Poofy Color Cloud

The poofy cloud thing is released. It turns on a cloud when you fly and turns it off when you land.

Poofy Color Cloud on SLExchange

Grappling Hook Price Cut

I decided 650 was just too high, so I dropped it to 450.

Grappling Hook Gun Released!

Finally, finally, finally! I pulled a kind of all-nighter to get this thing ready for the weekend. My goal yesterday was to have it ready by Monday, but I managed to get ahead of myself.

The grappling hook gun is fun. Yes. Very fun. I'm really hoping that it gets a few sales and people choose it over the other couple grappling hook options because of the increased range on this one. Earlier tonight I managed to have an 832 meter grapple successfully. I shot at a raised angle from one corner of a sim and managed to hit a sky box out of sheer luck. ^^

I put the gun at L$650. I think it's a fair price considering the amount of headaches I got from working on it. For more information, IM me (Eyana Yohkoh) or check out the notecard that comes with it that I posted in the description on SLExchange.

<3

grappling hook controls

Okay, so the passthrough thing was something I was overlooking. I figured it out. The gun works. Now all that is left to do is make a hud to switch between short and long range modes (short range mode is 100m, but moves the avatar to the target a bit quicker because of the less steps taken), make some animations and/or poses, and do a little re-texturing.

Grappling Hook Update Update (whee redundant)

I searched the SL forums and apparently there's a problem with multiple attachments taking controls or releasing controls (thread). A fix was to allow it to be passthrough controls or something which of course I've never done nor do I know what it means. A quick wiki search returned zero help as well. Meh. Guess I'll do some more searching.

Grappling Hook Update

The basic grappling hook is a fairly simple script up until a certain point. If you want your grappling hook to move the avatar more than about 65 meters you have to add a bunch of frustrating math and loops to the script. The limit of using llMoveToTarget was my first hurdle to overcome. It took several tries to get it right and I kind of got it right by mistake. Whee!

So getting around the llMoveToTarget limit raised my grappling hook range to 100m, the range of a shout. More bits and pieces were added and now I have it not relying on shout, but the actual grappling takes a slightly longer amount of time to start moving the avatar, so I think I'll add a short range bullet and long range bullet version to it.

Anyway, it definitely works. I grappled successfully to a distance of over 400 meters so far. Of course, it won't work across sims, but it is definitely sim-wide.

Another problem I have is with permissions—I think. If I start flying with my flight assist enabled it completely overrides the grappling hook permissions or something. Basically the problem is the gun loses functionality after flight assist is activated. I tried having it request permissions again after holstering and unholstering again, but that doesn't seem to work. I guess it's going to take some more guesswork and testing different options to see what will make it keep working.

Calendar Woes

I'm trying to get the feed to my new google calendar working, but it only wants to show one event even though I've told it to show a maximum of five. Of course, there are only two events scheduled so far, but it should be showing both.

Maybe I'm missing something simple. I'll leave it for now and hope it magically fixes itself, but it's more likely tomorrow I will need to figure it out.

o.O

I'm sorry for the awful writing in that last post. Meh.

Guns and Gadgets

I finished a neat, poofy cloud that activates when the avatar is in flight and it has a very neat way to change the start color and end color of the particle effect--at least I thought it was neat. The color changing part of the script took less time than the particles and was so much easier than making a huge list of menus and colors. It also doesn't require any typing of vectors or RGB values or whatever, so it's really easy to get exactly the shade you want.

Also, today I figured out a grappling hook script. After a slight bit of frustration--mostly me typing things incorrectly or skipping steps--it works perfectly. I may tweak the actual numbers in the script a little more after I get a prim gun and hook built. Right now it's just a cube firing a sphere out and then the avatar goes shooting across to where the sphere "hooks" to. I think I'm going to make the weapon a multi-function gun, so not only will it be a grappling hook, but it will be able to launch smoke grenades, flares, and.. hmm. I don't know what else really. I don't want it to have annoying griefing-like settings. I should put some silly things in there too.

New Items, New Store Location

I bought a larger piece of land to place my main store finally. It's up and advertised in Places search now (search Eyana's or follow this slurl). I also added a new kimono in different color styles that's just kind of been sitting around in my inventory for a while.

Image spam:





Also I made a neato fishing boat (at least I think it's neato) several days ago:



I've a lot of stuff going on in RL, and my brain is just frazzled lately. Raar.

Slacker Days

I stayed up very late last night and somewhere around 6am I decided to have some wine. It was very nice and relaxing, but I did get a little tipsy and I skipped classes today because of it. That's definitely something I shouldn't do very often.

A dream I had was centered around Second Life. I had some kind of vague conversation with Felidae in the dream and then I went on a sort of adventure to try to gather new players to Felidae's Aztec temple so they could be sacrificed in her name. It was very, very odd and I'm certain a shrink would have some interesting things to say about it.

New Items and SLExchange!

I finally took snapshots and made vendors for my jumpsuits. I'm not sure why I'm calling them jumpsuits instead of catsuits. Oh well. I suppose it doesn't matter. They're sold individually or in a special E-Pack that contains all of them at a discounted price.

I've also put my items for sale on SLExchange. I'm glad I finally did it. It was relatively easy to set up, but it did take a bit longer than I expected it would to add images for them all. I don't shop on SLExchange very often since it's difficult to find something unless it's a very specific item and having to browse through so many things is very, very bad for my pocketbook.

