Carbon Philter

Sculpties have a bounding box which doesn't follow the visble modelled shape of the object but is a cube matching the max dimensions of the the modelled shape. So if the stairs were made with the world's xyz axes as the basis you'll get the problem you are experiencing. You either need to make the stair phantom and put an invisible non-phantom prim along the pitch of the stair which you can walk on. This means you then need to leave the sculptie unlinked or use a scripting trick to allow you to link a phantom child to the rest of the linkset. If you're making single flight sculptie stairs yourself, create the sculpt mesh in whatever programme you use - I use Blender - and then rotate it so that the nosing of the stair is on one of the major axes before you bake the sculpt UV mesh. That way the nosings of the stair will become the face of the sculptie bounding box and you can keep it non-phantom and link it to the rest of the house and still walk up it.

Glad to be of help. Best advice I have is keep revisiting the forums, the scripting one in particular. This is where I pick up most of the info on new or more obscure functions from much more knowledgeable contributors than me without wading through the LSL wiki, which, incidentally, I keep open in a browser window most of the time I'm in SL and trying to build and script. Also, the College of Scripting in-world has a comprehensive series of tutorials on display boards on the upper floors of their building and there's a worked example of llDetectedTouchUV script for you to read through at leisure.

Great! It's a whole new avenue to explore, alongside mesh creation. Thanks, and that wasn't so hard, was it? 

Sounds extremely interesting and I'd like to undertand the trick to improve my own sculpties. So can I ask - having apparently been pushed in the right direction are you now willing to share the details of how to do this or are you going to continue the mystery and secrecy you mentioned or charge an arm and a leg like the other person you mentioned?

Hi Jack. As Rolig says, your query is really too general to answer specifically but one place you could start is the example animation script in the Wiki which will cycle through SL's internal animations on touch. The laugh anim is in there somewhere and you should be able to isolate it while trying to understand the general principles of LSL. The script is here: http://lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=ExampleAnimationScript As for the play button, you drop the script in the prim you want to have act as the button or you could get even more complex and define an area of the surface texture to act as the button by using llDetectedTouchUV in place of the general touch action.

Congrats - I trust we will see your name in lights in due course for sculptie creation.

Certainly doable, Romsey. The surface texture just needs to have an alpha channel with the area covering the screen being the bit where the alpha mask contains the partial transparent properties. However you must bear in mind that the alpha sorting glitch may affect how you see it and sometimes the sorting order of the bits will screw up and some bits will show forward of others. The alternative would be to use the split sculptie to define only the solid parts of the door and link a separate regular prim for the see through panel. That way you are less likely to suffer the alpha glitch problem. As an aside, bear in mind that if the door is to be scripted to open, you may come up against additional difficulty defining the axis of rotation or alternatively you need a more complex rotation/position script which does not need the axis of rotation to be at the edge of the door. Here's a link to the machinimatrix tutorial I learnt how to apply textures to a sculptie. Things have moved on and there may be more up to date tuts covering this on the same site, but the principles are still valid. http://blog.machinimatrix.org/3d-creation/video-tutorials/sculpties-older-tutorials-page/texturingsculpties_multiple_images/ Hope this helps.

If you have the UV sculptie map showing on the screen it's v. hard to say without seeing it. If it's purchased JASS version of Primstar, best ask in the Blender JASS/Primstar group - Gaia will probably help if she's in. Otherwise, it's a process of elimination where the glitch is - could be faulty initialisation - and maybe reinstall is the final solution. Test with basic Primstar sculpt mesh without doing any work on changing its shape.

Hi Barbarella. Once you have the rainbow coloured sculpt map baked in the UV window, try going to File >Export > Second Life LSL (to directory). You will get a directory window open which you scroll to wherever you want the map and LSL file saved - best not to leave it in the generic Blender location as you'll end up with a clutter and struggle to find anything once you're up to speed in creating sculpts. That should generate the tga map and lsl text file. After that I generally don't bother with the lsl and just upload the tga - lossless format - and drop it on a sculptie prim then adjust size and orientation to match the Blender model. Hope that helps.

54m max link limit - http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linkability_Rules

Thank you, Peter and Void. Your explanation brings me some added understanding.

