Grabbing

[animats]

Physical objects can be grabbed with the cursor in SL. You can rez "Beach ball (dragged to ground)" from library in Inventory and throw it around a bit. Does anyone use this feature for sports, or combat, or much of anything?

[Persephone Emerald]

I've used the above to throw a ball for my dog. 

There is also a way to grab items by right clicking on them inworld & selecting "Wear". Items set to the right or left hand will go to that hand. Clothing will be worn. This only works with objects you own.

Edited April 1 by Persephone Emerald

[AmeliaJ08]

I don't think I have ever seen this used which is odd given there are quite a lot of throwing games in SL.

I assume this is because it doesn't work well?

[Love Zhaoying]

AFAIK, "grab" as described in the OP is just used for moving physical objects. If those objects have a script, they can do all kinds of things..

It's odd that there aren't many examples of "grab" that come to mind. 

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

Hold down CTRL key (with mouse up/down) to levitate a physical object. This is basic Orientation Island stuff that used to be taught in Day 0 of your SL adventures. Which is why everyone still has the Orientation Island Beachball still in their inventory...

Edited April 1 by SarahKB7 Koskinen

[Love Zhaoying]

Some of older folks are going to need "Grabbers" in RL soon, it would be nice to get it in SL too!

 

[Pixie Kobichenko]

10 hours ago, animats said:

Physical objects can be grabbed with the cursor in SL. You can rez "Beach ball (dragged to ground)" from library in Inventory and throw it around a bit. Does anyone use this feature for sports, or combat, or much of anything?

If I understand what you’re talking about, there is an inspired version of a game on The Price Is Right- Plinko that someone made where you pick up a ball a move it & drop it into the peg board.  But the physics or whatever it would be called is pretty terrible & the ball runs away- doesn’t stay confined to the board.  
 

 

[animats]

Thanks.

If you hover over a grabbable object (physical, but not an avatar; you can't grab avatars) a hand cursor appears. Clicking and dragging will move the object in the ground plane directions, left/right and near/far. If you hold down CNTL, that changes to left-right and up-down. This is all relative to the viewpoint. If you're dragging and moving, when you release the mouse button, the velocity remains, so things can be thrown. SHIFT and ALT don't seem to do anything.

Big objects move more slowly, but can still be moved. Density does not seem to matter.

Is there more grab functionality I should know about? I was looking at this because I have to implement "Grab" in Sharpview. There's a lot of machinery in the viewer to make "Grab" work. Somebody went to a lot of trouble. It looks like this was intended to be a more widely used feature. Was it originally intended as the primary building tool? If you had scripts to help with automatic alignment after you placed something, and another shift key to get rotation, SL could have fast building, like Fortnite.

[Ardy Lay]

2 hours ago, animats said:

Is there more grab functionality I should know about?

Yes.  CONTROL plus Grab starts a physics-like move, left-right and up-down, on a non-physically-active object the agent has permission to move.  After initiation, addition of ALT changes this to left-right and away-toward, and SHIFT changes to rotations.  This set of actions can be disabled via a viewer option.

[animats]

3 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:

Yes.  CONTROL plus Grab starts a physics-like move, left-right and up-down, on a non-physically-active object the agent has permission to move.  After initiation, addition of ALT changes this to left-right and away-toward, and SHIFT changes to rotations.  This set of actions can be disabled via a viewer option.

Nice. Is there any way to rotate objects?

[Ardy Lay]

15 minutes ago, animats said:

Is there any way to rotate objects?

Yes, CONTROL + SHIFT and the left mouse button on my setup does that.

It appears to be sequence sensitive.  Hold CONTROL, mouse over the object, left-click and hold, then add holding down SHIFT then move the mouse a little while still holding the button and both modifier keys.  

[animats]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Yes.  CONTROL plus Grab starts a physics-like move, left-right and up-down, on a non-physically-active object the agent has permission to move. 

Huh. Can't get a non-physical object to do anything that way, even rezzing a cube in a sandbox. What needs to be enabled in Firestorm?

