Tuesday, August 24, 2010

August Roadtrip: Breakdown

August Road Trip: Getting Star...
Location: Side of the Road

Is this my final road trip in SL?

It's getting nigh impossible to travel by vehicle in SL. I say that while using a brand-spanking-new laptop with 8 GB of RAM, SL client 1.23 (no Viewer 2 for me), and my work connection, far faster than my zippy FIOS connection at home.

I may have to reconsider these monthly adventures. SL is having trouble and Philip Rosedale's window of opportunity for fixing it is limited. SL users will keep leaving. I don't think there's much of a driving community, anyhow. Perhaps the racers stay on low-lag sims they own, on special tracks. That's hardly the free-wheeling adventures I imagined when I saw the road-grid on the continents.

I realize that driving will never match the experience of a console game, but unless lag is reduced and sim-crossings made easier, the Lindens simply need to stop with their road-building plans.

Or maybe we can walk on them. Anyhow, here's what happened. Mind you, until my crash, I was moving rather slowly through empty sims.

I began at Starting Point: Gun Club Bar & Vehicle Rezz Area. My soundtrack: T.Rex and Iggy Pop

I found good cliffside views on road through Duck Sim. I can ignore all the "for sale" signs and continued evidence of crappy builds that focus on games of chance. If anything, the best casinos in SL before the ban were well made: today's parlors full of Zyngo and other games look like a loser's arcade at some ready-to-close amusement park.

If only the metaverse would fall into ruin, it would be more stately than this slow and continual slide in the tawdry and soiled version of what it might have been. Many ruins have a certain grandeur.

Driving past the Isabel infohub was fatal.; I crashed like the Hindenberg. When I returned, my car was at the Infohub with some noob named Pepe in a passenger seat. I planned to just roar off with him in my clutches and then use the ejector-seat option at the right moment by that cliff and sheer drop to the see, but Pepe got a good look at me, then ran for it before I could get the car to even move.

When it works, traveling in SL reminds me very much of Iggy Pop's song "The Passenger," because as fake as it all is, I do like it that we made this crazy world on the Lindens' infrastructure.
August Roadtrip: Crash

He sees the stars and hollow sky
He see the stars come out tonight
He sees the city's ripped backsides
He sees the winding ocean drive
And everything was made for you and me
All of it was made for you and me
'cause it just belongs to you and me
So let's take a ride and see what's mine.

Well, it does not belong to us, since Linden Lab changed their motto. And we may have to walk under that hollow sky. Fix the physics, Linden Lab.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you did your test a bit too early, I mean - these days Linden Lab is deploying 1.42 server release to the grid, that is supposed to bring a slight improvement to sim crossing.

The Rolling Restart ended a few hours ago so you may be more lucky now.

Also, remove all your scripted HUDs and attachment if you don't really need them and use an efficient scripted vehicle.

If possible, recompile the scripts in your HUDs and attachments to LSL instead of Mono. Mono scripts impact heavily on sims the moment they rez (that is, when you enter or get out of the region). This is currently the worst cause of lag when crossing sim borders.

Iggy O said...

So glad to hear that. I'll be back, then, for another of my monthly trips as soon as 1.42 deploys.

Good idea of the AO I wear. I'll remove it. The vehicles are new, except for the Dominus Shadow. She's not updated her cars in several months, but it's still my favorite.

Um...recompile scripts, oobscure? Don't even let me near code. The only code I can manage is the English language. I failed one programming course and never did better than a C+ (the grade, not the language) in one of two others :)