Testing The Waters

The Second Life grid is made up of thousands of regions called sims. They are 256x256 meters square and can stand alone or be connected side by side, end to end. These sims exist on computer servers so when you cross over a sim border to another sim, you are moving your avatar, and all its attachments, clothing, skin, eyes, shape, etc., over to another computer in real time. While walking across sim borders causes brief but strange disruptions in your forward motion, driving or flying across the borders can cause all sorts of strange things to happen including losing your vehicle or viewer freezup or worse. I actually quit driving my motorcycle and powerboat because of this problem. But recently, Lark told me about a boat which had newer scripting which helped to make sim crossing smoother.

So I went out and tried a jetski and catamaran demo containing these new scripts. Sure enough, the sim crossings were fairly smooth! The first thing I'm thinking of is being able to tour the Blake Sea. The Blake Sea is a cluster of sims which are mostly water all grouped together to form a sort of virtual ocean. Many of these sims are decorated with seaweed and coral under the water, but some have small islands popping up out of the water with decorations and even some pose animations. I recall exploring the Blake Sea in my old powerboat, finding some interesting places to visit but becoming frustrated, and in the end, fed up with the sim crossing problems. I kept losing my passengers or boat. I would end up at a sim's 0,0,0 coordinates unable to move or teleport. While the appeal of exploring vast sections of the sea was quite strong, the sim crossing issues ruined it.

So the first thing I'm thinking of is that I can go exploring, but I would need to purchase one of these newly scripted boats. So I shopped around frantically, motivated by the thought of my boat traversing the open sea surrounded by bikini-clad babes, searching for islets to check out. I had to buy a boat that night! There are plenty of sailboats out there with this sim-crossing feature, but I wanted a powerboat. Sailboats in SL are for the most part, quite realistic and for me, too complicated. I'd rather not have to wear a HUD as I navigate and control the vessel as that would take away from my flirting with the bikini babes. The powerboats that I did find worked quite well and were reasonably priced, but I did not like the looks of them. The textures and prims were not very appealing. So I quit searching when cat logged on and went to spend time with her.

Exploring the Blake Sea

I told cat about the sim-crossing scripts and my vision of exploring with her. She immediately wanted to go shopping for them, so I took her to the place Lark showed me with demos to try out. I got her on the catamaran and did a short demonstration as we crossed a couple of sim borders. She's had bad experiences of sim crossings too and was as amazed as I was. Finally, I decided to get a boat from the demo place we were at because none of the other places we checked seemed to have any demos, and the ones that did, were unable to cross sim borders without problems. So cat wisely suggested we get a boat large enough to accommodate several friends. I was also able to find a boat which was capable of allowing friends to pilot it so that if we ended up with too many people for one 4-seater, we could rez a second boat and have up to eight friends come along. So we got the boat and headed home to unpack it and rez it.

Cat had to leave at that time so we said our goodbyes and afterwards, I took the boat to the Blake Sea. I had a terrible time finding a place to rez it. Most sim owners understandably do not want to enable rezzing on their land. People leave their stuff laying around and it takes up prims which should be available to the sim owner. However, there is a feature called Auto-Return which returns objects after a certain period of time to the owner's inventory. I finally found one of those places and rezzed my boat. The region had an indirect connection to the Blake Sea so I was able to head south for a bit until reaching open waters. On the way, I crossed many a sim border without any trouble. It was wonderful! It was exactly as I imagined it could be (onley without the bikini chicks). So I explored for a while, practiced navigating teh boat (which was a bit tricky due to its touchy controls) and logged off with thoughts of a smooth sim-crossing helicopter in my mind.

Chatting with cat

The next day, cat and I had a little free time from RL, so we got together. I told her all about the boat and even sent her some pictures of my brief travels from the night before. We had a nice long "chat session" then setup a date for later that night. It was worth the wait.

Our Getaway Date

I found a place to rez the boat near the Blake Sea and teleported cat over and we were off on our journey. We did not find much at first, but I did see a sort of long channel/waterway on the world map so I went for it. It was very long and crossed countless sims without much trouble. We were going quite slow in order to smooth out the already mild sim border crossings and to allow the surrounding scenery to rez in properly. It took a while but we finally found the end of the waterway which emptied out into a huge circular lake surrounded by very high brick and mortar walls. I certainly didn't feel like scaling impossible walls just to get a look at what might be up there. Besides, we had not found an islet to explore yet and time was running out. So I turned the boat around (I should give the boat a name...) and I gunned it heading back out to the east. The sim crossings were not too bad and before we knew it, we were back out in open water. I set a course for south and west and finally found a small island.

We made landfall and surprisingly, our boat did not get returned to my inventory. So we checked out the island, found a campfire and some sitting logs. That was nice for a while but I wanted to wrap my arms around my girl so I activated a dance from my couple's hud and we danced and talked until cat had to leave. It was a wonderful evening and inspired me to go out briefly before logging off to look at some aircraft which might contain this sim-crossing scripting. I did find one but decided to wait until the next day to look closer at its features as the cost was a bit on the high side. Besides, it was getting late. There will be plenty of time for exploring with cat and friends soon enough.