December 2006

A weakness has overcome me recently, dear reader, whereby I have been drawn away from respectable life, the day-to-day affairs of the world - my profession, even - and into the shadowy Other World, wherein one may play at having a “real job”, though it is, truth be told, a poor imitation. After all, in the real world one picks an occupation which one enjoys participating in and produces items for the amusement of both creator and purchaser; resources and economic potential are distributed on a basis of mutual exchange of efforts.

In this Other World - bear with me, it is somewhat fantastical - certain folk are in possession of the means of production, and one must perform bizarre rituals to placate them and gain their favour, which is required to survive. I have heard such things referred to as “grinding” and it seems an appropriate term; carrying out tasks which one knows are pointless brings to mind the grinding of the gears of some immense, irrelevant machine. However, one can get into a state of mind where one is prepared to fritter away all the hours of the day not required for sleep upon such endeavours, and achieve nothing of note in the Real World.

Quite frankly I tire of this “game” - though its irrational adherents deny that it is any such thing - and I have made a personal decision to concentrate a little more on what is important. Recently I have been constructing - never one to actually produce something on time for any festive season one cares to name, but there will be snow on the ground for some while yet - a triple-barrelled Snowball Cannon, as well as an attachment which makes one vulnerable to the excessive chills of snowball assault.

(It must be said that somewhat exotic power sources were required to construct a machine which not only sucked in water vapour from the atmosphere but also froze it into ballistically-suitable projectiles - but the snowballs emitted are only slightly radioactive, and pose no real threat from brief exposure, except if one were to eat them, which I would not advise.)

The snowball victim attachment in fact detects any collision with an object having the last seven letters of its name “nowball”, and with each one increases one’s cold percentage, so that one moves from “Toasty Warm” to “Frozen Stiff” if one is not careful to evade such projectiles. This system allows for any sort of snowballs to be thrown, as long as, well, they are actually called “snowball” or similar. The Cold percentage can be reduced by moving through boxes of warming brandy.

The basic principle of this attachment is that it takes one’s movement controls when one reaches “Frozen Stiff”, and refuses to do anything with them, or pass them on. Thus one is paralysed. In addition to this there is a signal sent on a particular channel, which scripts can listen for to prevent their users from firing snowballs etc when they are frozen.

The system has been tested this afternoon and seems robust enough. A scoreboard prim is available to keep count of who has been frozen solid and how many times. I also have a less formidable Snowball Rifle, without quite the engine capacity of the larger version, and a simple hand-held Thrower of Snowballs (at low velocity and with a far lower rate of throwing than either of the preceding devices) will be available free, gratis and for nothing.

One issue perhaps of interest to Scripters is that the “cold victim” attachment, when taking controls, at times interferes with existing attachments that have previously taken controls before it is attached. For instance, if one holds a snowball rifle, then attaches the victim cube, occasionally, when frozen and then released by time, one will then be unable to fire the weapon. This is not very convenient and has no rational reason behind it that I can see, though if one attaches the cube then the weapon (or detaches and re-attaches the weapon) it does not seem to occur.

(Please note that none of the above are immediately available - I will post when I have actually put them up for sale.)

(Addendum 2006-12-31: blast it, due to everything I’ve been unable to get the things out this weekend; I will attempt to finally do so tomorrow.)

I have, unfortunately, identified an issue with the transferrable versions of the following items:

- Beehive launcher
- .45 Shansi
- Derringer
- .455 Webley

which would cause Operational Issues were one to actually transfer them.

Clearly this is not acceptable and I apologise. If any purchasers would care to drop their copies of these weapons upon me, I will send back two copies of the fixed version at my earliest opportunity.

I confess to being a little tired, thus I will merely provide you with two small photographic offerings this evening.

I usually have some mainland property at any particular point; I believe I mentioned my piece of land in the Alua region previously, and the above is its current appearance.

Alua is a pleasant, contoured area where I have a riverside plot, and, by God, if that is not an opportunity to dispose of hazardous waste I’m no engineer. Visitors are advised to leave the area of the outlet pipe pointing towards the water at some speed if they hear the warning whistle.

I shall be adding more and more here I expect; I am building in a style which is not, technically, low-prim, more low-prim-density I suppose, where each component (wall, doorway, outhouse) uses fewer of the basic shapes beloved of us all than it might, in order that I may go on to add more and different elements, and end up with some enormous rambling structure that makes no sense whatsoever - or appears to make no sense, I might add, there is of course hidden purpose here. How could one ever imagine otherwise? For shame!

I popped briefly to Port Caledon after a report that a tram was misbehaving, ready to administer discipline (trams, being what they are, do not respond to belt, cane or paddle, and hydraulics are often necessary) and found not only an absence of misbehaviour (resulting in a pat on the boiler and an encouraging word for the tram concerned) but also…

…an absence of Caledon I. Above you may see that I stand on the edge of Port Caledon, wondering exactly where the rest of the roadway has gone. I found no real answer to that question, but given that I have heard no-one else complain about Caledon I’s absence, I assume that it is a transitory thing.

One can become a little blasé regarding the appearance and disappearance of arbitrary land masses on the Grid. “Oh, several thousand tons of earth, water and plywood appear to be missing… ho hum.” Oh, to be rid of the jaundiced, jaded eye of the prematurely-aged Veteran! (An eye both jaundiced and jaded does admittedly have a pleasant greenish-yellow tinge.) If only it were possible to see the world once more through the marvelling eyes of a freshly-minted Ruth.

