Get the Freight Out! - GTFO!How to cross the continents
You have probably heard that the mainland has been connected, opening air travel from the Northeast of the grid to the Southwest across Bellisseria.
One of the frequently asked questions of 2021 was when GTFO! would support jobs over this new route.
The answer, as of April 2022, is that we’re working on it. There are technical reasons for why this is a time-consuming piece of work, but we’ll come to that.
Our best suggestion for crossing the continental divide between the Northeast and the Southwest is to “deadhead” across Bellisseria.
What’s a continent?
According to the Second Life wiki, a “continent” is a collection of 30 or more regions placed next to each other.
The largest groups of continents (mainland), plus several attached estates, are where most GTFO! activity takes place. This image will give you a rough idea. It includes most of the mainland, except for adult continent of Zindra, which also has its own GTFO! hubs.
The best place to learn about the Second Life continents is New Kadath Lighthouse Art Gallery which is lovingly curated by Juliana Lethdetter-DeCuir. It’s consistently updated and a beautiful place to visit.
Mainland continents connected
Until late 2021, you couldn’t travel between the Eastern continents (including Corsica, Gaeta I, Nautilus and Satori) and the Western Continents (Heterocera, Sansara and Jeogeot), because there was no land connecting them.
With the opening of a new route through the new premium continent of Bellisseria, this travel became possible for air and space traffic. Water is still problematic.
How GTFO! has to change to add support
Before the continents were connected, it was possible to calculate routes based on “bounding boxes” drawn around the mainland continents. There was some overlap, but this was only mildly annoying. Now that the continents are connected, these bounding boxes are no longer accurate enough, because the overlap is too great.
The elves are working on ways to route traffic based on being able to discover and track connected regions across the grid.
Once we’re happy that GTFO! will be able to use this new data, the next step is providing accurate routing for all traffic, not just air and space.
This ongoing work forms the basis of GTFO! v2.