[Need Help With Legitimate Scripting Question]

Nice to see when I ignore someone for being rude to me they make a point of making every other post in my topic.

I don't even want to read this thread now.

[Possibly Ridiculous Project for Stimulating LSL Research]

As a humorous and on-topic aside, I actually got an IM the other day from someone who cammed on me and saw I was facing the direction they were standing in. The IM said, "I see you looking at me", and proceeded from there, as if I was interested in them already.

Finally the messages stopped, and only then did I come back to my keyboard to find someone had shown up while I was afk and had tried making passes at me, thinking I was looking at him the whole time.

[Possibly Ridiculous Project for Stimulating LSL Research]

I would totally like your post with the like button, but I hate that thing, lol.

Yes, people do seem to really hate being looked at, that's why I thought it would be such a stimulating idea to get other people's ideas on. Drama aside, I'm really just trying to learn if this is possible, and how it would work.

And no worries, I have no intention of ever trying to make it fire bullets at people for looking at me.

Maybe learn something about how things outside my realm of scripting experience work, that would be my ideal result of pursuing this admittedly possibly ridiculous project idea.

I suppose it could toggle a person's Away or Busy status, or maybe just send an Away message response some other way. Ideally, they wouldn't get something like "User has blocked/muted/derendered you for lookin' at 'em", because that would just make people angry, or could get people thrown out of a sim for blocking admins or such.

Just an away message response or something if a person is a distance away and camming on you to send IMs would be the ideal result as far as I can visualize. And only for as long as they're on the same sim as you and camming on you; leaving the sim could reset it, making it only temporary while on the sim it's activated on.

[Possibly Ridiculous Project for Stimulating LSL Research]

I've been thinking of ways to discover what the real limits of LSL are, and have been tossing around many ideas in my mind which may or may not really be practical, or practicable to bother trying to implement. I have settled on one idea, and have not had the best success in independent research for it. I would be interested in seeing what ideas or lack thereof might be forthcoming by asking a question or two about this idea here, on the scripting forum.

First off, I have no idea if this is even really possible with LSL, or with anything, really. But it's an idea, and hopefully any answers by the persons who attend this forum may potentially guide me in my learning.

Anyway, does anyone think it's possible, and how would one go about it, to determine if a person situated at, say, a distance far enough away to require camming in on you is doing so, and would it be possible to automatically block them from sending you an IM for the duration of the time they are camming on you from said distance away?

I have no particular desire to avoid speaking to friends on sims who are engaged in things and cam on me and send an IM; rather, the idea with this is that it could potentially make a person feel just a little more comfortable in places where they might be exploring and someone they can't see is trying to send potentially annoying IMs while "ogling" them.

So, is any of this sort of interactivity possible without in some way violating anything? I would be interested to see any honest try at answering any part of it, because even if it might seem stupid, or an impractical idea, or unnecessary, or impossible, someone somewhere might someday think it was a nifty idea, and any project requiring real research, and possibly even real thinking, is more than welcome to me right now.

[Options for Scripting Doors]

That does seem to be the case. No way around it save through an illusion of some sort, and it would have to look right.

Come to think of it, I have seen sliding doors as well, but they have their own problems, I'm sure.

Thank you for your honest attempt at an answer, even if it doesn't fix anything.

[How Do We Uphold Proper Coding Standards? [ANSWERED]]

I feel this is an important question to ask, as there seems to be a great deal of confusion regarding the subject.

What is the risk threshold for potential future misuse of functions taught here, and how do we determine which new scripters are and/or are not intelligent enough be trusted with what information?

I see beginners being given sizable scripts, often being told, "I haven't tested this, but it looks right". Is this safe? I test everything before I ever pass it to another; shouldn't everyone be expected to do this?

Some users prefer some functions over others, even if using them is more complicated than simpler functions, the details of which on the wiki pages can be digested and understood easily in a matter of minutes. How do we determine which person's preferences should or should not be given any credence?

I find the number of "likes" a person has is not much of an indication as to the real validity of their opinions on these subjects, as everyone likes every post made by people who do the same for them, until people have thousands of liked posts, and it still doesn't make what's being posted any better when it doesn't work when it's tested inworld.

So, aside from everyone simply avoiding places like this and sticking to official documentation and the experience of one's own trial and error, how does one decide what sort of help is legitimate, and which isn't?

 

EDIT: It's strange to me that everyone who usually has such ready answers and such readiness to haggle over them can't be bothered to try and answer this one, even though they've been viewing it for over twenty minutes. Does anyone have an answer for this, or is it one of those things that just has to be left to the individual scripter, and not dictated by others?

EDIT2: Okay, thank you all for your honesty. Mark this one as answered, I guess.

