Berksey

I have a peeve. Sims and regions that have "child safe" in their descriptions but are actually safe havens for people who fancy children in a sexual manner, and defend them to the point of threatening anyone who has a problem with it. Today I got to add a well-known and very beautiful 8-sim region to my list of places that aren't safe for kids. I gave them multiple chances to deal with the people who were doing it, and they've done nothing about it. It's a shame, because I know the offending parties aren't in any way supporting the sims financially, while I myself have, on many occasions. It's sad how many places in Second Life are pretending to be kid and family friendly just as bait to get kids to go there so they can try to prey upon them and ruin their SL. When they flaunt it openly in local chat and bully anyone who has a problem with it, that's just sickening. A user told a child avi they were arousing them, and everyone laughed. Apparently nobody there has a problem with it, even the sim owner, or they'd have banned the residents I reported to them before for trying to get sexual with me on multiple occasions. I am now making it my personal theme in Second Life to make these people as miserable as they have tried to make me. /peeve

Several members in the group, all several years old, I'm thinking they should know better. One group tag in it is "LL Care Service", which is dodgy at best, the rest actually have the full name Linden Labs in them. They don't have a specific AR category for this, but hopefully someone will actually read my report. EDIT: And thank you, Rolig.

I'm seeing a group profile with "Linden Labs" in the name, and the titles in the group all have "Linden Labs" in them. It is not an official group, but one made by a user. I'm wondering if this isn't somehow against the rules, as it could mislead people into thinking people with those group tags are official employees of Linden Labs. Should I report it?

Scripts are dangerous. You're right to be paranoid. Ask anyone here, they'll tell you how awful it can be.

I could type up the entire thing for you in about three minutes. But what good would that do you? On the other hand, I could tell you about some functions and how they work, and trust you to be intelligent enough to learn from there, but I'm always being told that unless people know all of this already, they might use it wrong, so I really don't know what to do anymore. You should probably hire someone's alt to sell you one.

I would help you as much as possible with this, as I have lots of fresh and current inworld experience with particles and the llParticleSystem functions, but you might not fully understand every implication of everything I say, and it could lead to disaster. Enjoy the forums, I can't anymore. Anything I think I could post to try and help anyone just makes my mouth taste bad now. Good luck. Enjoy your LSL. Oh, and anything of mine you got inworld, just throw it away, it's probably badly coded.

Improper use of anything through the misunderstanding of it can be dangerous. And yeah, people have misused things before and others have been less than delighted with the results. I think I shall now and in the future simply warn people away from even trying to learn any of this, as some mistake might potentially creep in, and somewhere down the road, it could lead to disaster. The future is scary now that I consider all of this; I mean, some person could read about the legitimate use of a function, and being too new to scripting, completely misunderstand the function, and what the person describing the function is trying to say, and the potential damage caused by imperfect information in the hands of the unlearned is simply too awful to countenance. I see the awful truth now. New people must be prevented from having any of this knowledge, as they may not be expert in its use, and then any number of awful things could happen. I will do my part to prevent this miserable future by immediately implementing the only solution I can even consider at this point. I leave it all to the experts, and the safety of the future I shall simply have to trust to them. @NawaliaTrea will probably want to discard anything I gave her inworld that she's incorrectly assumed (as an unlearned newbie) to be helping her with learning this stuff, as every once in a while the scripts tend to be told to sleep for half a second or so. We all know that using that function is just bad coding practice now, so throw those things away, and learn to use extra code, if it's what these guys recommend. See, this is what happens when you let someone with only twelve years experience speak on a scripting forum. I propose anyone who isn't at least retired from IT work after 30 years be disallowed from even asking about this stuff, let alone be encouraged to USE any of it. I'm done overthinking LSL, I'm going to go make fun things now.

I was tired. Sorry. llSleep between two animations in a draw/sling script is just what usually works for me instead of having to refer to a separate timer event when only one timer event can run. I never use timers for the pause between two animations when it's drawing or slinging an attachment, it makes no sense to use up a timer for that, when llSleep was made for it. And as for "anything super-important", I probably would have done better to say, "anything else at the moment". Sorry.

For things like draw and holster animation sequences, I use an integer I can toggle to an on or off state. Then if the script knows the item is drawn, it slings it, and if it knows it's slung, it draws it. Also, a way to sequence animations so that they play properly one after the other is to determine how long the first animation is, then use llSleep() to make the script wait that long before doing the next thing, which would be running the second anim. llSleep puts everything on hold for the specified amount of time, then turns it all back on, but things like sounds, animations, and particle effects still play while the script is sleeping, if they were begun before the llSleep() was used. This is why you can use it like a timer, provided it isn't crucial for the rest of the script to be doing anything super-important for that 3 seconds or so. So you'd end up with something like this... llPlayAnimation("reachback"); llSleep(3.5); llPlayAnimation("drawsword");

If I want two animations to play in sequence, I look at how long it takes the first one to play, and tell the script to sleep exactly that long right after starting to play the first animation. Then, immediately after the llSleep(), I call the second animation to play. I use the same trick in timing the toggling of alphas when drawing a sword, or similar, so that the one in the scabbard vanishes as the one in the hand appears; the animation is started, the script sleeps until it's played to the right point in the animation, and then the script kicks back in with the secondary visual effect. It might be a little clunky compared to more elegant techniques, but it's the best way I've found for making it work for me, at least with timing animations, sounds, and particle effects. Naturally, you'd not want to use llSleep() if the script needs to do other things while the animation is playing.

tl;dr: You cannot force anyone to do anything without their permission, and it's that way on purpose. Of course, a crafty scripter could find a way to get it to simply guilt people into doing things, maybe... <-<;

Thank you for sharing that, I'm going to play with it. ^-^

I've probably said it before, and I'll probably say it again, but I think the best advice for anyone, new or old to scripting, is to make a habit of reading the wiki. I've met several people this week who had scripting questions for me, and when I mentioned finding the answer on the wiki, they had no idea it even existed. It's strange to me, because in my world, if it exists, there's a wiki for it, and to know how to do it, you read the wiki. In most of the online communities I've participated in, "Read the wiki" has been almost a cliche. If there isn't a wiki, at least there's a forum, but can you believe it, there are people in SL who not only do not know of the existence of the wiki, but also do not even know this forum exists. I advise anyone who reads this forum to put the wiki on speed dial, seriously. I also agree with Innula on Googling. Knowing how to use Google properly is what separates the tech-savvy from the... um, non-tech-savvy (I once made $20 an hour at an IT job, and my entire job was Googling for people who didn't know how, basically).

That is SO cool~! I'm keeping that, if you don't mind.

I totally called you instead of Fiona, didn't I? <-<; Sorry, I'd just gotten up, and all I had was tea, no coffee... ^-^;