Havok4 Beta Grid

After reading a post on the Second Life Blog about the upcoming physics update I decided to go check it out on the Beta Grid. I don't know much about the technicalities about what they are changing but it was mainly this blurb that made me curious:

"Some slight dynamic changes - avatar movements have changed slightly"

Firstly, the spacebar does not work quite like it did before. Previously, you could achieve a bit of a slide across the ground by using the spacebar or in the air. This—although technically a bug—has been used but quite a number of people as part of their fighting style for C:SI and other similar combat systems. The debate over whether or not it is an acceptable action should come to a grinding halt when the Havok4 physics stuff is on the main grid. Spacebar works only to stop the avatar's momentum. It will not give any sort of speed increase whatsoever.

Sliding along the ground does not appear to happen anymore. This was always an annoyance: tripping over a prim and going sliding across half a sim was just annoying. I have not tested this to my satisfaction yet, but a number of perfectly level floors with a prim added that would have normally caused a slide has yet to cause any sort of sliding.

This is good and bad. I'll just have to rewrite a couple of scripts (probably minor changes) to make them work as intended since they were designed with the sliding problem in mind.

There also appears to be a new llMoveToTarget bug introduced. If the avatar is standing still then a llMoveToTarget simply will not work until the avatar starts moving. I need to do more testing for this, but I think applying a small push will help.

Anyway, I'll post more if I figure anything out.

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.