[Options for Scripting Doors]

Are there any door scripting options that do not rely on rotations? Or that can be used without worrying that they will break through use, and leave the door at an open angle when closed? If there is not, and these rotating door scripts all seem to have these same issues, how would one repair the doors afterward? Editing them back into place every time, or having to replace them entirely every time, is inelegant and clunky.

Long question short, is this really the best we have to work with, or is it all just the result of looking in one direction at everything? Does every door script have to treat the door as a real-world door, and make it physically move? And how to fix the issue with doors being stuck at odd angles and having to be replaced when the script breaks?

[Need Help With Legitimate Scripting Question]

Hi, I need help with this. I want to be able to launch objects at anyone who is looking at me. Don't worry, they'll have to be looking directly at me, and possibly with some sort of intent. It will only be used on my own land, and for my own purposes, but it must shoot at people when they look at me. Don't worry, I have no intent of using it for griefing purposes, and the idea has been around for years, so it must be legit. Heck with what anyone else thinks, right?

Anyway, some help with this would be appreciated.

Also, if anyone knows of any other ways of doing similar things, like the ever-practical and ages-old, practically grandfathered-in idea of sticking a black box in front of people's cameras for looking at me, and/or launching swarms of particle poops at people for looking at me, those would be useful as well. Also anything that targets them and won't stop, until finally they leave my sim. I find land tools are not as effective as simply shooting people who look at me on my land.

I have been in SL for a long time and know what I am doing, I just can't seem to make these things do what I want, despite having them set to fire upon anyone who is looking at me. Constructive help only, please.

This is for a project of my own, and what I use it for is my own business. I shall await the help, and thank you all in advance.

[Physics issue]

64-bit Linux, so I'm excluded from using the official viewer.

I fixed my issue by linking a prim to the underside of it; no worries about exploding LI, as it dropped the LI to 1 when I did it.

Thank you for trying to help me. I would press the "Like" button, but I dislike the circular, jerking motions it tends to foster on forums. It's appreciated, though.

[is it possible to have 2 timer in a script]

I'm having difficulty understanding something. A timer event is not a hack or a workaround, true, yet this thread is asking a question that can only be answered with a workaround, or hack, enabling one to bypass the one-timer-event limit. When I mentioned hacks and workarounds, I was referencing this thread, the one we're posting in, and I do not recall ever stating that a timer was a hack or a workaround.

I believe this failure to see the obvious when one is trying to make a point of being right is what a certain someone was talking about when you guys got all over her for mentioning a function you guys didn't like as much as doing this stuff, the stuff in this thread.

Failure to see how our scripting practices will potentially blossom out over time and affect the scripting practices of others is certainly something to overcome, but it seems to me that it isn't restricted to scripting practices. Seeing how treatment of other members of the forum affects them, the forum, and others on the forum, I think that's possibly just as important.

[drawbridge]

Another issue, provided I continue using this script or any part of it, is that anyone or anything unfortunate enough to be on the bridge when it begins to open tends to fall through, and anything trying to pass under, such as a ship, tends to get knocked about by the changes in physics. I'll probably have to figure out my own way of doing this, it's okay though, I'm getting used to having to do that lately.

Everything I've ever used any of the rotation or door scripts, etc., from this forum in has ended up broken somehow, usually through the simplest of normal circumstances, and I'm just kind of tired of having to manually edit things back into place. I'll probably just use toggling of alphas and physics and sacrifice the extra LI, like I've had to do with everything else.

Cool effect, but just not practical when all the drawbacks kick in.

Thanks for the effort, anyway.

@Wulfie Reanimator you can save yourself some time and effort in typing, as the Ignore List prevents me from seeing your content now. I took your advice about bad eggs after the name-calling last night. Thanks~

[drawbridge]

I left a simple bridge mockup out for one hour, and it seemed to work fine, using the above script. However, a person sitting on the bridge for a few minutes broke it.

I believe it happened because someone opened the bridge while another was sitting, and the bridge ended up stuck in the open position. Upon being clicked again, it opened further, and "closed" in the open position.

So, when people break this bridge, is there a way of fixing it that does not involve right-click, Edit Linked, rotate? Or, is there a way to prevent the breakage in the first place?

[Rez a Bullet in Prim attached to Avatar]

I want to mention that shooting someone on your own land, even with something made and sold for that purpose, can still get your account in trouble, but I don't want to sound like I'm harping.

In the hopes of furthering the constructivity, I will try to be nicer, but bear in mind my main left this forum earlier today because of how she was treated by others; there's always going to be some residual ugh when the sweet person gives up on being nice, it leaks out and gets on people. Apologies.

I see so much arrogance in this place so regularly it makes me not want to help people. I can't help wanting to help people though.

What I wish we had was a sticky about how to ask for help without being misunderstood and misunderstanding the people who post here regularly. Tips and things are great, and how to get started is scripting is great, but how to ask this forum for help in the most efficient way, without triggering everyone who's a refugee from a war zone could be good.