On a side note, SheOfTheSourSnailsSuckers Sellery released her Moonlit Pond katana for the Shunrai Combat System. It is a very well-crafted weapon and just looks fantastic!

If I can find a link to it then I'll update the post so everyone can go get it.

Obstacle Course Obstacles (awful title)

Yesterday evening and night I spent most of my time on Second Life working on an obstacle course. I doubt it'll end up being useful for any sort of training, but it is kind of fun. It's mostly finished, apart from texturing. By "mostly finished" I mean that the basic course is almost ready for use. I'm going to add some checkpoints and time tracker scripts so it'll report your time. Eventually I'll have a time tracker for each of my courses and a top ten list and... ugh. There's too much stuff I want to do.

The most annoying part thus far has been getting the falling bridges to work properly. In theory it seemed a great idea, but it's really quite a pain to acheive any sort of consistency with it. The prims used for the bridge become physical when an avatar runs over them. That sounds easy enough, right? The prims can't be flush against each other though or Second Life counts them as 'interpenetrating' which essentially means it won't enable physics. Okay, so I thought the easy solution for the bridge was to simply put a very small gap between the prims. That works insofar as enabling physics goes. If the bridge is a perfectly horizontal bridge the one millimeter gaps cause the running avatar to trip and go hurtling forward uncontrollably.

Argh.

I ended setting the bridges at a ramped angle. The sliding issue doesn't seem to occur quite as frequently, but it still happens often enough to be an annoyance. Another thing that occurs is sometimes when the avatar jumps off of one of the falling prims, for some reason, the jumper flies very far up into the air gaining at least an extra fifty meters or so higher than a normal jump. I suppose that's just a quirk of Second Life physics and nothing can be done about it.

I could change the falling bridges to just change positions after collision and not enable physics at all, but where's the fun in that? In the earlier tests of the script I had something like that and discarded the idea.

How badly broken will the the falling bridges be when I log on to Second Life today? There are a couple kinks in the resetting script (I think—I couldn't see why it wasn't working completely last night). Sometimes the prims reset to the incorrect positions. Oh well. Another thing to figure out.

The rest of the obstacle course functions fairly well. It's fun being smooshed by the chompers and flying off the course. I need to add some particle effects and squishy sounds for that.

That will come later. I had enough stress today that I don't want to look at scripts yet. I think I'm going to go see if I can find something to chop.

Chop chop.

Second Life Videos

About a month or so ago I recorded a few duels, put them to music, and uploaded them (link). There are three videos—two of the them are videos of my good friend Surfer Ryder and me sparring with Combat: Samurai Island katanas, and the third video is just me operating a camera (somewhat clumsily) while watching two other friends practice. The latter video was my first attempt at recording movies in Second Life.

About a week ago I began to try to get the videos to work on my television in Second Life. This was very frustrating for me because I used Windows Movie Maker to create the movies but Second Life needed a different format hosted somewhere online. The hosting part was easy to do: I just searched the Second Life forums and found a place called blip.tv that allows videos to be uploaded in a wide variety of formats, allows the use of the files that are uploaded directly instead of forcing users to go to their website to view them, and the website's services are free.

The difficulty I ran into was converting the .wmv file to an acceptable Second Life format. The machanima forums for Second Life did have a little bit of information so I tested different software to convert. My first attempts, and of these there were several, I tried converting to the mp4 format. This sort of worked, but not well enough. Every attempt to convert from wmv straight to mp4 had audio syncing issues in Second Life: the audio was either behind or ahead of the video by a considerable amount.

This was an annoying and lengthy testing process and I should have asked for help sooner—I can be a stubborn girl sometimes and I really wanted to figure it out by myself—but the process of converting, uploading, and then dashing off to the Second Life television set was lengthy and lagging my computer badly. It probably didn't help that I was trying to actually do things in Second Life while the files were converting and uploading. Oopsie. Anyway, I finally posted a topic at the Second Life forums requesting help (my very first post on any of the Second Life forums) and gave up for the night.

So essentially I use two bits of software to get it working in Second Life. The first is Videora iPod Converter to convert from wmv to the Quicktime MOV format. After that I use 3GP Converter to get it into this weird format I've never heard of before but is useable by Second Life and a much smaller file size than the Quicktime MOV format. There is a loss of quality, but I still think it looks just fine on my Second Life television.

So I didn't figure it out all by myself, but I did give it a worthy try. I'm very glad to have it working.

I am definitely going to make more movies. I thought about making a C:SI and SCS training video series. That might be fun.

Blogness!

Okay, I decided to start my own blog to keep track of things and Second Life and to hopefully become a useful tool for when (not if, but when!) my store takes off a bit more successfully. I'm not sure how exactly I go about advertising a blog. I'll probably just put the link in my profile and possibly make a group for my store (finally).

Mostly I'm doing this right now because I've nothing better to do and Second Life is currently down for maintenance.

I only have a few things in my store so far: nine or so scripted umbrellas or parasols, three kimono, four screens, and my C:SI and SCS training tools.

I think I'll end this post now and maybe make a couple more about particular topics to keep things slighlty more organized for archiving.