Those who publish pieces regarding Second Life on the internet will be interested to learn of a service known as SLurl, which allows one to easily link to a location in Second Life and have the viewer taken to a map of it and given the option to visit, whether they have the Second Life client installed or not.
I consider this a most useful service to provide, and a simple SLurl is just of the form:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Acontia/56/186/86/
which one would hope that anyone could construct. However, the building of a customised SLurl that utilises the full range of other options is somewhat time-consuming and a little daunting to the novice.
To save time in this matter, I have created what seems to me a useful web page that allows one to simply fill in the blanks on a form and produce a SLurl. It is called SLurlBuilder. Please feel free to use it as desired.
If anyone was concerned with the progress of my paper aeroplane investigations, I can announce that I did, in the end, come up with a design for the aeroplanes that seems to provide reasonable results. Rather than calculating the angle of attack each time, I simply assumed that it would always be zero given that the plane does turn to face its direction of movement anyway.
The plane now basically works with lift and drag, both proportional to the velocity. Lift applies in its local Z-axis, and drag in its local X-axis. Using llSetForce with the local flag set really does save a lot of time as far as calculating the correct co-ordinates is concerned.
The resulting item is now available at Ordinal Laboratories, but one can also scan the aeroplane code here and now should one wish (pretty colourised HTML version).
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March 7, 2006 at 8:29 am
Torley
I just wanted to say, THANX FO’ THA SLURLBUILDER. Most graciously appreciated.
March 7, 2006 at 11:28 am
Ordinal Malaprop
My pleasure! Thinking on the matter I should now link to the more pleasantly-designed version on the Slurl site.
March 29, 2006 at 6:27 pm
President Leechman
How about having it blown by the wind?
March 29, 2006 at 8:04 pm
Ordinal Malaprop
I did consider it, but it makes it rather hard to actually aim the thing. I might put it into a new version at some point.
December 28, 2006 at 1:25 am
Windyweather VanAlten
Recently tripped across your musings and found them tremendously interesting. I shall consider them further at a later time.
However, I thought you might like to know that your link to the SLurlBuilder page is broken.
Cherio,
wwv
December 28, 2006 at 3:26 pm
Ordinal Malaprop
You’re quite correct, I apologise - I used to only have a Geocities area in which to store such things, but then the SLurl people adopted my SLurlbuilder page, and it now resides on their server. I have suitably amended the link.
March 9, 2007 at 8:42 am
Viajero Pugilist
Can’t wait to visit your establishment and ride your tram. I love your site.
Sorry to bother you with a problem I’m experiencing, but I’ve searched quite a bit for an answer but have so far come up empty-handed.
I cannot load any Slurl map in either FF or IE. The frame where the map should be is always blank (white). I’ve tried possibly 50 in the past couple of months from many sources without any success.
JavaScript is enabled (I use NoScript, a Firefox plugin), I have a clean machine, NAV 2003 with secondlife.com allowed, the latest Adobe plugins, and this occurs with no other site.
Would you possibly consider what might be wrong, or alternately steer me to a person who may have specific knowledge regarding my predicament?
March 9, 2007 at 3:41 pm
Ordinal Malaprop
Well, hm… I have had blank white maps appearing recently, but it turned out to be due to the fact that I was sending… now let me get this right, I was sending parameters which were URL-encoded but not HTML-entity-encoded. Having a ‘”‘ character in these confused the whole map and resulted in nothing appearing.
However, if you have been trying different slurls, I am a bit lost. If you cannot see something like this, well, the only thing I can think of is to try on an alternative connection, or remove various plugins and bits and replace them gradually, which I imagine you will have thought of already. It should require nothing more than Javascript. Have you tried using Opera?
June 5, 2007 at 7:24 am
Feldspar Millgrove
I can’t get any maps to come up on slurl.com, either, using either Firefox or Safari. Used to work…
June 5, 2007 at 7:28 am
Feldspar Millgrove
Opera 9.01 doesn’t make maps for me on SLURL anymore, either. And if you click on the “View this location in an interactive map”, it seems to do nothing. The teleport button does launch SL and take me where I expect it to, but no maps.
June 5, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Ordinal Malaprop
Yes, unfortunately the maps have been turned off on SLURLs for the time being - see this issue.
October 28, 2007 at 6:41 am
SuezanneC Baskerville
In the phrase “which allows once to easily”, did your mean to write “one” instead of “once”?
October 29, 2007 at 8:34 pm
Ordinal Malaprop
I did indeed, and shall edit it, thank you.