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.