Following the terraforming of Abalus by Daryth and a few minor adjustments by me and Nimbus, the next task is to decorate the sim. We have 3750 prims on the sim of which we want to reserve 750. This leaves 3000 prims to do our own builds and for general sim landscaping.
I don’t have the time or skill to build everything a sim needs, so time to go shopping!
Most of what I do involves scripting (aside from the odd animation or texture). There are many annoyances to a scripter, most of them in-world. In no sort of order these are:
Some of these just come down to doing things correctly and having patience (#3 is often down to taking an object back into inventory after modifying a contained script, before it has compiled and saved). However, trying to develop and debug scripts in-world can often be very time consuming. When SL is being laggy, often it takes some seconds for a script to compile, save and reset ready for testing.
One of the alternatives is to use an offline script development system. The one I use is LSLEditor which is an open source tool created by Alphons van der Heijden.
LSL Editor performs a number of functions, it has code completion and code tips (useful for if you can’t remember all the arguments to a function, or the exact name). It can check if your LSL is semantically correct and it has a debugger function. There is also a “Solution Explorer” which allows you to build a virtual object and test the interactions between multiple scripts.
On the 18th of June a new sim rose from the waves, west of the new Equus sim (soon to be the new home of Lone Star Ranch).
Abalus, also known as the Island of Amber, is an Open Spaces sim. The sim is shared between the Purple Wyvern group and the Caudra Draconis group. This will soon be the new home location for the Purple Wyvern outlets. Jsindo is staying, alas delegated to second fiddle. This means that the Avendale Ruins location will be for sale soon!
Make a Treasure Chest for the upcoming aquatically themed Isle of Wyrms Summer Festival. The idea being that the hatchies can hunt down the treasure chests, click them and the chest will open to reveal the treasure (and give the hatchie a gift).
The treasure chest itself is based on a stripped down version (from about 16 prims to 3) of Daryth’s treasure chest from one of her building kits. To save prims I decided to move the chest lid instead of having 2 chest lids and swapping them using alpha transparency. The issue with this is that setting location and rotation of a prim in SL can be a headache inducing exercise. SL uses quaternions to specify rotations. Although there are a number of transformation functions to switch to more commonly known units.
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Many products in SL come with a head-up-display or HUD device to control aspects of the product. These range from simple colour changes to the ultra sophisticated multi-tool do-everything type HUDS.
The reasons you might create a HUD is if you want to make some aspect of your project controllable by your customer but don’t want to have to add lots of button prims on the product or have your customer edit notecards.
This tutorial covers some basic concepts in putting together a basic hud, the basic type that simply sends commands for processing in a separate in-world device, but doesn’t show a complete example (I’ll add that if it’s requested, should anyone read this).
More complex devices that might incorporate 2-way communication are beyond this simple tutorial. Read the rest of this entry »
