Vehicles are typically shiny, highly reflective objects. The go-to method for a very long time in game dev is to attach a reflection probe to the vehicle itself. It has been so successful of a solution that it's only now being replaced by raytraced reflections in ultra modern games.

I feel Second Life could benefit from a similar system. How I envision the probe system working for SL is that when a linkset is being acted on by the llVehicle system and the agent is sitting on it, the viewer will place a probe at the geometrical center of the object. This probe will ignore rendering the linkset (including agents) and only have it's influence affect the linkset.

There could also be an additional probe parameter as part of this system called Blending. This would control the blending between probes and the Hero Probe:

1.0 = Overrides Manual Probes

0.0 = Blends with Manual Probes

-1.0 = Overridden by Manual Probes

I envisioned this system having two important controls: a llVehicle parameter (defaulted off as to not change existing vehicle behavior) and a Viewer toggle for the system.

I feel this would contribute greatly to the driving, flying, and sailing experience on SL as more PBR content makes its way out there.

I've linked an example of a game that uses this hero probe system, BeamNG. It has several novel features regarding reflection probes and mirror simulation, but this video only focuses on the primary hero probe system: https://youtu.be/fUrOGDQ8nnY