With the SL-centric news on TPV policy changes, it was easy to miss the announcement that vehicle sim crossing capabilities have been rolled-out to the Avination Grid. I actually caught the new through Maria Korolov’s ever-excellent Hypergrid Business News.

The official press release reads in part:

Avination is the first Grid beside Second Life advanced to the point to offer cars, ships and other vehicles driving across sim borders.

“Breaking down the borders and crossing them!” Avination literally made just that possible for it’s residents. With the latest rollout of its server software Avination became the first grid beside Second Life to allow residents to explore their world using cars, ships, bikes or horse pulled carriages.

The days where one could only cross sim borders hiking or flying or needed a TP to get somewhere else are over.

Whether Avination was the first outside of SL is debatable. InWorldz may equally lay claim to that honour. However, sim-crossings are now available on Avination.

In discussing the roll-out with Hypergrid Business, Melanie Thielker, CEO of both Avination and hosting company 3D Hosting said, “We have worked continuously to improve vehicle physics and we have a good driving feel as it is,” she said. “However, we have also just started a complete revamp of vehicles with the aim to get even closer to Second Life behavior. At this time, Avination supports most of the API [application programming interface] and most values match or need only minor tweaks.” This essentially means that scripts that currently work in SL should work on Avination with minimal revision.

The capability will initially be proprietary to the Avination grid, but will eventually be released to the OpenSim community as a whole, in keeping with Avination’s policy of supporting the OpenSim community, in which it has its roots and strong ties (Thielker is one of the core OpenSim developers).

To mark the roll-out, Avination will be hosting a cross-sim race, sponsored by VirWox, the Austria-based virtual currency exchange and backer of the multi-grid Open Metaverse Currency (OMC), and organised by M Events, a Dutch marketing company which invested in Avination at the end of last year. Details of the race have yet to be announced, and I’ll endeavour to report them when known.

With thanks to Maria Korolov & Hypergrid Business