Huns Valen
Following this closed thread: https://feedback.secondlife.com/ldpw/p/there-should-be-no-instant-autoreturn-protected-land-anywhere
The root of the problem is that failed region handoff often unsits avatars from vehicles, OR it breaks the sit camera + controls so that they have to stand up and re-sit in order to regain control of the vehicle.
When the vehicle is over a no-entry parcel, it's returned within seconds, even though the auto-return time may be minutes long. This is a common setting in water sims that were put there specifically for vehicle navigation, so you can see how this behavior is at cross purposes with the intended use of the sims in question. It's also confusing to users to have a visible setting that is functionally meaningless.
It was suggested in the forums that this is for gray goo mitigation. I propose two possible solutions (either/or):
  1. Gray goo works by recursively self-rezzing objects. Track how many generations have passed since the object was rezzed by an agent. (Call that "telomeres," same idea.) If that number is 0, then don't instant-return it over no-entry land.
  2. If an agent was seated on the object when it entered the region, then it obviously isn't gray goo by itself (there is no realistic way to do "gray goo" if each object has to have a "rider") so don't instant-return it over no-entry land.
#1 is more robust, but also somewhat more difficult if you want the information to cross sim borders.
#2 is probably easier, as the information lifecycle is single-region.
Either solution would mean that the autoreturn time would be accurate, and that vehicle operators would stop being repeatedly penalized for region handoff bugs.