Progress(?)

I'm unlikely to be posting all that much in the near future...

The obvious reason is, I am just getting back into SL and will need to spend time catching up with stuff, and therefore actually doing said stuff rather than talking about it.

But the real reason is, as I look at the evening news and see soaring petrol prices, show trials of dissidents in Moscow, police gunning down miners in South Africa, and the search going on for the Moors Murderers' last victim... the real reason is clearly that somebody has wound the universe's clock back to about 1970, and therefore the Internet has not yet been invented.

If you are reading this, welcome to the temporal paradox.  Goodnight.

Bloodied but still unbowed, sort of

Apparently, "I've fallen and I can't get up" was something deeply hilarious, a few years back.  I never quite got why it was so funny, myself, and having just had my mother in precisely that position, I find it even less amusing than I did to start with.  I'm sure it's just my defective sense of humour, of course.

The fun thing is, I wrenched my back at one stage, lifting her, and was darn near in the same condition myself.

So my activities have been severely curtailed, lately, not just online! - But things improve.  I am able to sit and type comfortably for short periods, and my mother was fit enough yesterday to go to a funeral (not her own). 

They say these things come in threes, don't they?  First a badger eats a junction box and puts my connection out of action (or whatever it was), then my mother's fall, now my back.  Well, hopefully, that is three over and done with and I can get back to normal.... and, once RL is properly sorted out, I can address the SL commitments which have been piling up!

(Neither of us is in any real danger, I hasten to add.  Just massively inconvenienced, and, in my case, slightly woozy still from codeine.)

Anyway, there we are.  Or aren't.  As the case may be.

If it's not one thing, it's another

No sooner do I get back online than my mother has another fall...

She's OK, I think, but I'm snatching time to post this in a tiny bit of a hurry!  Normal service will be resumed.  Promise!

Gagged!

Taking advantage of a brief opportunity (and a public wi-fi hotspot) to post something:  my home Internet connection is out of action, hence my unusual silence!  I'm hoping to be back to normal, or what passes for it, come Monday.  In the meantime, I am stuck in reality.  It's weird...

And, while I'm grumping...

... and inspired by a charmless buffoon who wandered into Oxbridge somewhat before I crashed last night...

If you are looking through the ToS and the local sim rules and plotting very hard to find some course of action which is not technically griefer behaviour - then that in itself is griefer behaviour.

(This particular guy was quite determined to pick some kind of fight.  Fortunately, everybody there, including a sixteen-year-old anime fan, was too mature to fall for it.)

More irritability

My feedback on the second support case I had to raise, to report that I couldn't access the first one.

You will notice that I don't feel my problem was solved, that I was very unsatisfied with the whole business, and - most damningly - that this was what I was expecting.

There are people who make unreasonable demands of LL on a technical level... but, come on, guys, I'm running Windows 7 and Internet Explorer, this is not some obscure custom system, and it is not unreasonable to expect the flippin' support web page to work!

Belt and braces

A while back now I mentioned some problems we were running into with the keyframed movement system.  While this is somewhat improved - possibly as a consequence of the impending arrival of pathfinding on the Grid as a whole - there are still issues, especially with region restarts.  The lifts running up and down my tower in Burroughs still freeze when the region restarts, and are a little erratic in resuming function.

So, by way of experiment, I rigged one to sort itself out when the restart hits.  Basically, this is run off the "changed" event, because one of the things it picks up is the starting up of the region.  (I have an explosive device in Steam SkyCity, in fact, which counts the number of times the sim has restarted.  And then explodes.)  So, this one lift, now, when it detects a restart, shuts down keyframed movement, uses the old warpPos trick to go to its starting point, and then starts keyframing going again.  In theory, then, the next time a restart hits, this thing should go right on moving as normal.

I mentioned all this to Tali, and she said, "WarpPos?  You do know llSetRegionPos is live now, right?"

Well, this is why Tali is an accomplished creator and I am a dumb blonde; yes, I did know, but it had temporarily slipped what passes for my mind.  So I turned back to the lift...

... and I thought to myself, hang on, this is an excellent moment to run some comparisons, here.

WarpPos is not an LSL function, it's a trick developed by sneaky programmer types; it works by calculating a number of steps between where you are and where you want to be, and using llSetPos to move an object along those steps - the trick being that, due to a quirk of the implementation, all these repeated calls to llSetPos are executed in the same physics frame, thus making the transition effectively instantaneous.

The newer llSetRegionPos actually does move an object, straightforwardly and simply, from point A to point B (if both points are in the same region).  So there is not a lot of use for warpPos any more, unless you're going outside a sim... but...

The much-published warpPos user-defined function has an error margin of 0.01 meters.  In the documentation, llSetRegionPos is given an error margin of 0.1 meters.  Now, this may be simply LL covering their backsides with a generous allowance for errors, but - I thought - it might be interesting to see how the two compare in practice.  So I edited a second lift and set that to use llSetRegionPos.

So, it will be interesting to see how the two compare.  The ideal result would be for both lifts to handle the sim restarts normally - but it is possible that, with the wider margin for error, the llSetRegionPos one will drift, gradually, out of position over the course of weeks.  (It is also possible, or even likely, that they will both hit an unsolved keyframing bug and fail to restart properly.  Well, we shall see.)

An experiment in progress!  I may have results in, oooh, a month or two.