One of the best collaborations I worked on in Second Life was an ultralight plane — the Terra-Kojima Starling — designed by Reitsuki Kojima then scripted, bashed, and cajoled into flight by me. It was one of my absolute favourites to fly because it instills the feeling of the freedom of powered flight without insulating me inside the fuselage of a larger airplane.
And then our friends at Linden Lab changed how physics bounding boxes worked so that we could use mesh objects. Unbeknownst to them, it had the side-effect of breaking the Starling so that its physics bounding box extended a couple of meters below it. Essentially, it couldn’t taxi anymore. If you can’t taxi, you can’t take off and fly. So I retired the Starling.
Today, I put my newfound knowledge of Second Life bounding boxes to use and updated the Starling model. It now taxis correctly, and I corrected a couple of other minor issues that I found along the way.
Want to fly my favourite plane in Second Life? You can find it in the Second Life Marketplace and at the Terra Aeronautics shop in Abbotts in-world.