Teleport routing, a parcel setting that allows you to decide whether people who use landmarks arrive at a set point or anywhere (or blocked if you so deem it fit) should be used sensibly and when it comes to setting teleport routing to a landing point, it’s a bit of an annoyance.
Why would someone want teleport routing to be set to the landing point? Well they may have a build in the sky, or they may have private tenants inside a building, or they may want you to see a build from the start rather than arriving halfway through it and missing the experince, some builds are experiences that require you start at the beginning, they may want you to read the rules before entering the parcel, so there are a number of uses for this setting.
However when it comes to public sims with no start or end, or stores, setting teleport routing to the landing point can be frustrating because you can’t share a landmark with someone else and tell them to look at what’s at point x, because the landmark takes them to point y. However when it comes to ground level stores …… why do people do this?
An example I have is from an affiliate package I’m a member of, a customer had the failed delivery problem, it happens, the owner of the affiliate franchise advises you to tell the customer to use the redelivery terminal, which is all well and good but when you land at the landmark you can’t even see a redelivery terminal, so I go to the exact point of the redelivery terminal to create a landmark to make it easier for the customer and then get an inkling that this store is going to have teleport routing set to the landing point, which it did have.
So what’s likely to happen here is that the customer won’t know what the hell I’m on about. Setting your teleport routing to anywhere provides plenty of options for people to easily share locations, for example you’re going around and you see something that you feel a friend will like, but they aren’t online or they’re busy, so you send them a landmark to the exact spot, but as teleport routing isn’t set to anywhere they land at a different point and wonder what the hell you’re on about and lose patience trying to find said item.
Setting teleport routing to anywhere won’t prevent someone who finds your parcel via search landing where the owner of the parcel wants them to land, but it does prevent people easily sharing landmarks to other parts of your parcel. As I said, there are use cases for setting teleport routing to the landing point, but in many cases this isn’t the best choice, setting it to anywhere provides visitors with more choice.
Setting teleport routing to Anywhere will become even more important if/when the ability is restored to click and “Go” directly from Search to individual objects set for sale on the parcel. There are hints that this is returning (finally!) to in-world Search; it’s been in web search for as long as parcel content pages have driven indexing.
As somebody who actually uses web-based search just for that particular advantage, I can say it’s pretty frustrating to have it defeated by a parcel landing point, with nothing but a red beacon as a guide to the target item.
I also read somewhere recently that a developer was looking at making llMapDestination() actually do something with the “look_at” target, so visitors are oriented the right direction when they arrive — at least when the Map teleport target is set through that script function. If landmarks, slurls, etc., also had optional “look_at” extensions, it would remove one other motivation for landing points: offsetting them slightly from landmark destinations in order to “trick” the avatar to face the right way on arrival.
I will be extremely happy if they bring back the Go button, that was one of the best features of new fangled search. However, I always wondered why LL didn’t blog about it, maybe they felt it was experimental, but it was such a bloody good feature that it seemed odd they didn’t make a fanfare about it.
We use routing at Hillcrest specifically because you must read the rules of the sim before you can enter the gate. However, we also have several 4m parcels that have been split out in strategic locations specifically for landmarks. For instance, the membership area, where people may want to go to update account information without having to go through the whole sim to get there. Also, the school store is on its own parcel so renters can get in and out or even use classifieds to route shoppers directly to their vendors if they wanted.
I think teleport routing is extremely useful when coupled with parcel editing. It would be nice if we had master parcels that you could split into sub-parcels. The master could then contain the ban list and the overall traffic information while allowing you to set specific things like build rights, auto-return, and teleports on the sub-sections. That would make too much sense though.
I was thinking about your sim when I pointed out that some sims want people to read the rules first, Tombstone does the same and in scenarios like that it makes sense.
There are ways that landing points could be improved, for example first time visitors land at spot x, and yes a master parcel setting for several parcels or being able to group several parcels with pre-defined settings would be very handy.