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Scripting for railways in SL


arabellajones
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It looks as though the Virtual Railway Consortium group in Second Life is dormant, and the VRC scripts for rail vehicles are pretty old. They work, but there have been so many changes to LSL since they were written in October 2010.

Are there any available scripts more recent than that? Either similarly open source or on the marketplace. One possibility would be putting the vehicle characteristics in a notecard, rather than needing to edit the script, but is that worth doing? You can still get the VRC packages at places in-world such as Tuliptree, but that, and "Hobo" trains using a similarly old script, seems to be all there is. Which makes me a little nervous.

 

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3 hours ago, arabellajones said:

Which makes me a little nervous.

SLRR is alive and well. If you expect free you're going to get what you pay for. You could always make an actual investment.

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Bibians-Creativity-Train-Script-Accessory-Package-Steam/6738809

This is for a steamer, there is a diesel version also.

You're welcome.

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I am not sure how old that advert is, but since it still points at the SL Wiki pages of the SLRR system, I have my doubts. One review, dated November 2015.

As for your "If you expect free you're going to get what you pay for," you're talking to somebody who uses Linux. It's a lot better maintained than most things. It's partly a question of reputation.

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4 hours ago, arabellajones said:

I am not sure how old that advert is, but since it still points at the SL Wiki pages of the SLRR system, I have my doubts. One review, dated November 2015.

As for your "If you expect free you're going to get what you pay for," you're talking to somebody who uses Linux. It's a lot better maintained than most things. It's partly a question of reputation.

Perhaps. Though Bibian is still in-world everyday and provides excellent customer support. Go ahead and contact her with your question, I'm certain will will be impressed with her positive and timely response.

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  • 4 months later...

I now have some of this stuff. It appears that the way a train works is still close to the old SLRR/VRC method, with components of the train still being distinct objects, running as vehicles and tracking the locomotive/engineer. The vehicle setting have been moved to an editable notecard rather than being defined in the script.

The end result is easier to adjust, but still horrible for sim crossing.

I do know about Literate Programming

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 12/1/2019 at 11:07 AM, arabellajones said:

It looks as though the Virtual Railway Consortium group in Second Life is dormant, and the VRC scripts for rail vehicles are pretty old. They work, but there have been so many changes to LSL since they were written in October 2010.

Are there any available scripts more recent than that? Either similarly open source or on the marketplace. One possibility would be putting the vehicle characteristics in a notecard, rather than needing to edit the script, but is that worth doing? You can still get the VRC packages at places in-world such as Tuliptree, but that, and "Hobo" trains using a similarly old script, seems to be all there is. Which makes me a little nervous.

 

Conceptually things haven't changed much, I recommend that you take the VRC free script and simply examine how they detect and follow the rail path in front of the train.

Anything past that is everyone's secret sauce I'd say.

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  • 1 month later...

I am not impressed by the way in which the code is written. It's not really documented. The most recent VRC free script apparently uses the Sensor method which the SLRR tech spec refers to, not the Collision method, but "sensor" isn't mentioned until line 300, and there's only an indirect reference in the comments. So I was on a wild goose chase.

// this is setup for non-physical, phantom movement which uses Sensor events through llSensor, rather than Collisions, 
// but can be modified for physical, etc. The guidance code expects to run in the root prim of the linkset.

That's how I have changed the comments.

There's a concept called "Literate Programming" which I commend to the general attention of the scripting community. Because LSL is compiled into byte-code, you don't have to be parsimonious over comments, or assume readers can spot Hungarian notation as a naming convention. On this piece of code I suspect I'm seeing the use of Leszynski naming convention but nobody bothered to document that. Fair enough, you're getting a bit of that just from the use of such things as llDetectedPos

And then there are two different conventions given in the LSL Style Guide , only as the two most popular, so it doesn't get you out of documenting it. Less than a screen to document only two out of an unknown number of naming conventions comes across to me as a little inadequate.

Look guys, several talented creators I know have shuffled off their mortal coil, rung down the curtain, and joined the bleedin' choir invisible, and CoViD-19 hasn't even come into it yet. Without better documentation, your work will not survive.

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