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Most Dangerous Calendars
Concerns of Lag and Presence have been frustrating me a little when it comes to Building of recent days, but I have been able at least to achieve a few things.
The first is yet another one of my Aethernetical Nonsense Works - a little thing which I call "Eventcal". As you will know, Great and Terrible Lab has blessed us all with a little shared Diary of Events, in which anyone may place items and which anyone may read; it is, however, a bit tricky to use at times, and some of us would wish to use it in concert with our own Diaries (Aethernetical or Otherwise) more easily.
At the moment one may view these Events outside of the Grid, but I have found it more convenient to view and note them using such other things as "Google Calendar". With this in mind I produced a minor Aethernet Automaton which, when asked, rifles through the afore-linked section for all of the events assigned to a particular category occurring in the next seven days and gives them to you in a format that is generally Machine-Legible (named "iCal").
The upshot of all of this is that this thing allows one to subscribe to a particular Events category with Google Calendar, the Apple program iCal, Outlook (I believe - I have not tried this) or in fact anything which understands this widely-accepted way of sharing calendars. If this sounds like something of interest to you, please visit the Eventcal page for more information as to how to use it yourself.
The second is a more general project; my experiences with constructing my Galvanic Swordstick recently, and certain issues arising regarding our Regrettably Inevitable Conflict (mostly Standards) left me wishing that I - and others - were able to simply use some form of Generally Compatible System of Personal Combat. When I speak of this I am really talking about something along the lines of the systems mentioned in my Standards post, in other words, a script which anyone might drop into a hand or other weapon, control via Link Messages and use to Engage others similarly equipped.
I considered a wide-scale, "persistent" system of some sort, which would keep details on one's health and injuries and so on in an Aethernet Data Archive tied to one's identity, but this struck me as missing the point somewhat - whilst it would be an interesting system and likely diverting in the long term for a certain subset of duellists (and perhaps something I might work on out of interest's sake) the sort of communities where this is useful are fairly uncommon, usually have their own systems already and are not ones in which I live.
For most potential combatants it is quite enough to have the ability to have occasional battles with similarly-equipped people, without having to either have the power to create, or risk entering, a Combat Zone. Furthermore, a persistent system might give the wrong impression of Caledon, which is a mostly very peaceful place; I do not wish to have random folk accosting me for martial purposes, myself.
At the moment, the system works on a sensor and chat basis, with a central script in each weapon that, when activated:
- announces when the wearer has activated or deactivated the system;
- receives requests via link message to strike with a certain force - each one has an appropriate time delay, so that one may launch many quick but light attacks, or one slow but very dangerous one, or something in-between;
- senses when a target should be hit on such an attack, and broadcasts a message saying that an appropriate hit has been scored;
- receives hit messages and depletes health accordingly;
- when the wearer's health has been depleted to zero, stops itself working for a certain time and holds the wearer to their position (also starting an appropriate "fall down and do not move" animation) until such time as they have recovered, currently thirty seconds.
One thing which is also a possibility is that it will be able to affect inanimate objects containing appropriate scripts; something which I find useful during the testing period.
I shall be experimenting further with this, and releasing it for general use once things have been completed. Unfortunately, to prevent Cheating and Skullduggery, the script must remain Un-Modifiable (though free to copy and transfer) but the basic principles will certainly be outlined for those wishing to learn from my poor efforts.
A silly question, ma'am, but would this system work for ranged combat as well? I assume the ability to attack inanimates would translate into possible avatar vs. vehicular combat, correct?
Waiting with utmost anticipation!
I'm deeply sorry about the fact that I cannot write in a more proper manner. Nonetheless, Madamigella Ordinal, I would like to point you to this piece of Aethernetical information, where one could see another experimentation with Calendars:
http://tinyurl.com/3ae2ql , or
http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?id=161189&sort=Pictures.PictureI...
It would (there is a range with a hand weapon after all, it is just rather short). However, the issue with longer-ranged combat is that there is no proper way of checking for intervening objects with sensors, which may not be too much of an issue in the sky but which I find a bit daft on the ground. I was thinking of some sort of invisible projectile to check for this, but obviously it would add some complexity to the system.
The issue of being able to attack objects was really regarding being able to break things, or face suitably-scripted automaton foes - a person sitting on a vehicle is considered still a person (and in fact an easier target) and the system would work perfectly well with them. As it is, though, since it is based on attachments, it would not actually be integrated with the vehicle itself.
I am reliably informed that, as far as bladed weapons go, the system of choice it the Safezone Combat System, primarily because of the swords manufactured by ReMzy Andrews. So far they're some of the best looking historical weapons I've seen in SL.
They do indeed seem to be very fine pieces... the problem I have is that there seem to be umpteen different combat systems around, all of them impossible to find and almost always either proprietory or requiring negotiation with the developer or something like that.
