How to know the direction the avatar truly faces?

[agentronin]

In gorean combat with melee weapons it is very important to know which way the adversary is facing. This is because It is highly desirable to be behind the adversary where one is outside the adversary's 180 degree forward melee strike and shield defense zones. I find knowing this can be difficult because when walking backward the animation can cause the avatar to face in the direction of the walk, making it appear the avatar is facing what way, but actually it is not in regard to melee strike and shield defense zones. Also there are animations that come with katana sword that make the avatar spin.

I attempted to solve this problem by turning on the Look At targets at Avatar => Preferences => Privacy => LookAt (tab) . But this has not been reliable because most have opted to turn off sending their look at targets to others.

Is there a reliable way to know which way avatar is truly facing in regard to melee strike and shield defense zones?

[Lindal Kidd]

Sheesh...combat geeks.

[Rolig Loon]

Not reliably.  You can script a sensor to tell you llDetectedRot(), but that is notoriously flaky when the detected object is an avatar.  For your purposes, however, an unreliable answer may be good enough, since you only need to know whether the detected avatar is facing "sort of toward" or "sort of away from" you.

[agentronin]

I think such a scripted sensor would be considered cheating.

[Rolig Loon]

And using LookAt targets isn't? 

[Nalates Urriah]

@agentronin You may have some misconceptions as to how walking backward works with avatar auto-turn-around.

In the Developer menu (Ctrl-Alt-Q) -> Avatar -> Show Collision Skeleton you can see how the avatar actually behaves when moving and being animated. Old information on combat tactics will be out of date and has been since Fitted Mesh was introduced. So, you need to consider the time frame of any combat tips.

The collision skeleton is the important item for combat, melee or projectile. You and a friend can test this using projectiles. Find an animation that moves the avatar around. When the avatar is visually away from its standing location, shoot where it stood then shoot where it appears. You'll see the avatar is actually moving. Also, notice the name tag is moving too.

Prior to Fitted Mesh when combat games were a bigger thing in SL (bigger IMO) shooting and melee animation moved the avatar without moving the name tag. So, we shot and struck where the name tag was and ignored the visual avatar. Also, the Collision Skeleton was stationary only moving when the avatar moved, as in arrow key moved not animation moved.

Since the avatar skeleton turns, the attachment points turn... this can complicate how shields protect or don't. It depends on how they are made, but as most detect collisions... there will be an effect.

If I were to return to combat games I would test and then decide if I wanted to use the LL viewer that doesn't turn the avatar around or the third-party viewers that do. You may not need to detect which way they face, just look.