I’m going on a voyage. Wooot! And what a voyage it will be. From Alexandria all the way up to the site of the second cataract and the magnificent Abu Simbel, I will be immersed in Egypt and its history for 17 glorious days. Well, maybe not so glorious: “Day 12 which tomb is this?”.

What’s great about this trip is that it’s not your typical tourist tour. It’s a small group, lead by a real life Egyptologist, and has required reading. I’ve been working on that for awhile.  You sailors might be interested in part of the description for Day 10:

We board our deluxe Nile river ship in time for lunch then disembark for a leisurely felucca sail on the Nile. These replicas of ancient Nile sailboats cruise around several well-known sites, including Elephantine Island, Kitchener’s Botanical Garden, and the tomb of the Aga Khan. Tonight: a Nubian folklore show.

—=== SLSAILING.COM ===—

On of the last things I got to do before I left for Egypt was to appoint an editorial staff for SLSailing.Com. Nber Medici will be the site’s Associate Editor. Joining her will be Jane Fossett as Managing Editor and columnist. Also Lex Lian will be a columnist giving his insights playing of in world sailing imagery. Jane will be adding one or more contributors while I am gone. And all of you can contribute via the comments block that following nearly all pages and posts at the site.

—=== NO 300! ===—

Another project I am working on in the midst of preparing to leave SL for a few weeks is Starboard Yacht Club’s “No 300 Initiative”. It’s an effort to stem the spiraling size of vehicles that overwhelm the processing power of your typical water sim.

When Hollywood was a single sim back in the old days we approached Linden Lab requesting them to sell what were then called void sims, water based sims with greatly reduced script capabilities. The outcome of that discussion was the development of “Open Spaces Sims”, a group of four water sims running under a single “server”. The Channel Islands sims around Hollywood were the first such sim package deal in Second Life. The concept took off and now you see Open Sims all over SL. It made it possible for the 48 sims of the United Sailing Sims of Second Life to exist.

However the presence of so many sail-able sims also generated a market for boats to sail those sims. Then came the innovation of boat prim attachments which made it possible for boats larger than the physics limitations of 31 prims to sail the Second Life seas. We have all benefited from this innovation with boats such as Jacqueline Trudeaus’ classic yachts and boats such as Verkin Rakin’s Tetra 35 just to mention a few.

The problem is that other builders see an opportunity to make a buck making huge vehicles well beyond the sensible 250 or so “attachment based” boats. Note that these attachement based boats are a bit less problematic because the sim only records about 30 of these prims towards the sim limit. However all of the prims must be resolved in the graphics engine so even they add a larger load that say a Tako. But its the megayacht/spaceship/floating-parcels which load up our water sims with tons of prims (I have seen some over 600 prims) and scripts that are the real problem. Nber and I have gotten tired of politely asking them to leave and hearing how they have a God given right to (fill in the blank).  As much as these folks irritate the hell out of us that have to deal with them, I personally hold the builders of these monstrosities to blame. They are bartering a product that can ONLY be used on the kinds of sims we pay and provide to the sailing community.

We support the desire to have Governor Linden’s water sims all script enabled. But I bet we will never see that if only because of this very dilemma. If LL provide those sims as a matter of course we will start seeing huge vehicle builds and the use of don’t time out scripts to keep those vessels moored all over those sims held there by robo-alts. Is this where I am supposed to add “IMHO”?