It’s the end of an era in Second Life. I am forced to ground my autopiloted blimps, along with the cargo planes, jets, and light planes. I had hoped to keep all of my AI aircraft flying out of Abbotts Aerodrome, but it’s just no longer feasible.
What led me to this? At first, Linden Lab introduced a small change to how a parcel of land handled incoming objects — if the land was already full, the object would be returned with an error message. That immediately swamped my email inbox with forwarded error messages — hundreds of them per day — and filled my inventory with returned copies of various AI aircraft.
But… I worked around that by making the AI aircraft into “temporary” objects. They could still fly over full land, once Linden Lab had removed the error message for temp objects. So the airships flew again.
Then Linden Lab introduced a new option for landowners — the ability to prevent objects from entering their parcel. At first, it seemed like a brilliant idea to me. Nobody could litter your home while you’re offline or shoot at you from your neighbour’s land. It could be a fantastic peace-keeping tool that thwarts malicious, gun-toting kids.
It’s a fantastic “anti-griefing” tool, but the no-object-entry option has a serious side-effect on all vehicles. Try this: Hop onto one of my blimps that depart from Abbotts. Eventually, you will get dumped unceremoniously to the ground as you hit parcels that don’t permit object entry. You may even have to restart SL to continue. No-object-entry parcels are like invisible, impassible walls that reach kilometers into the sky. If you could somehow make these walls visible, you could look across the mainland and see nothing but a forest of towering barriers.
What happens now? It used to be possible to fly across the mainland, but now we can fly only in special areas, like private islands and the six vehicle sims (Balance, Fame, etc). Now I’ll have to stop my automated flights — the airships, light planes, the cargo planes — because I’ll never know if the route will remain viable or if a landowner will block flyovers. Now we have to re-think plans for events like balloon races between airports. We have to give up flying between airports entirely.
I hope Linden Lab will reconsider the design decisions that have led us to this point.
- We need to keep the skies open for air travel — no more booting people from aircraft for flying into invisible barriers.
- We need to see significant reduction of border-crossing glitches. The situation has deteriorated badly over the last year or so.
- We need to see banlines on the minimap, so that we can avoid them instead of getting ejected or crashing or being thrown off-world.
- We need to see a significant improvement in the handling of physics objects — less time dilation, fewer sim crashes. Even the dedicated vehicle sims can barely handle more than a couple of vehicles at a time.
I hadn’t intended to post a manifesto here, but I have to say something. It is incredibly disheartening to finish a new aircraft — weeks of effort — then crash out of SL on its first flight because I hit some kind of invisible barrier.
I just want us to fly across SL the way we used to. I want to log into SL without an avalanche of error messages that caps my IMs. I want aircraft in SL to be fun and reliable everywhere again — not just in private sims. Things have to improve soon, or there won’t be much left to do in SL but stand around and chat about how laggy things are.