[Ardy Lay]

20 hours ago, animats said:

What needs to be enabled in Firestorm?

Dunno.  I absolutely will not install Firestorm.  However, I can search Debug Settings in Second Life Viewer for "grab" to find this likely looking candidate.

Edited April 3 by Ardy Lay

[animats]

Same thing works in Firestorm.

Any way to get snap-to-grid while manipulating that way?

[Ardy Lay]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Same thing works in Firestorm.

Any way to get snap-to-grid while manipulating that way?

Not that I know of.  Is very easy to make a mess using it though!  I have seen people accidentally flip houses and other items.

[animats]

26 minutes ago, Ardy Lay said:

Not that I know of.  Is very easy to make a mess using it though!  I have seen people accidentally flip houses and other items.

Right. I turned it on, tried it out, practiced for a bit, stacked up some prims, and turned it off again.

We do need an easier way to build, but this isn't it.

[elleevelyn]

grabbing physical objects and moving them was part of the New User Orientationl back in the day.  I dunno if it still works but the tutorial path on Orientation Island Public has a grab tutorial station down by the creek below the temple.  Grab the ball on the ground and place it on the table. Not part of the tutorial was throwing the ball off the island, but a few people would give that a go as well

[Nexii Malthus]

I use grabbing in scripted objects quite a few times.

For example doors that a user can grab, or slide, open or slam them closed in a loud bang. It's a lot of fun.

The scripted objects are non-physical and the prim movement is animated procedurally which makes the movement stable and easy to use.

 

Grab in scripted objects is quite useful albeit can be quite confusing for scripters to implement, however the advantage is that the grab can exceed the surface of the object compared to touch. If you have ever used a slider in a LSL user interface you know how frustrating it is when you try to slam a slider to the end but you leave the edge of the slider making it non-responsive. Scripters will try to implement a graceful safe area around a slider to counter this problem so it knows if a slider needs to hit the edge. However you can't quite use this workaround for in-world objects like doors. So grab is the perfect tool here and works better than the workaround since it works to the edges of the viewer.

 

Some might wonder why not just have a click open the door? Because it's boring and actually is quite unattractive, I'll still have that option for convenience, but.. doors look a lot more natural when they can be left at angles you'd naturally open and leave them at, which is different across people as well, making a house actually look lived in. It can be useful for roleplay or socialising. Being able to slam a door closed or leave it at an angle is silly but exactly what SL allows you to do and adds warmth to our little world.

I feel like I went on a bit on a rant there. Anyway! Grabbing for physical objects? Pretty rare, I've used it once for a virtual target marker when testing inverse kinematics:

But it's application to physical objects is very rare to see in SL. Most games are very contained to prevent cheating and the grabbing doesn't give the right UX for fun mechanics anyway.

However for scripted non-physical objects, the usecases grow much wider and it shouldn't be too rare to see it being used. I've already explained above it being used for in-world objects like doors.  I've used it in the past for being able to move around HUDs and some HUDs may still rely on grab, there might be example code in the LSL Wiki on how to do this. But I've personally switched to relying on resizing a large transparent surface instead, like e.g. in openLayout.

 

[Eirynne Sieyes]

Much easier for those who don't script and want to throw stuff around: Get an awake KittyCat. Click her and then click "Interact" on the blue popup. Then click "play" on the next blue popup. Then permit your avatar to be animated. You will gracefully throw your cat a ball. She will mess around with it a bit and bring it back near you. It' a riot! 😸

[Zalificent Corvinus]

On 4/1/2024 at 5:45 AM, animats said:

oes anyone use this feature for sports

Theoretically...

There is "grab functionality in "Bubblizer", an RLV Bondage themed "dodgeball" game sold in SL: Bubblizer used to be a big thing on A rated kink sims, there was a League and a lot of courts. Now it's kind of rare.

 

[AmeliaJ08]

Oh come to think of it I have seen this functionality! in an air hockey game I used to love, it actually worked quite well but you could definitely feel some latency when moving the paddle... or whatever the air hockey thing is called.