My intention here is to provide one script which can be dropped into any modifiable weapon and used straight away in concert with anyone else's. I am aware that the basic concept of sensor-based weaponry is not at all unusual and has been done before hundreds of times (including by myself) but in the absence of any open standards that I can find, well, it seems necessary to create one.
(Or perhaps I will forget all about it in a few days, as I have done with so many other projects.)
I love the calendar idea. Sounds really awesome.
I personally have been fairly happy employing eventful.com for my SL event aggregation needs. You can aggregate favorite calendar events into your own groupings, assign them a feed, and download them to various calendar programs. Also it uses the tagging system ,which you can find using the search function. Just search for "tag:discussion" or "tag:sports" and those all come up.
I would certainly look forward to seeing what you come up with. Suppose it's like any software, there are always issues with people wanting to keep some parts proprietary.
I for one would welcome the use of your Webley in an actual combat occasion. I think it's far more stylish than the average colt. And even the longed for holstered Webley is on my waiting list.
Then again having been on the receiving end of you beehive launcher I'm not sure how thrilled I'd be once it was damage enabled :-)
rikomatic: Thank you! I was aware of the Eventful feed, but not that it was tagged by category. Is it possible to subscribe to iCal feeds for individual tags? If so, this has all been a bit of a waste of time :) but at the least, a learning experience.
Mr Pearse: I shall certainly do my best to keep people informed should there be any further developments.
Linden Lab started feeding the events calendar into Eventful last year: http://secondlife.com/knowledgebase/article.php?id=282
Everything is tagged with "secondlife", and the "Venue" field is populated with the sim name from the event listing.
Outstanding job; however, only the "Discussion," "Sports," and "Live Music" calendars load; all the remaining ones time out.
Others seem to be working for me at this moment. Since they rely on secondlife.com being operational to read and parse the calendars, it may be that there was some sort of blip, and only those three were already cached when you tried - it has been up and down (or slow) sometimes with the recent updates.
Mr Mondrian: that is quite true, but getting an iCal feed for a specific category is a little inobvious, and in any case it was good practice for me; I make no claims as to originality.
They are there; however, the server is taking 3 - 4 minutes to deliver the larger calendars (right now, 23-26), and iCal gives up after 30 seconds.
BTW, These will work with Outlook 2007 as Internet Calendars, just enter the URL with "webcal://" in place of "http://".
Have you considered using the FWC system designed by Caledonian Gerami Fizz? Fizzworks weapons and the system they use have just been upgraded I am told, and they are the standard for 19th Century sims such as Tombstone and Steelhead. The systems work with firearms as well as some meelee and ranged primitive weapons.
~Qli
I would, but it is not an open system and I do not have access to it. The system which I propose would be usable by anyone who simply dropped the appropriate script into a device, of any sort, activated by simple link messages.
Mr Bertrand: it should only need to create the page once per hour, and after that should cache it and make it available instantly. Setting the frequency to every half hour should solve that. If not there is something wrong I think and I will look into it.
Unfortunately, every time it recreates the calendar, it _will_ take a long time - it has to look forward seven days, with a page for each day, and parse two different pages for every event on each of those days. To reduce this would either require direct access to the data or radically simplifying the listings, down to name, start time, host and day (and perhaps a link to further information).
Hmm... I'm all for opening up my system (in the way Ms. Malaprop suggests... no-modify), if a way can be found to both prevent cheating, AND allow for flexibility in weapon choices. I imagine a single script would not be able to serve as both knife and rifle without some intermediate configuration. Even the ammunition capacity of a shotgun can become a cheating element, if it requires no reloading.
I tried a configurable-by-notecard approach some time ago, but the outcry from those who didn't understand proper syntax was enough to make me take it off the market. Maybe it's time I tried again.
I have not really given a lot of thought to this recently, I must confess, but I was just composing an entry on my initial experiences of and experiments with certain "RP" combat systems, specifically DCS, which might be of interest here. It is a pity that I don't really have the time to invest in actively participating in their overall use, but I think it is the closest to a standard that I have yet seen....
Even with the calendar cached on your end those larger ones (22-29) are still taking 2 - 3 minutes for the server to respond with a document, making it impossible to load into Apple iCal, and Google Calendar responds after about 10 seconds that it can't load the URL. My solution was to set up a cron job to retrieve them with curl every hour, on the half hour, to my local drive and then use phpicalendar to read them; or to load them in korganizer on a Linux desktop; the curl output is how I saw that it took 2 - 3 minutes for the 20s calendars (except 25, which is usually empty). Unfortunately with Apple iCal there's no way to force a calendar to accept if the URL takes too long.
2-3 minutes? That must be a technical issue. The cached versions should be delivered in seconds at the most.
The major issue in general is the caching process, as it holds up requests. Rather lazily I have not implemented it independently to the delivery. It should be an entirely independent process and just update the caches when it's done. I'll see what I can do.