Second Life Sketches: Drive My Car
By Warren Ellis
The following is an independent opinion column, and is not connected with Reuters News. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by Reuters.
[Today's column will also be featured as a driving tour within Second Life. Click on your Reuters display tab labeled "Acura RDX" to receive a notecard version.]
I have always felt that there’s really only one way to properly see and understand the mainland. Drive.
When Second Life first opened, there was no point-to-point personal teleportation. The only such travel available was through station-to-station “telehubs.” Therefore, if you wanted to travel, there were really only three options: sailing the coast, personal flight, or utilising the mainland road system.
The roads still crisscross the mainland, as public channels owned by Second Life operators Linden Lab. But, with the advent of personal teleportation a few years ago, they pretty much stand empty now. Empty: but still in place. And, in most areas, they’re still fringed with buildings, some of which date back to the time where roadside location was still very much sought after. Even today, a lot of people make much of a roadside location when selling a parcel (though, if you search for land, you’ll find such notes swamped out by “waterfront” as a superior point of interest).
As any user knows, flying over the mainland for an extended period shows you little more than a crazyquilt of structures that become a little homogenous after a while. Driving is a different experience. You’ll find older and more extensive (and often more eccentric) builds, and start to gain a real sense of how the landscape of the mainland changes. Travel broadens the mind.
Finding free vehicles is easy — if they elude you, put “Yadni” into the search system, head to his Junkyard and get a box of vehicles for nothing. Yadni’s remains the best gateway to owning and understanding objects for the new Second Life user.
Finding a place to unpack them is a little harder. The road system doesn’t allow you to create new objects right on the tarmac — you need to rez a vehicle on land next to the road and drive the car on to the road. You’ll usually have to poke around a little bit to find somewhere to do that.
So, for the purposes of this piece, I’ve bought a bit of land in Lemon, and set up a (slightly hairy, sorry) ramp on to the road it sits next to. So teleport over to this station in Lemon. I’ve laid out a bunch of reliable free cars for you to play with, all controlled by the cursor arrows on your keyboard.
Yes, they are indeed horrible green boxy things that make Trabants look like sex on wheels. They may in fact be Second Life Trabants. However, they are extremely simple to steer and control, which, believe me, can’t be said for every vehicle in Second Life. I long ago lost count of the number of times that vehicle testing left me buried in the side of a mountain, jutting out of the sea bed like some mutant anemone, or folded up in a contortionist’s nightmare at the bottom of a pit.
I expect to find a lot of crashed cars there — they do take a little practise. Don’t go straight to high speed. High speed is always a recipe for trouble when using SL vehicles. Why? Sim crossings. When you cross from one sim to another, you’re actually crossing from one server to another in most instances. This usually leads to a weird five seconds where you and your car appear to be falling through the road, through void, and down towards the centre of the Earth. Do nothing. It rights itself after five or ten seconds, and you’re off on your way again as if nothing happened.
Set your draw distance as long as you dare. Otherwise, you’ll be speeding past things before they’ve had time to rez, and the materialisation of the road won’t keep up with your velocity. And, as I say, don’t go at top speed. Find a civilised gait. And look around.
Moving through the road system means that you’re pretty much off the usual circuits of the search function. You’re unlikely to bump into a lot of stuff you recognise. Three or four years ago, these were the important thoroughfares, the veins and arteries of commerce in Second Life. Today, they’re practically an archaeological artifact. You won’t see a lot of people. Here and there, you’ll drive past a long-established club with a loyal clientele, a popular veteran store, or the cherished inworld home of an early adopter.
There are a lot of abandoned builds, and empty structures on unsellable parcels. A lot of pillars of floating ad spinners, on tiny parcels that probably looked like a good bet back when there were more cars than yours on the road. Pick the right road, and you can actually follow a lot of the coastline - Linden Labs are rightly excoriated for a lot of things of late, but you can’t argue that they do views exceptionally well, and they really shine at the coastal regions. Drive for long enough - north from Lemon towards Healy and on, for instance - and you’ll eventually find the great fogbanks, the high altitudes and the winter sims.
To my mind, hitting the road remains the best way to really discover the world and its scale. There’ll never be a great return to the roads - personal teleport has become too important, particularly with so much of the populace located on private islands that can only be reached through point-to-point TP - and while I think that’s kind of a shame, it does mean the roads will be clear of traffic for your own explorations.