People new to all of this scripting jazz see the magic of it all. They see that OMG it can do this, and this, and what if I made it do... and that doesn't mean they're out to zap everyone who comes along. But there's also wanting to see people avoid the serious dismay of getting into trouble, or worse, incurring the wrath of someone who spent the 2,900 L$ on something more effective than an auto-targeting gun, and having them torment you with harassment by a hundred alts.

Some people really take it seriously when they're out exploring and someone shoots them or sets them on fire or even sends unwanted flowers at them, for that matter. I wouldn't expect people wanting to do awesome magical stuff to think of that, but I learned it the hard way.

Trying repeatedly to keep other people from learning things the hard way and getting hurt has made me bitter. Try to help, and if it isn't what someone wants to hear, it turns into some TV show or something.

I just don't want bad coding practices coming back to bite me in the butt someday, so to speak, as I have been so graciously reminded so many times. If I didn't try to avoid assisting people in getting hurt, I'd feel I was doing a lot more harm than good.

[Rez a Bullet in Prim attached to Avatar]

Aiming in mouselook is the same as looking at someone in mouselook. The only difference is whether they have a weapon pointing at you and are hitting the button on it, and the only way to tell someone's actually firing at you is to detect things coming at you from them.

You could test it and find this out for yourself, of course. But that might change your mind. I don't know if you want to do that. But rest assured, nobody on this forum has EVER, EVER tried what you're doing and decided better upon doing so. Honest, I have never messed with scripts that shoot things at people.

Earlier I saw the bullying that happens when someone recommends a simple function and others prefer to use a different one; now someone is asking a person to choose an alternative to something that could cost them their land and their account and that person is called a bad egg for it. Name-calling is so morally superior, yes.

Yes, these forums are full of toxicity. And it's always someone else's. Welcome to SL.

People are free to ignore my advice. There's a setting for it. But just because you don't like what I say doesn't mean I'm wrong. Next time I'll just listen to Fiona. Helping people is unwelcome if they don't like you here.

I used to be an extremely sweet and nice person, and all it got me was bullied. Yet, here I am, asking someone to reconsider something that could cause trouble, and they cheer people for calling me names. People respond by saying yeah, bad people say don't shoot others. Please think about it. Really.

[Stopping KFM when standing up: how to stop avatar being flung around]

Yeah, if it's throwing you at the ceiling, you might want to fix it, at least if you let company sit in it.

Alternately, you could paint it big and bright, and leave it out for people who like to sneak into people's homes and use their furniture.

[Stopping KFM when standing up: how to stop avatar being flung around]

At least when I pop out of the casket I made, I end up standing on top, all cheeky-like. I don't mind it so much, myself. Perhaps having things go phantom when not sat upon could help, but I don't know.

[what is onion, arc or jelly doll]

Switching to a Bento head was like wearing several fewer heads for me. I went from almost 200,000 to 47,800 in one go.

Switching from flexi hair dropped a lot before that, but I still like flexi hair with some outfits.

A lot of people with high complexiy ratings just count on people to like them enough to render them, I guess. Over a million just feels ...wrong to do to people.

[Blood particles script]

Rolig brings up a very important point, besides what I said about reading and learning for yourself. Every single detail of a script is (or should be) there for a specific reason, and anything that doesn't match up perfectly is going to "break" the script in some way, or prevent it running correctly.

There are functions for checking every aspect of user input, such as chat commands, and checking against various... variables. If a script is for your own personal use, it might not matter so much if you know you're supposed to be using a lower-case chat command, but others might not know, and it can annoy people badly to use a chat command several times before finally getting support from the maker and learning that because the script is missing one line of code it requires case-sensitive input.

I propose looking at each segment, or event, of the script (the parts in brackets inside the "default" event's brackets), and looking up the words that start with "ll". Things like llListen and so forth have entire pages dedicated to them on the wiki, with several examples usually of how to use them, and you can learn what each thing does and doesn't do.

If you really want to learn to do this stuff yourself, and aren't just trying to make one thing work and go have fun with it and forget about all of this, do yourself a huge favor and dig into the wiki. It seems like moonspeak at first, but it's everything you ever wanted to know about LSL and more. Really.

EDIT: Also, if you're eventually going where I'm intuiting you might with all of this, a good look at https://daleinnis.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/combat-system-scripting-v-our-first-combat-meter/ could be useful, as well. I'ts not the freshest material out there, but there's inspiration for things that everyone doing what you're doing right now eventually leans towards.

I'm only intuiting this because I started just like you, and my crowning glory as a scripter is my made-from-scratch, better-than-on-the-MP (I like to think so, anyway), proprietary combat system. Anyway, there's good stuff there, read it sometime.

[Physics issue]

I've had this same issue just today. On two separate uploads of the same object, part of it seems to go completely phantom, allowing me to fall through the sidewalk, and the rest holds up. The road segment between the sidewalks has mushy spots as well.

