Designing a Ferris Wheel

I've been building a ferris wheel for a customer. Design-wise it's an interesting puzzle. The wheel turns, but the cars/seats/carriages remain upright with the passengers inside.

The only way it was viable in the old days was to make each of the cars an object, and to have the wheel be an object. A seated avatar moves with the object it sits on, so the avatar would move naturally with the car. The movements of the cars could be coordinated according to messages spoken on a channel (requiring listeners in every car,) or they could use llGetObjectDetails() on the wheel to determine its rotation every so often and then place themselves in the proper locations. If you were a gambler, you could simply have the cars move along at every X time interval and pray they never got out of sync.

A ferris wheel using physics to allow the cars to hang as objects from the wheel is a disaster. Smaller sized physics objects (like a pole and ring for the car to hang with) develop strange urges to spasm wildly and fling themselves across a sim. When the pieces are large enough to behave, they are too far out of scale. I do recommend trying this - it's very entertaining!

Before llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast() was added to LSL, the 0.2 second delay for each prim would have broken the illusion of the spinning wheel if it was all one object. The other difficulty is that you must also move the avatars as if they were part of the linkset - moving a prim in a linkset with a sit target does not move the avatar sitting on it.

I made a demonstration one-object wheel using llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast() and four one-prim cars. I suspect quaternions are the lovechild of an insane mathematician and Cthulhu.

Moving prims in a linked object generates a surprising amount of scripting lag if you aren't just moving the entire object. The demo wheel with one avatar (5 individually moving prims in the linkset) averaged about 0.035s of script time. Surprisingly, sizing up to eight cars and five avatars (13 moving prims in the linkset) only used about 0.065s.

I've passed the eight car version on to one of the texturers on the team, and am looking forward to seeing the final product.

Invisible Woman

I'd never gotten around to making an Invisible Woman avatar. Until tonight.

The original avatars (made years before avatar masks were introduced) had super-hero proportions in order to hide the default avatar inside. She's a good deal slimmer, and has smaller limbs since there's no need to try to hide the default avatar as it moves.

She's available at the shop in Kitaro.

Roadtrip

I found a freebie hover-board and a road...

I headed south.
Saw a lot of the usual stuff...
Parks and forests, houses, virtual horse ranches,
glowing meeroo hells...






This fellow reminds me of my old Easter Island Head Conference.



At the end of the road I found an amusement park. Most of the rides worked!



I haven't been out on the virtual roads for a while. I was surprised at the number of large plots sitting around unowned. I only saw one avatar - and he was afk.

Musing about starting over

I've been having the urge to wipe out most of my inventory and start fresh. I've done the alt thing before, but this time I'm considering starting Storm over. Throwing out all those 2006 freebies, getting rid of the out of date clothes, dumping all those contacts I never see, etc. Maybe even starting with a fresh product line or two. What I've got now is a mishmash, over time a lot of it has aged, and my skills have improved.

Mesh

I was doing some blender/sl mesh today. The uploaded physics model doesn't appear to be working on the beta grid today, but I did have fun messing with the LOD feature.

Purchasing abandoned mainland just got easier

No more waiting for weeks to be able to purchase that neighboring abandoned plot.

Clouds

Changing your cloud texture is making the rounds... I like my sky to be surreal. How do you like yours?

Particles trouble?

What I learned the other day:

If your particles ( llParticleSystem ) are being cut off by distance, make the prim they originate from larger.

Small prims get trimmed from your view first, and it seems their particle effects go with them.

... now I'm wondering if that's true for sound as well? Experiment time.

Coding

Sometimes, this is so true. Even when it's entirely your own project.

52 weeks of color challenge tracking post

I've been participating in the 52 weeks of color challenge and using mostly mermaid themes since I have a ton of mermaid sets. Pics.