27 November 2011

Doings



I've spent most of my time running around as a micro lately. The virtual world's a different place when you're only a foot tall. There's sculpted versions available, but I prefer the mesh version - if you've got skin and clothing textures you like you can apply them to the avatar. There's also prim wearables, vehicles, and furniture available for them.


I'm still enjoying the papillon breedables I got last month. The community group is very friendly, the toys are low lag and attractive, and if you set up the environment right you can pretty much ignore them and they'll still thrive. They're also good company while you're scripting. *grin*

The train-based project I've been working on with some friends has entered beta. I'm excited! I made a lot of the art assets on it. Sometimes the beta grid is down, so I've changed my workflow when doing sculpt/texture combos to include using sim-on-a-stick as a free way to check out how they look.

I purged several old products. Deleting entries from the current SLMarketplace is a painful process. First you have to remove the items from your magic box(es), then refresh so the delete option is available on that listing. Then you have to delete each listing one by one, since the page refuses to let you use the checkboxes to group command the listings. I'm still musing about which products I want to freshen up or rearrange and which I want to leave as-is.

I finally seem to be getting comfortable making mesh models with Blender. I'm still working on getting rigged models to work, but there were some changes made to Blender 2.6 that are supposed to help.

09 November 2011

Copy viewer toolbars from one account to another

To copy toolbar positions from one account to another in Viewer 3.2:

Shut down the viewer. Copy the toolbars.xml file from one acct to the other's folder. Restart.

Public Service Scripting Message

Only the most recent sensor event is queued. 
Previous sensor events are replaced. 


So, what does this mean to you? If you're using sensors, and you're sending sensor messages fairly quickly one after another, and the sim starts to lag... Your script appears to stop.

Every script has an event queue that holds up to 64 events. Normally these are given to your script in more or less a first come, first served order. If you do something that adds a sensor event (  a llSensor() or llSensorRepeat() call ) then the queue adds it to the end and removes any other sensor events in the queue.

I repeat: If you make a sensor call while you're still waiting for the results of previous calls, you will never see the results of the first call.




Scriptors often talk about problems or look over each others' code when it isn't working as expected. Sometimes another set of eyes can spot whatever it is that's driving you nuts. I've spotted this one in several "broken" bits of code this month, so I figure it's time to write it up somewhere. LSL has its quirks, and at least in a SL environment this is one of them.

08 November 2011

New viewer with customizable buttons, and a Humble interview

Spotted Rod Humble interviewed in an article about game innovation.

Trying out the new release viewer. I like being able to pick and position buttons. I'm still pissed that you can't move things around on the Inventory Recent tab (I really hope that's a bug and not a deliberate change!)