Scripting

Kelly Linden thinks tomorrow (Tuesday) the Le Tigre update will roll the main channel. Chances are good it will work this time. It contains a large number of fixes and some improvements.

Once it rolls to the main channel there will probably be no further upgrades until next year. After this week Second Life enters a no change window and a number of Lindens take holiday.

Vehicles

Havok and script functions are being looked at to improve movement in SL. In the wiki is a function… well more of a subroutine… warppos() that handles movement over more than 10m. Some consideration is being given to making the function a built-in function, may be llWarpPos(). No promises.

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I suspect most of you know Linden Realms opened to the general public in Second Life. If you have been to a Realm you may have noticed new features. Teleporting has changes in that you walk into a Portal and it will teleport you into the game. This is a teleport on collision feature. It is a feature we have in OpenSim scripting. It is coming to Second Life. Exactly when or how it will work is unclear. The Lindens are considering how the feature can be used by griefers and how they may limit its abuse.

There is all so the HUD that attaches automatically. Many of us are pretty sure we do not want mall owners attaching shopping HUD’s to us when we visit a mall. So, the auto-attach HUD feature is also being considered in terms of griefing.

There are also auto-run animations. Obviously those can be used by griefers to be annoying. So, those have to be considered in terms of griefing.

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This week Kelly Linden’s Scripting meeting covered a couple of interesting things.

Region Crossings

The server update with the region crossing infrastructure improvements did not make it to the main grid because of problems, something with vehicle crossing issues. Check the Server news later this week.

llSetKeyframedMotion( list keyframes, list options );

This function has run into some use problems. It seems there is some problem moving numeric data between SL and Havok that results in serious numeric round off errors. The problem causes objects being moved to drift out of the intended position.

See llSetKeframedMotion() for the scripting details.

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There is some news from the Scripting User Group. Meaning something I find interesting.

Le Tigre Oddities

The current update (week 44) running in Le Tigre is showing some scripting oddities. Most are around scripts that use the llTakeControls(). Kelly says it look like the control events are firing too often. So, if you are trying to steer a vehicle things are going awry.

Paraphrasing Kelly said something like: We put a cap on the total time the scripts for an agent can trigger. This is the time outside normal script time. When you press a key we give your scripts, that have control, an extra chance to run. This happens in ‘agent time’. To prevent abuse we added a cap per framer per agent (1ms per frame per agent). It is pretty large right now (it is adjustable and we may drop it later). Disabling scripts on a parcel only stops the script time block. The changes make it so you get at most 1 extra script run per frame.

Anything that adds more data to serialize per script is difficult. There is some potential to use a lot of script time but the recent changes on Le Tigre limit that severely.

Kelly says, “1ms is generally enough time to run ~20 scripts. More if they are ‘quick’.”

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There was an informative discussion in the Scripting Group. The scripting group’s general discussion meetings are good meetings for advanced LSL programmers to attend.

Operators Precedence

If you don’t understand precedence, sorry Google for an explanation. (LSL Precedence) It was brought up that the operators || and && should have equal precedence. Kelly Linden conformed that they are not equal.

Estate Owners Access List

The update running on the release channels will likely make it to the main channel this week. This will give residents the ability to use the new LSL functions discussed in the Server Update News here. ( llManageEstateAccess(integer action, key id) ).

The idea behind this function is it will make it easier for estate managers to manage ban lists.

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