Today Kelly Linden had a meeting in Ambleside, AGNI. It is sort of the Scripting part of Content Creation/Mesh Import/Scripting Group.
LLCastRay()
This is a new feature being added to the Linden Scripting Language (LSL). Many scripters in SL are eagerly awaiting its roll to the main grid. Right now we rez and throw prims to simulate bullets fired from a gun. While effective it is not the most efficient way to simulate bullets. In laggy sim’s one can literally walk on bullets at the sim edge.
Kelly is hoping to see this feature make it to the main grid soon. Exactly when is unclear. It seems to be wrapped in the Mesh release. His advice is to add a request for the release date information to the Mesh Meeting Agenda. I have to wonder if all the various things wrapped in the mesh release is suggesting the Lindens are planning some big news media splash.
Ongoing Scripting Work
Not much going on. Kelly has been working with the Mesh team to get the Prim Equivalency equation working, which is now more or less being renamed Resource Cost. (See: Mesh Costs Explained) The result is much of the work on scripting is sort of on hold.
Mono2 is hoped to ship soon too. Kelly is tidying up making sure Mono2 is ready for release. We may see it this week. If not, them probably next week. But, no one can be sure. Mesh Prep may out rank Mono2 in the priority cue. The pressure on mesh project hitting it roll out date is high. So, Mono2 may get bumped.
Mono2 has been running in the Le Tigre Release Channel this past week. So, if Mono2 has held up and passed testing it has a good chance of being rolled to the main grid.
JIRA item SCR-92 is pending. (LSL functions for MESH prim type) If you script you know there are functions that allow you to manipulate prims, their color, size, position, and more. This JIRA entry is about getting similar functions for mesh objects.
Kelly points out all the features in this JIRA are unlikely to get implemented. It would be better to put new feature requests in separate JIRA items. That makes it easier for the Lindens to work with them, which makes it more likely they will deal with the requests.
Kelly makes and interesting statement about mesh.
Meshes are static assets. They behave more like textures than objects in many ways which will make manipulating them more difficult.
PRIM_OMEGA is a property being added to the ll(Set/Get)PrimitiveParams functions. I don’t see it in the wiki yet. Kelly says it will come out in a Server-Maint. release, possibly this one or the next one. The change here is rather than OMEGA being tied to a script, it will be a part of the prim’s attributes. This means when it is attached to a script that if you have an omega rotation running, the rotation stops when you remove the script. With the new omega you can remove the script and the omega rotation continues.
SVC-129 – Need PRIM_LOCAL_ROTATION and PRIM_LOCAL_POSITION to complement llGetLocalRot() and llGetLocalPos() – This is a JIRA item that will likely get split into two items. Today the JIRA was fixed as there was some confusion about open and close status.
Chat
Kelly had a few words about recent changes to chat, well… actually group chat. Basically an iteration of what I wrote in #SL Chat Update.
Things to Come
Yes, there are things to come. But, Kelly is not talking.
Next week’s meeting will be Monday at 9 AM SLT in Ambleside, AGNI.
It is hard to see how LLCastRay() will replace bullets. Physical properties are important for bullets, both for damage and for trajectory (most bullets have drop, some amount of reaction to gravity).
In most simple shooter games there are no projectiles. A ray cast type function is used. SL is unique in how damage is measured. Even swords in SL use projectiles to register damage. The resources needed to rez temp prims with scripts is huge. If you have been in a combat sim you know how 5 or 10 people opening up with automatic weapons brings the sim to its knees.
Distances are so short in in SL ballistic drop is too small to matter. A 256 meter sim is less than 900 feet. Besides it is all math in any case. There is no real thing making up a bullet in a virtual world. To simplify the math few games take gravity acting on the projectile into account.
Everybody else does it is not an excuse for SL to take a giant step backwards in realism.
I own and operate a shooting range, you would be amazed at the amount of bullet drop designed into most SL guns, even over distances like 50M.
🙂 I would be surprised… however drop has to be coded into the gun/bullet in all events and can be coded into any gun whether it uses llCastRay() or not. Removing the prim and script that has to rez is going to reduce lag in combat sims and that is not something I see as a step backward.
I’ll ask a couple of my friends that make weapons how they are going to handle availability of llCastRay().