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What’s happening on Level 3?

Visitors to Abbotts Aerodrome will notice some dramatic changes to the tower’s Level 3. Since the tower’s construction, that level has been for offices (in other words, completely useless). Starting today, we are tearing out walls, installing crash barriers, and constructing a shiny new indoor air-race course.

What?? Air races… indoors?? That’s right! Tiny airplanes, each carrying a pilot, will tear around the mini track to beat the clock. Picture indoor mini go-karts that fly. By scaling down the size and speed of the planes, the indoor space feels to the pilots like a full-size race course.

Of course, visitors to the 2008 Relay for Life event will probably remember our tiny racetrack at the Relay’s Flying Aces team build, where we had a little racing oval with tiny biplanes. That worked with great success, and was roughly half the size of Level 3.

Soon I hope to hold weekly races. If those prove popular, we can maybe look at holding a trophy series.

But that’s all blue-sky right now. In the meantime, drop by Abbotts and check out our progress on the Level 3 track.

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Fruit Islanders fill the sky with hot air balloons

Yesterday the residents of the Fruit Islands estate in Second Life celebrated the re-opening of their sim, “Mango“, by launching an enormous balloon rally. Flying mostly the (truly awesome) Cirrus balloons, pilots led their airborne flotilla around dozens of fruit-named tropical islands.

But even private estates have problems with private security, apparently. At one point, a few balloonists found themselves trapped between two flanking ban lines and unable to escape, even though they were all Fruit Islanders themselves, which led to shouts of “ban lines suck!”

Besides that small glitch, the flight went well — I was happy to see so many of my balloons in the air!

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Stingray in beta testing

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQVthNe7Qt4]

It’s official. Today the Terra Stingray enters final beta testing, in which a crack team of testers puts the plane through its paces and uncovers those little bugs that I missed in development. Since I last blogged about the Stingray, I added five more paint schemes, a selection of tail decals, a passenger seat, a glowy heads-up display, as well as a few other less visible details.

I don’t think I’ll release Stingray this weekend, since this weekend is the annual SL Relay for Life event. The folks at SLRFL are raising hundreds of thousands for The American Cancer Society (that’s US dollars, too!), so keep an eye on the official Linden blog and the SLRFL site for info about that event.

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Terra Combat System is now open source

What’s the single most common question that aircraft makers ask me about the Terra Combat System? “Does it do bombs and missiles?”

The answer is, not yet. But now is your chance to do something about that. As of today, I’m releasing the TCS source to the public under a CC license. This means that you can take TCS — the long-established sensor-based combat standard — and make it better. Adapt it to your bombs, missiles, mines, exploding penguins… whatever.

In return, all you have to do is share your updates with everyone. (I’ll provide a link to a place to do that shortly.)

Let’s work together to make TCS even better, and establish a single sensor-based combat system that we can all share.

Get the full-permission TCS 2.5.4 at Abbotts Aerodrome or at Xstreet SL (click here).

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More planes added to Abbotts Aerodrome

Today I spent some time setting up displays for five additional aircraft in Abbotts Aerodrome. Now you can try out or buy some classic designs that haven’t been available for a couple of years now.


Tigershark 2 is the immediate predecessor to the popular submersible combat plane. It’s sleeker and more futuristic than version 3, which was designed to reflect a WW2 theme.


Tigershark 1 was the original diving combat plane.


Cormorant is a twin-engine, single seat submersible plane that was the contemporary of the Tigershark 2.

Also included in the lineup are the Futura 5 (a pod-shaped, retro-styled hovering pod), and the Terra Taxi (a hovercar with a working meter).

Drop by the aerodrome and take a look!