Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Fly me to the moon

Small, but possibly consequential, change in the last server rollout; the flight limit is, essentially, no more.

Last week, if you were ascending to a great height (say, in search of an errant cylinder or something), you would get up to 150 meters off the ground or so, and then you would inexplicably run out of puff.  The flight limit makes normal SL gravity reassert itself after a while, preventing you from getting too high.... or, until the last bunch of rollouts, it did.

Now, as I found out by experimentation last night, the limit has been raised, and raised a fair old bit, to around 5050 meters (I started running out of steam at that height and finally stopped rising entirely at 5067).  Unless, of course, you wear something that gives you a push upwards - a flight assist, like a freebie flight feather or an equally free but far more stylish Cavorite Personal Levitator (advt.)  Which you could have done anyway.  So.... I suppose the big change is, you now have one attachment slot freed up if you want to fly at heights between 150 and 5050 meters.  Which is not such a big change after all, I guess.

I've never entirely understood the reasoning behind the flight limit in any event, so its effective demise means very little to me... I think.  (The reasoning behind the new limit also escapes me... why that height?  Why not, say, 4096, which is still the build limit, and above which the official viewer goes glitchy anyway?)  Since the limit was so easily circumvented by anyone with a little scripting knowledge, or even with knowledge enough to pick up a free flight assist (still available [advt.]), it never really meant much...

There is an allied question, though, which I understand has been exercising people's minds, or at least voices, in the JIRA; namely, if the height of the flight limit has been raised, will there be a corresponding raise in the height of ban lines?  As things stood, ban lines just clustered low to the ground, and people in fast-moving air vehicles, say, could fly right over them.  Now, there are of course sound reasons not to let anyone you don't want onto your SL property... but the appearance of mile-high invisible walls in the skies could come as an unwelcome surprise for pilots across SL!  I'm not sure what to think about this one, myself.  I do like vehicles, and SL is, through accident or design, not always friendly to them already.  But I don't fancy the idea of griefers doing free bombing raids from a mile up, either. I am torn, on this issue, rather.

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