incompatible with the rest of the SLRR system, and both streetcar lines are mutually incompatible with each other. Solving the Nova Albion problem has been tricky for the LDPW as the original Linden who designed it died in a traffic accident in Dallas back in 2007 as I understand it.

Qie Niangao wrote: Granted, the ones to which I refer are phantom so they don't really interfere with other rail traffic. (It's not ideal for immersion to ride through other trains, but the SLRR tracks simply don't have enough turn-out capacity to do much about it, regardless of how sophisticated the switching and sensing, and IMHO the practice of moving one unit off the track onto blank right-of-way is not a heck of a lot more compelling than phantom trains simply passing through each other.) There's plenty of turnout capacity if everyone actually bothers with the blocking signals and switches. The avatar-operated trains are consistently good about this...

Cerise wrote: The informatin is still available in Help>About, and a simple notifier can be made with llGetEnv and CHANGED_REGION, for the few people who really need to know about region changes all the time. I presume the fix you're refering to is going to be something you have to explicitly apply, or is it the new default?

I do hope this becomes a toggle; personally I can understand how people may find these messages annoying. On the other hand, it's nice to be able to have some idea what's going on in the underlying system.

Qie Niangao wrote: Just in passing, I don't think the VRC* really had much to do with that. As I understand the history, the Linden trains on the SLRR fell victim to Havoc 4, and were removed because the bleeping things kept flying off the tracks. They could surely be replaced now if desired, but I very much doubt that LDPW would ever put their own automated trains on the SLRR again. That was a factor, and LDPW removed the trains for a while because of that. However, the LDPW blog mentioned that the moles assigned to the SLRR were working on fixing the automated trains, that's when the VRC got involved in opposition. Ultimately SLRR capitulated to being an exclusively ROW-maintenance division of the LDPW. This worked to everyone's advantage on the railway: SLRR now focuses their work with resident groups to add switches, crossings and spurs as needed to attach to privately-owned railway connections. Qie Niangao wrote: Others have already mentioned that the Bay City water trolleys are in operation; I rode one yesterday. It may be worth noting that both the Route 66 trolleys and water trolleys in Bay City operate by waypoint navigation, not by discovering routes by examining parcel properties as do AnnMarie's vehicles. (The latter is a very much more difficult problem.) Speaking of SL 66, I think that really counts as a Planning FAIL on LDPW's part, though not one that could have been readily anticipated. The highway ends at Ahern Village and doesn't pick up again until Noyo due to sandboxes and Ahern itself (though a big roundabout around the outside edge of the Welcome Area and a sun-baked highway across the roughly five kilometer gap between Ahern and Noyo through the sandboxes would be pretty nifty...the waterways around Noyo would require some interesting and massive bridges, though. On the other hand, the ability to drive an approximately 20 kilometer route across Sansara would be pretty epic. Before they put in guard rails on the hairpin going westbound 66 into the Noyo Rez Area, if you got enough speed, it was possible to jump off the embankment on the outer side of the hairpin and into the sandboxes in a massive jump that makes The Dukes of Hazzard look like Matchbox cars, and just free-drive across the sandbox desert and around the outside of Ahern to get back to the highway. The trip wasn't exactly possible eastbound, though. SL 50 could use some consistent signage once it enters Shermerville...it splits into 50N and 50S, both running perpendicular to the 50 that runs into 66, without so much as a hint of signage. Qie Niangao wrote: Holocluck asserts that "If anyone should be making scheduled vehicles on Mainland, it's the moles or a special project in close cooperation with LDPW." But I don't think the LDPW does that. Do we think they officially blessed Cubey Terra's flights, or Qu Qi's ferries across ANWR and between the SLRR terminals? Just a point of clarification, the SLRR doesn't operate on the northern coast, just the Bay City Streetcar, and the Nova Albion Streetcar (which I understand there may be plans to connect the two systems and get the NASC running again). The line that runs on the northern coast is the privately owned Great Second Life Railway.

Marianne McCann wrote: That would be in error. There is an automated water trolley in the center of both the east and west side that serves the very platforms you speak of. These do automatically lift the drawbridges on their route. Why, here's a picture of one of the trolleys doing just that: http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?id=275631 Oh, well, I stand pleasantly corrected, then! Though I think my point about the BC canals being a little more suited for random stumbling to be valid since the vehicles in question don't try to eggregiously violate gravity.

Holocluck Henly wrote: Hello Baloo - when you refer to the rails, do you mean these same random type vehicles that push us around, shoot at us, and solicit product, or the Trolleys? Both.

I like this idea, especially if it flies apart and cleans up after itself a-la the F-bomb.

