[Opensim-users] monorail or train scripts

[Charles Krinke]

I have been thinking about the monorail or track question for a while and I think we are very close to being able to build practical trains or monorail in OpenSim in either non-physical or physical configurations.

Here are some of my thoughts:

Physical:
Given a rectangular track cross section which is higher then it is wide and a hollowed out prim with some clearance, but not enough to rotate around the track, a physical, hollowed out prim can be made to slide back and forth on a rectangular cross section track which is non-physical. I have only tried this with a single hollowed out prim, but suspect this area of experimentation with a script to apply force could be fruitful.

Non-Physical
I have seen the bus on "Port Edward" and it moves around a fixed route fine and accepts passengers. It should be possible to make a track script that senses a vehicle getting to one end of the track, determines its X,Y position and uses llSetPos() to move the vehicle to the other end of the track segment where it can be picked up by the next track segment.

Challenges
Single prim is probably practical. Multi-prim vehicles have issues.
Crossing region boundaries is challenging.
Crossing four-corners is particularly challenging.

I think that having a few groups working together on a few different sims on working out scripting issues within a sim of a single prim vehicle will allow us to have some test setups to address the challenges above. As we solve each challenge, we can then extend the track across sim boundaries and make the vehicles multi-prim and also head towards the complicated four-corner crossing.

So, I am encouraging a few folks to see if they can work on this and share any scripts with the rest of us so we can work along and get a monorail, train or whatever to move between sims on a grid.

Charles
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