Duckie Dickins

First off I will say that my combat experience has mostly involved with developing weapons for the old DCS2 system as well as working on the meter system itself. That being said, I love the enthusiasm and the willingness to expand on combat in light of game controller support coming down the pipeline but if I were to give my honest opinion, all of these things are already being accomplished by existing scripted combat meters...for 15 years already. Combat developers have already created their own library of functions to do most if not all of these things proposed. If I was still a combat developer, the features I would rather have than this is like you said...better hitbox detection and being able to better determine if a hit was a head shot, a body shot, or being shot in a limb. Or programmable client side HUD widgets so we can get rid of the need for some types of button bar attachment huds. Or a type of animation preloading. The best combat system isn't fun when the opponent you're facing has an avatar that is frozen in a pose and sliding across the screen because the animation they are currently using hasn't been fetched and cached yet by your viewer and that immersion breaking. Sorry if my view point sounds more negative than the others but many of the features I proposed not existing is what has frustrated me with combat in SL for the past 7 or 8 years now. Today if I want to get my pew pew pew on, I just pick up my phone because I know I'll have a better experience on a mobile device and that is what combat in SL is actually competing with.

There was also an Android client called Lumiya which allowed you to log into SL on your phone and you could keep yourself logged in and use group chat like any other chat app, or even turn on 3d view. The app is dead and no longer on the google play store, however those who still have it can still use it to keep themselves online to chat with friends and interact with group chats and such. I personally leave my avatar online most of the time and park him in bed when I head to bed or at a desk when I'm working on stuff in another window. The idea kind of came from a cyberpunk book I read in the early 90's called "In the net of Dreams" by William Mark Simmons about an online virtual reality with the same (or maybe original) story idea of players getting trapped inside of a game and dying when they die in the game which is pretty much the plot of Sword Art Online. Anyway the premise was that when you were not actively logged in to play the game, your avatar would be operated by AI which learned your daily routines and would continue to move your avatar through them while you were not playing, creating a persistant world that always had life or at least the appearance of life. So while SL isn't as sophisticated, I still like to leave my avatar parked doing some type of activity, even if it's lying on a beach or sitting on a boat fishing. It's just something fun. Plus I can read all of the group messages I might of missed if I had been offline.

I have noticed this behavior on mainland regions as well. I have witnessed many avatars teleport in and spend less than 5 seconds in the region. I assume many of those are land survey bots of some type that drop in and grab region information and teleport off to the next region on their survey list. Try not to take it personally. Not every avatar has an actual person driving it. The most common land survey bot will teleport in fairly close to the center of the region, slowly turn in 45 degree increments and then teleport out after rotating 720 degrees.

If you are diligent, you can attempt refreshing the page. If one is abandoned by another resident then the option will be available on the page immediately. A friend did this until one finally showed up and they were able to acquire a traditional home. I did a similar thing on Wednesday to acquire a houseboat as they were the first to be taken up until someone abandoned one.

This topic is a couple of weeks old but I also wanted to throw this out there. I often use a text viewer called radegast and if I need to activate something on the hud I can tell the viewer to render that hud in 3d so I can touch a button but those viewers don't support touch coordinates but touch linked works. I know it's niche but might also be a factor to weigh in if you want mobile viewers and text viewers able to interact with the hud.