* Originally there was no way to stop them going on SLRR, the railroads had the same parcel names as regular roads. That has now been corrected. I've debugged my TRANSFORMER script and gradually vehicles will be able to morph between road, railcars and boats as needed. Space on the SLRR is too limited for any unmanned vehicle traffic, which is why as rail travel increased, LDPW stopped working on automated trains and ultimately removed them from service. The currently operating automated trains are generally disruptive to most railfans, and discourage the rail community from operating as the line is designed to, thanks to the automated trains just plain ignoring signals and other traffic. Sure, they're set phantom, but that doesn't excuse the behavior given the nature of a railroad versus a road or waterway. This problem with automated vehicles is ultimately what the VRC used to convince LDPW to stop with the Linden automated trains on the SLRR. It would be a very good idea to avoid running automated trains on the SLRR except for occasional testing purposes under direct progammer supervision until they're able to handle signals and switches in a manner that other railway users expect. That said, the boat canals in Bay City have ferry platforms in the canals, which may have one time or in the future be served by LDPW boats, but are currently unused. Would be neat to see boat traffic lift the drawbridges now and then, and the high canal walls would help prevent boats from running into other parcels. AnnMarie Otoole wrote: * The number and distribution is strictly controlled. All vehicles are tracked. The goal is one every 10 minutes average but due to random travel sometimes you get more than one, sometimes none for over an hour. * True the drivers are drunk but that's all I can hire. 18 months work in that script and at this stage most of the problems are limitations in the physics engine response time. * True the "scripting is not that great" but so far no one has done better, or even come close. Ethics would suggest under these circumstances, a better option would be to use some form of garage that someone can spawn a vehicle from on demand, similar to how the Kama City Metropolitan Transit Authority in Zindra handles the overhead trams, while reducing the frequency of automatically spawned vehicles substantially. I realize that you're all about driving the numbers as high as possible, but I believe most users of the Linden right of ways are of the opinion that automated vehicles in excess of resident-operated vehicles, particulalry when they have difficulty staying in their lane and disregard accepted conventions at intersections, are considered harmful. I suggest at each of the rez zones you have, the frequency of vehicles rezzed should never (except when a vehicle is explicitly requested from a button push at the rez site) exceed (n / t) / 2 where n is the number of avatars that pass it over a given interval of t, which should be a long enough period of time to get a representative sample (such as one day or one week). This is likely quite a bit more infrequent than the current spawn interval but is probably more in line with the number of vehicles required for single-occupancy coverage and public visibility, without being so frequent as to be a nuisance to landowners with a frontage and other road users. Unrelated to this particular conversation, I should apologize for the ugliness of the above formula, for some reason this website barfs on MathML and doesn't consider it to be valid. Hey, Lithium: Web Standards: Do YOU speak it??

You need to be in the directory you unpacked the tarball to for that to work.

I'm lukewarm to them. I see the value, but the frequency of automated vehicles, and the ability of these vehicles to track properly or handle obstructions leaves something to be desired. They're fairly disruptive on the rail lines, even if they're not physical, since they interfere with prototypical operation by resident railfans.

Ban lines prevent entry, not exit, and even then, not for people on the exception list (like the owner).

I could be wrong, but I've interpreted anything past the height of banline effectiveness to be communal Linden airspace, as people piloting air vehicles are generally unable to see property lines at ground level and are usually just passing through at a relatively high rate of speed.

I like what he's wearing...curious where you can get some decent indian garb.

Does that also include unanswered questions in the SL Answers, and new forum threads?

Did anyone look at the actions.....I see MAP on there! Are we going back to 2006-2007 when anyone could map you at any time. First, you're thinking earlier than that even. Second, I doubt they're going back to that, it's pretty common in software mockups to show everything just to get an idea what it's going to look like with everything on it.

What you say makes a lot of sense, Baloo, and in fact that's what I'm hoping will protect the V1-class viewers, or at least their access to THIS world. (Most competing worlds are smart enough not to bite the hand that feeds them.) I'm not so quick to consider malice a forethought when something can be readily explained by either stupidity or They Just Didn't Care. Could also be an example of the maxim of proprietary software in general if you look solely at the server software and support it receives as compared to OpenSimulator: "You can get a worse product, but it will cost you more." We can't be sure that some genius at LL, either in management or in software "development", won't decide tomorrow that teleporting is an unnecessary feature, or somehow threatens LL's new business model -- and do away with it. Am I the only one who liked the telehub concept for teleportation? Really helped along the idea of railways and highways as something practical for something other than transportation nerds, and drew the design of a pretty large radius together having that kind of centerpiece.

Shannon, while I devoutly hope you're wrong about LL killing the V1-class viewers, I am very much afraid it will happen. Fear not. The developer community is still quite entrenched in that codebase, to the degree of cherry picking the good stuff from newer codebases and backporting it. It'll be a cold day in hell before the Lindens burn the legit developers.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you just look at the Z coordinate of your present location to find your altitude?

Thats happened with privacy setting maxed.

As many have found out, to their dismay, it's damned hard to extricate yourself from the web of privacy violations (e.g. personal info passed to "app" developers, with no guarantee that they won't sell it), and nearly impossible to cancel your Facebook account, unless you have special knowledge not available to the common user. It's not that hard to block an app, though I'll agree that deleting a Facebook account tends to be problematic. It's kinda like saying that you have to understand the Windows Registry if you want to stop Microsoft from forwarding your personal emails on your home computer to your boss at work. (They don't, fortunately.) Show us the source code and prove that they don't. As for "There's plenty of RL companies in SL" -- yeah, a few, but so what? The majority of RL companies would take a dim view of an employee capering about dressed as, say, a lesbian feline dominatrix, or a Gorean tyrant with slave girls, or a homicidal maniac with automatic weapons in both hands. Perhaps they shouldn't, but the reality is that HR departments scrutinize social media now. So maybe, just maybe, they should use an alt for that sort of thing if they're so concerned. It's not like throwaway email accounts don't exist. Gmail and Hotmail are good sources. And guess what, SL just became Social Media. Welcome to 2002. The rest of us are in 2011. Real people are losing real jobs.

is one of the first things most employers look at when you apply for a job. If youre SL is linked in any way to your facebook an employer wont touch you. if you have a job already allot fo companies will fire you for it. especially if you have a very consienscious employer or you work for a government agency. IBM expects you to use SL. To the point where IBM Beaverton is nearly vacant on any given day because everyone's telecommuting via SL. There's plenty of RL companies in SL. My employer knows I'm in SL and knew that prior to hiring me. Canadian Customs does their training in SL.

oh you dont think so? tell that to the people that HAVE lost their jobs becuase of what got linked to thier facebook accounts... Sounds like some people need to learn to go through their FB security settings.