Automatic Vehicles

Beginning a piece of writing by apologising for not having written previously is most appallingly gauche, and you will not, dear reader, find me doing such a thing.

Whilst investigating the latest tram fiasco in Port Caledon, due to prim limits in the parcel just across the bridge (as usual), I endeavoured to show Zeppelin Duesberg (who was in attendance) that when one sits upon an object it does not fall foul of prim-limit-returnment.

Except that when I sat down on the tram, and waited for it to cross the bridge, I did fall foul of it. The tram was returned, I was plunged into limbo and forced to relog.

Yet again I manage to hibernate through another assault by Parties Unknown on the Grid; it is convenient for me that such things tend to occur during times of rest for me. Others have had some harrowing experiences, it seems:

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blockquote>The embankment next to the landing point in Rodeo is getting waterlogged and has started to slide in a few places. I was out in the muck, trying to clean off the landing stone and stabilize the hillside when an object whizzed by me. Then another.

I'm sure that any person of sufficient powers of concentration to be willing to hack through the thick, obscuring undergrowth of verbiage that makes up my Journal in the faint hope that, in sufficient time, they will clear aside one last creeper to find King Solomon's Mine revealed (or more likely a deserted quarry and a small squalid shop selling badly-painted souvenirs) has had the experience of becoming so engrossed in some project or other in Second Life that they completely forget to perform some vital task, such as - for the gentlemen - trimming one's moustache before meeting one's frien

Recently I decided to entirely replace my existing shop with what I consider to be a much more aesthetically pleasing, and spacious, building; the shop floor is a now a broad, high-ceilinged, iron-framed gallery. Clearly I had to retain the breakable windows, and clearly I had to retain a balloon deck from which visitors might board the Touring Dirigible. (Even considering its antiquity, the Dirigible is still very popular.

I am fed up unto the back teeth with not being able to have my Instant Messages sent to my Aethernet Mailbox on account of people being untidy and leaving chess pieces out near the Tram Rezzing Device (for the uninitiated, the Device sits near the chessboard in Caledon II, and creates a new tram if the old one has an accident befalling it, but if the area is already full of Primitives, well, it complains to me).

On the other hand, one cannot really complain if one creates a device which behaves in a way which one does not mean it to; it has hardly decided to do this on its own.

The tram has been lost at Caledon (1, 190) - a routine sim-border-crossing mishap, I am sure - and it appears that someone has left the pieces out on the chessboard by the Caledon II telehub again. This, I might say, is where the tram rezzer is.

Here, it appears, is the answer to the tram-related issue that I have been encountering... secret release notes!

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blockquote>* Improved prim accounting on parcels ** Counts are correct within 1 frame of the simulator (typically 1/45th of a second) ** The categories for prims on a parcel are: Owner, Group, Other, Selected.

As a minor thing of note, readers interested in the Science of Automatic Vehicles might also be interested in visiting the Third Year Anniversary Celebrations, as detailed on the Second Life Wiki. The monorail that you may travel upon there works upon a similar system to the Caledon Tram, which is not terribly surprising, as I scripted it. The actual car itself was not by me, but by Merle Widget, and the fabulous monorail stations and track are by Lethe Naumova.

Recent viewers of the Tram Status Page will have noticed that it has grown a map, indicating where the tram is, rather than than there simply being a SLurl link.