I've been a premium member since mid 2007 so my first instinctive reaction to the news was "What's the big deal?" until I looked into it more closely. My main influence to being a premium member was owning land. LIke most people, I started off as a free account and rented from land owners, acquring larger and larger parcels until it made more sense to go premium and buy land as it would ultimately be cheaper in the long run. Since then, Linden Lab has offered more perks for premium members over the years. Premium Sandboxes, Linden Homes, Premium Gifts. All of those were fluff to me as my primary purpose for premium was land ownership. All of these things added to the premium users experience and took nothing away from the free user. Land ownership already had a premium requirement and as for the other perks....free members really aren't missing anything out on that. They are items nobody had and then suddenly premium members got them as they rolled them out. The Premium Reservation is probably one of the first things that actually takes away something from the free user experience. Before you had an equal chance to get into a full sim as a premium user and now there's the 10% buffer which could keep you stuck on the outside for an extended amount of time at an already busy event sim. Many premium users don't care. It doesn't change much of their Second Life experience other than they might be able to get into a busy sim slightly easier. People who don't go to large events don't understand why there is a rush to get items that will appear in their main stores later. I think that part is psychological. Ever gone to a party and discover someone there is also wearing the exact same outfit that you are....the same witty printed tshirt becomes less witty if another person shows up with the same printed tshirt. A fabulous dress becomes less fabulous when another woman shows up wearing it and makes you feel like a twin. Everyone in just about every social circle tries to express their individuality by what we wear. If 3 people show up somewhere and they all have the same Skrillex Haircut, what do you think of them? So people rush out and get the newest hair or outfit because if your friends see you already have it....it makes you somewhat unique and they will more than likely avoid getting the same exact item as you. I spent a good period of my SL existance buying new motorcycles that ranges from 4000 L$ and up and would pick a new model up as soon as it came out. I have had friends in my own social circle tell me that they saw the new motorcyle came out but because I had already gotten it so quickly that they didn't want to get the same one because they didn't want to be seen riding around the same sims on the same bike as someone else. People are odd this way, but it's partially why the demand is so high the first couple of days at these events, regardless of the fact that the same items will be available in the creator's main shop after the event. It's something new. It's something you can go out and get before your friends and lay your claim on being a unique snowflake amongst your immediate peers. It's school yard behavior of wanting to be part of the crowd that has the newest toy that everyone else is getting but maybe in a fashion where you might still be distinct from everyone else. I was a child of the 70s and it was important even then to be one of the kids with the new Incredible Hulk TV series metal lunchbox but not the same picture depicted on the side as my classmate Johnny has, because even at the age of 8 something inside of me said having the exact same lunch box was lame and I needed to be the same and yet a littlle different to still be a unique snowflake. I believe what free to play users are feeling is that premium reservation "feature" is less about making it easier for premium users to teleport into a full sim and more about Linden Lab placing up one of those "Buy a pass to access" ban lines that you can set on parcels...in this case, packed out event estates, and the price of a fair chance of entry is premium membership into the pocket of Linden Lab and not into the event organizer/estate owner's.

Estelle Pienaar wrote: Easiest method, but absolutely no security. If a product ever gets popular and a griefer searches the channels for the communication, he/she can send commands to your customers attachments! See also this discussion: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/LSL-Scripting/Channel-Fair-Use/td-p/2784502 You don't need to lecture me on security. I was lead developer for the DCS2 combat meter for a while. I was merely responding within the scope of the original message which requested assistance in ensuring there wouldn't be any cross talk between hud and avatar attachment. If you really want, you can create a hash so that everyone's hud/attachment picks a communication channel unique to that avatar so that it doesn't matter if a griefer scans out their own channel number...yours will be different. You could even go further to encrypt all channel comms but the original poster did not specify the need for any of these options.

If you use llRegionSayTo then the only person who will receive the message is the avatar and that avatar's attachments. Easiest method.

Nope. It' uses mesh prims with 8 faces. Each face is a single letter. There's only 3 textures it uses for rendering the letters so it loads very quickly.

You should ditch both of them and use Nexii's Nextext which is mesh based. It's available on the marketplace full permissions. You might be able to find it inworld for free but I encourage that it's worth the marketplace price and its always good to toss a few bucks at the developer. https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/NexText-Third-Gen-Text-Rendering-for-HUDs-and-Boards-Rich-Text-Colours-Bold-Italics-Underline/4542779

It's my understanding that VICE is being phased out for a new system called MCE (Modern Combat Environment) made by Aeon Voom.

Perrie Juran wrote Sure there are people who do these things for fun but that doesn't change the fact that to do it right and to do it well takes time, and actually could take a lot of time Just adding to what has been said already. If someone can do great quality mesh work, it also would be more profitable for them to pay a scripter for a gun script for their mesh guns than to sell the gun models full permission to someone. Especially since the original poster mentioned having them textured too. I know someone like myself or even some of the most well known weapon creators would sell a script for a more reasonable price or even for a percentage of the sale price then price expectations of the original poster

another option is to make the pumpkin act as a vendor and have the candy delivered from a central server. I had owned a gumball machine which did that. Unfortunately when the creator closed shop, the gumball machine stopped working

Thanks for the rage quit notice. On the other hand, if people you help are upsetting you, just start charging them. You'd be surprised how fast the idiots go away when the are S.O.L. with their busted script because your time now has a monentary value attached to it that they can't ignore or take for granted.

You can find the SDK here http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Undine%20State/9/161/3002 If you end up at the landing point, use the teleporter to go up to the vice support area. It's one building over from the teleport location.