Category: news

Mosey on down to Abbotts Aerodrome and pick up a copy of the new TerraSport III parachute.

Be sure to mosey. Non-moseyers may not purchase this parachute.

Want a free sub? Visit the underground submarine dock at Abbotts Aerodrome (elevator is beside the 737).

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.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve had many requests to install vendors at private airfields and skydiving facilities. So many, in fact, that I was unable to manage the network of vendors myself. It struck me that there had to be a better way to get my vendors out there.

Then… while I was in San Francisco at SLCC, someone gave a brilliant idea — give my vendors to people. Let someone else manage all the sales, and make sure that the vendor is up and running. In return, they’d get a cut of each sale. It seemed like a bright idea, but one that I kept procrastinating on, due to the complexities of supporting a network of vendors that are owned by other people.

To cut a long story short, I went ahead and built the vendor system and it has been in testing for weeks. It’s now ready to go live.

Here’s how it works: I supply you with the vendors. I can also provide kiosks, shops, hangars, and signs, if you need them. All you have to do is set them up and you have your own instant business. You get a cut of each sale, which is currently 10%. So for example, if you sell a L$1200 plane, you get L$120.

Naturally, you’ll earn more if you promote your shop with advertising and word-of-mouth. I’ll leave it up to you to work on the marketing side of things.

So, what I need are volunteers. I want aircraft enthusiasts and sales people. If you have a shop, you can add a Cubey Terra vendor. If you want to start your own business, I can provide everything you need (except the land) to get you started.

If you have a head for business and you want to try your hand at selling (arguably) the most popular skydiving gear and aircraft in Second Life, send me an instant message in-world and we’ll chat.