I have no idea why it would be doing this, as I've changed nothing, and it's "spotty", on solid, large faces.

[Blood particles script]

You need to set your "life" parameter to longer than 0.

If it's set to 0, the particles will run for 0 seconds, meaning not at all.

PSYS_SRC_MAX_AGE, life, is the part telling the script how long to emit particles from the source prim.

I love the text formatting here. Anyway, I suggest looking at the (sigh) wiki, and learning what each of the particle script's bits and bobs actually mean. Then instead of just having a quick drop-in fix, you'll be able to make all your own particle effects from scratch, rather than relying on big, convoluted solutions by others that can make more problems for you.

Using pre-made scripts is part of how we learn, but really the learning part is because pre-made scripts aren't the same as learning how to script from scratch. That would require the wiki.

I used to have all of the problems you're going through right now. I learned the hard way. All of the actual working answers people get on this forum are from people who read the wiki.

[Blood particles script]

Perhaps warning that one should also be in the habit of using listen handlers even when they aren't needed is in order. It might complicate things for your current project, but I have it on good account that even when a script is simple, one should always code as if it's a complicated and convoluted arrangement with lots that could potentially go wrong.

We've all been learning lately that just because something works the way it's supposed to when used as it should be used doesn't make it right, and I really hoped that our community would uphold better coding practices than allowing a listen event to happen without a listen handler.

EDIT: I know you "liked" the post, but this was just me being sarcastic, please ignore it. We can do better.

[Unphantom Script]

I suppose warning you about the possible drawbacks of using lots of timers would have overcomplicated things, but someone perhaps should have warned you about that. Using any function (even for what it's for) without knowing about all of the potential future drawbacks is just asking for trouble later. I can't tell you how many times I've had to fix code where the problem was lots of timers, and could probably have been avoided entirely by embracing better coding practices.

And before anyone even thinks I'm making that last part up, I had a script I got from our very own past masters of LSL scripting that actually had to be fixed because it was using workarounds to make the same effect as multiple timers. Not saying it would be the right thing to use in your case, but in my script, all the errors were fixed by adding a, get this, properly-timed llSleep().

I wish you luck sorting your issue with the timers. I know how bad it can be, because I've had to deal with it myself. My best advice is to read the wiki, and don't just do what people on the forum recommend as best, either. Learn it for yourself.

[Rez a Bullet in Prim attached to Avatar]

Considering the nature of the script idea itself, sending projectiles at people as a defense against possible future attack sounds an awful lot like nuking your neighbor for looking out the window at you, just in case he was about to jump out and shoot you.

Perhaps it is an aggressive nature, coupled with fear of the aggression of others, that is behind the thinking, but in an environment other than a combat zone, it's just downright antisocial.

And IN a combat zone, you'd probably get kicked out for using something not part of their sealed, anti-cheating system.

Please understand, not everything people say that you don't like is a potential threat, and people not helping you with a weapon that targets people who aren't shooting you is to be applauded, not condemned, if you have any real feelings whatsoever.

So basically, someone comes to SL, gets frustrated, and wants to lash out. Gee, everyone's been there. Not everyone shoots people out of nowhere for it, though. Sure, effortlessly dealing with those who would do us harm is an attractive idea, but implementing it isn't so simple as shooting people for looking at you funny.

Also, even things like, "let him get banned" are just symptoms of the same problem. Letting someone cause problems in the hopes it will remove them is just as bad as actively causing problems oneself.

I'd never wish to see anyone pushed out of the community for seeing things differently; better to maybe try to get people to see that "other differents" can make sense first.

Personally, when in a situation where objects might be flying at me and either disrupting my fun, or taking points off of my combat meter, I prefer small, floating, angled deflector shields. If the shield rezzes at an angle to the oncoming projectile, it can deflect the projectile away from you, rather than being pierced by it.

Incidentally, this also works great in dealing with anything thrown at you by, say, an automated attack script that targets you whether you're an aggressor towards anyone or not.

[Rez a Bullet in Prim attached to Avatar]

I edited my post; it took a moment to realize that myself but I did.

Plus all it does is detect if an agent is in mouselook. That means anyone within range who is in mouselook is targeted. That's straight-up griefing, and cannot be justified in any way, no matter who helps you with the script on this forum.

And even if you own the server itself, it's still griefing, and griefing is always against the TOS. Even orbiting a person can be considered griefing, and it's built-in.

tl;dr: scripting is bad. Nobody should do it unless they have a reputation of at least 73759679867.

[Blood particles script]

You can stop asking for Berksey. She isn't coming back. You guys are stuck with the ugly sister now. Also, if you would do us the courtesy of not pasting code into people's IM windows inworld, that would be great. It might not actually do anything bad, but it's probably not the best way to get help.