Nota bene: This section is for SL residents who are comfortable with some advanced tasks, such as copying and pasting text, editing notecards, and SL’s grid coordinate system.
Tours let the airship to fly a preset route across a very large distance either empty or carrying passengers. It can fly in an endlessly looping course or wait to be manually started to fly the route once.
How It Works
The Merlin airship reads a list of global coordinates (and other data) from a notecard, then flies to each location until the last one is reached. You can create your own tour by editing the waypoints in the notecard.
Tours are a strict “point-to-point” path that can span several regions (sims): it simply points itself at the next waypoint and goes. Upon reaching the waypoint, it turns immediately towards the next one until it runs out of waypoints.
Starting and stopping a Tour
Any authorized pilot can start and stop tours. To start a tour from the menu:
- Say MERLIN to open the options menu.
- Click “Tour…” and click START TOUR.
Alternatively, you can say AP START and AP STOP to start and stop a tour.
Public Tours
If you want, you can allow anyone to start a tour even if the airship’s access lock doesn’t allow them to be the pilot. In that way, your airship can be a public attraction without giving full access.
- Say MERLIN to open the options menu.
- Click “Lock…” and “Owner”. Your airship now allows only you to be the pilot.
- Click “Back…” to return to the main menu and click “Tour…”.
- Click “Tour Lock” to toggle the lock state so that the menu indicates “PUBLIC”.
Now, when an unauthorized person stands at the ship’s wheel, instead of unseating them, the airship lets them start a tour. Tourists can start tours, but not stop them. Only a pilot can stop a tour.
Creating a Tour
You can create a tour by entering properly formatted waypoints into a notecard and putting that into your airship. To be safe, we suggest that you drag a copy of the “waypoints” notecard to your Inventory for safekeeping, and edit that copy. There is less chance of losing your work that way. You can replace the “waypoints” notecard in the airship when you’re done editing. The notecard must be named “waypoints”.
Plotting the Route
While planning your route, keep these points in mind:
- Waypoint Spacing: Ideally, waypoints should be spaced up to 500 meters apart. You can space them less than 10 meters in some cases, but it may become confused and skip waypoints inappropriately, or even get stuck trying to reach a waypoint.
- Obstacles: Although you can place waypoints farther apart than 500 meters, the chance of encountering an obstacle increases with distance. You never know when someone might decide to build in your flight path. The airship has no obstacle avoidance ability, which means that your route will have to be carefully plotted along the safest path.
Nota bene: It’s always a good idea to make your airship “phantom” (i.e., not solid) on a tour. That way obstacles are less of a problem
In the notecard, a each waypoint is a line that begins with “WP=”. To add waypoints, add a new line that starts with “WP=”. The airship will give you the correct format, as we will see in the following steps:
- Start by deleting all existing waypoints (the “WP=” lines) in the notecard. We should start with a clean slate.
- Put your airship at the start location, get in, start the engine, and fly manually to the first waypoint.
- At your first waypoint, say WP in chat. The airship replies with your current global location in correct waypoint format. Copy this line into your notecard. The waypoint will look something like this:
WP=256214.578125|255456.875000|739.033630|5|Abbotts
Each value is separated by the pipe character, “|”. Do not use spaces. - Verify that the altitude (the third value) and throttle (the fourth value) are correct. Replace the name of the region with any comment that you want the airship to say upon reaching the waypoint. Here is an example of the previous waypoint after editing altitude, throttle, and comment.
WP=256214.578125|255456.875000|740|8|Below us, you can see Abbotts Aerodrome! - Fly straight to the next place where you want to create a waypoint and repeat the WP command. Remember that tours fly straight point-to-point lines, so make sure that the path between one waypoint and the next is clear of obstacles.
- When you have finished adding waypoints, replace the waypoint notecard in the airship: Delete the waypoint notecard from the airship’s Content tab, then drag the one you have edited from Inventory to the airship.
- Right-click the airship and Take it into Inventory to ensure that you don’t lose it.
You’re ready to test your tour! Go to a location near the first waypoint, rez your airship, and start the tour with the AP START command.
Optional Looping
If you want, you can put “LOOPING=TRUE” in the “waypoints” notecard, and the airship will keep restarting the tour until you tell it to stop.
Tour Chat Commands
AP START
AP STOP
These commands start and stop the tour. Stopping the autopilot also shuts off the engines. If you are a long way from the first waypoint, the airship will say so. The farther you are from the first waypoint, the more likely it is that you will encounter an unexpected obstacle.
WP
Say this to get your current location as waypoint data. The airship says your global position in this format:
WP=global_x_axis|global_y_axis|altitude|throttle_to_waypoint|Comment
Throttle is a number between 1 and 10, where 10 is the fastest. The default is half speed (5).
Troubleshooting Autopiloted Tours
Issue: The airship flies right past the waypoint without turning.
Solution: This can happen if your airship flies too low over “no-script” land. Sometimes entire regions can have the scripts turned off. If the autopilot script can’t run, it will never turn. Make sure that the path between waypoints is free of no-script land, or if that’s unavoidable, plot the waypoints high enough so that you’re above the effect of “no-script” (I think that’s about 50m or so).
Issue: My airship keeps getting returned with a message about going off-world.
Solution: Your tour flies too close to the edge of the map. If it touches the map edge and nobody is aboard, SL will return your airship to your Lost and Found. Plot a new course that’s farther from the map edge.
Issue: My airship keeps getting returned to my Lost and Found with a message about a parcel.
Solution: This is one of the hazards of owning an autonomous vehicle. Some parcel owners set their land to block object entry. Sometimes parcels are simply too full.
If the parcel is set to block object entry, plot a new course around the parcel. If the parcel is too full, try making the airship “temp-on-rez”. Full parcels can usually handle a temp object sailing overhead.
Issue: My airship keeps getting stuck on objects.
Solution: Make your airship “phantom” (say PHANTOM in chat). That means that it will pass through solid objects (but not the ground). A limitation is that passengers in the airship will remain solid, so you can’t actually fly through a wall, for example, if anyone is aboard.
Issue: My airship keeps going missing.
Solution: Possible reasons this might happen…
* Someone hopped in, turned off the autopilot, and flew it manually for a while.
* A landowner grabbed it and returned it to your inventory.
* A sim crashed while the airship was in it.
For any of these issues, I suggest using a Terra Perma-rezzer, which is included with the airship. It’s a small prim that can re-rez the airship if it goes missing. If you use a perma-rezzer with the airship, make sure the airship is also phantom and temp-on-rez, to avoid problems of multiple airships accumulating in one spot.
Issue: My airship is pointing in the wrong direction when it ends the tour.
Solution: The airship always points towards the next waypoint, so to make it turn, add another waypoint just to one side, with the throttle set very low. The airship will turn to face that waypoint.
Issue: I keep falling out of my airship when I pass through a sim corner.
Solution: Avoid sim corners. Plot your tour around them. This isn’t as much an airship issue as it is a fundamental flaw in SL.