Beginning a piece of writing by apologising for not having written previously is most appallingly gauche, and you will not, dear reader, find me doing such a thing. I would like instead to add a few observations regarding the latest Scripting Abilities sent our way by the beloved Laboratory, in particular those dealing with Parcels.

It has always been a source of much irritation to me when constructing Automatic Vehicles that they were unable to check before entering a particular area whether they were likely to vanish into the Mists of the Asset Server, roaming around and mournfully ringing their little bells until finding their way back into my Lost And Found compartment, to join their fellows. In fact, so many trams have entered my Lost And Found that they have actually created their own system of government, which pretends to be a parliamentary democracy but is in fact a poorly-disguised and oppressive oligarchy that keeps plywood cubes as a de facto slave class. I really must go in there at some point and unlink a few of the most prominent, pour encourager les autres.

Nowadays, however, one is able to head off any attempts at self-organisation by the contents of one’s inventory by careful use of the functions llGetParcelMaxPrims and llGetParcelPrimCount. By checking the path ahead at regular intervals to see whether the entrance of the vehicle into a parcel ahead will push said parcel’s prim count over its allotted limit, one can see when a course would lead to disappearance, and make alternative arrangements. The precise nature of the arrangements are of course a slight problem, but I would think that such things as moving ahead using “WarpPos” or perhaps returning home would work. A proper automaton would look for an alternative route, but public transport is meant to be predictable - one cannot have trams deciding that they prefer taking shortcuts, or would rather take a turn around the lake to feed the ducks, leaving potential passengers abandoned, confused and cross. I have not actually yet implemented this but plan to do so when I am able.

Whilst on the subject, it also means that the “re-rezzers” (which recreate trams and balloons which meet a sticky end) can now check that the parcel that they are on is actually capable of supporting the vehicle to be rezzed at all. Currently they cannot, as I have previously mentioned, and must attempt to do so and then check whether they have been successful, which is wasteful and annoying.

One function with which I have been actively playing is llGetParcelDetails, which enables one at last to actually see what parcel one is on. It is not of course perfect. The owner and group functions return a key rather than a name, and as others of the scripting persuasion will know it is a pain, and a slow pain, to get the names of agents from keys - and, I believe, impossible to get the names of groups from their keys, though doubtless some young thing will come along and show me to be an ignoramus on that score.

In most of Caledon, the parcels are deeded to groups, and as I test most of these gadgets in Caledon I was mostly unable to get any owner names at all. Some of the most recent areas such as Caledon Victoria City use the “covenant” system which does mean that the tenant is listed as the owner - all well and good but still a pain.

That aside, I made myself a device which can be used to create a map of the parcels in a particular sim, something which is not at the moment accessible from the world map, which, while much prettier than anything I can do, just shows construction and terrain rather than boundaries. If you would care to visit the following:

Second Life Sim Parcel Maps

you will perhaps see what I mean, though I do warn those of a delicate disposition that the colours are not perhaps the most aesthetic.

At this point you may wish to skip to the end of this piece… there are two sides to this, as usual: the sim mapping device within SL, and the sim mapping server upon my Aethernet Box. The former divides the map up into four metre chunks and retrieves the details from the middle of each spot in sequence - so, it starts at (2,2,0), then (4,2,0) and so on, until it gets to (254,254,0).

It goes by rows - the data for a row are transmitted as a series of records of where a parcel starts and what its name and description are. So, if Parcel A starts at the bottom left corner (2,2,0) and continue on to (62,2,0), with Parcel B starting at (66,2,0) and continuing for the rest of that Y-position, it will send to the map server the information

row,0
0,Parcel A
16,Parcel B

The numbers here refer to the particular 4m square rather than the exact X or Y position of its centre. If a row is actually the same as the last one, the scanner sends nothing at all, which cuts down on the amount of data to be sent.

This information is stored in a temporary file once received, and once the entire sim has been scanned it puts it all together to create a (very messy and inefficient) page displaying the map. There is obviously more to the technical side than this but I am starting to bore even myself and will thus cut this a little short; suffice to say that any half-competent apprentice in the field of PHP could do such a thing, it is really just opening and writing to files and creating arrays and all that malarkey.

One thing that does interest me is that the system stores every map rather than overwriting the existing one for a sim each time, which would enable a historically- or research-minded person to see how the occupancy and usage of a sim has changed over time. (There are no archive pages or such at the moment, I only made it yesterday, but it is part of the plan to put them in.) I was considering setting up the scanner to, say, do a scan of Caledon every week - the scanner itself could be made to move about between sims, it does have to be in the same sim as that which it is scanning.

Originators and propagators of Urban Myths upon the Grid will be most disappointed to hear that there is still no function which enables the creation of “land scanners” which allow automatic purchasing of land set for sale at L$1, since there is still no way to tell what the purchase price is or if the thing is for sale at all, let alone buy it automatically.

The practice of Land Swooping is as far as I can see a purely human-powered endeavour, with some odious weasel sitting there clicking “Search” again and again, like an urchin waiting on the street, watching for passers-by who unwisely reveal their Purses, Wallets or Mobile Telegraphic Equipment, whereupon the little beast will swoop in and relieve them of their valuables. In the Other World of course the thief does not usually hang around to taunt the victim and tell them they deserved it, since such practices are illegal there and invite Attention from the Constabulary or even Immediate Retribution by the Injured Party.