Hi again. Thx for previous advice, Void, and others. As a follow on could I get some advice on llLinkParticleSystem to do some script economising. I came across this new function and as I have both bow wave and prop wake emitters in separate prims I thought that using it in the root prim would cut the script count and thus help the sim crossing issue. I don't quite understand how scripts are handled by SL servers and accordingly just want to get confirmation that adding two custom functions to the main script defining the different particle params for bow wave and prop wake doesn't over-complicate the main engine script and make it have to work harder(slower?) rather than staying with the two relatively straightforward independant emitter scripts elsewhere in the vehicle. Thanks for any further enlightenment. Carbon 

Take a trip to the Particles Lab. There are scripts there for various particle effects along with controller scripts to let you start/stop them in a variety of ways and they are all free to use and mod as part of the learning process.

Really?? So my excuse to prospective purchasers that I couldn't make allowance for passengers is a load of crap?? Oh dear - Carbon scurries off to dig out his copy of Prim Sitter and set up some passenger seat positions. Thanks for info. Wish there was a central repository for such things - couldn't find anything on Knowledge Base. Cheers Carbon

Hi again everyone. I'm still messing with finishing my boatss and have a relatively simple (?) query about the 32 prim limit to physical vehicles. I know LL recently changed it so the driver doesn't count against the 32 limit, but do passengers also count? Do I have to lose valuable prims to be able to allow other passengers to sit and travel with the driver? My pc isn't powerful enough to test with alts and I haven't enough friends to get them to help test........... :( Thanks Carbon

What do you mean by 'stick out' If you mean something tah stands out from the crowd it's just a flat texture and you save the texture as a.tga or .png in Blender then upload it as a texture into SL. If however you're talking about full 3d lettering you'll need to model a sculpt map, bake that, export it as SL sculptie, then upload that sculpt map into SL and apply it to a prim which has the sculptie attributes set in Edit. The prob with a sculptie would be getting the level of 3d modelling correct. One letter may be ok but you won't have enough faces to do a lot of text in 3D.

Hi Blot. Just so you know - I was tearing my hair out with sculpties not rezzing their shape for other ppl and, yes, finally tracked it down to the phantom child script. With the help of Fred Gandt we eventually determined that the perms on the sculptie were screwing the shape as they were megaprims - for whatever reason I'm not yet sure, they needed to be full perm before the phantom child script would function correctly. As leaving the linkset full perm was not the best of solutions for a commercial item but I needed the sculpts phantom because of bounding box issues what I had to do was hard code the sculpt texture UUIDs into the script. That seems to have sorted it.

Hi tataku. Welcome to the mysterious world of Blender. Not sure what the problem is with your model but it may be something to do with your copy of Blender. I d/loaded your blend file and opened it with my regular 2.49 Blender running Primstar 1. I don't like the fact that some of the vertices in the UV Edit window are joined together - to my mind the mesh should be a regular rectangular arrangements of vertices, but that may be down to the way Primstar 2 works to map the shape you've modelled Anyhow, I did a Sculptie Bake on it and got an image, tested it by Import as Sculptie and it came in exactly as the original. I then exported the LSL and uploaded temp to SL and it came in as your original sculpt mesh. The sculpt map I got did not have the bands of pure colour that the tga image you posted shows. Bottom line - it worked for me using my standard process, so I'm sorry to say I'm at a loss to say exactly where you're going wrong.

Just an update for anyone who might have an interest - I got the boat working as I wanted. It involved specifying differing variables for the rotation I wanted and using the llSetVehicleRotationParam(VEHICLE_REFERENCE_FRAME, rot) to call the desired rotation dependant on the accelerator settings. I haven't seen any problems so far so fingers crossed it stays good. Another step on the road to scripting competence. Thanks again for the assistance, Void and Taeas. 

I was reading another thread - 'Time to switch to mono' and the reference to sim crossing issues triggered this query as sailing from one sim to another seems to be giving me ever more grief these days and previous Scripting Forum searches on the issue produced no results. I find I've frequently been locking up and the only solution is to relog quickly and hope that the vehicle has not been returned to Lost and Found during my absence. Is there a real difference between original LSL and Mono for vehicle scripts and are there any other scripting tricks I can incorporate into the vehicle engine to make the crossing less risky? Thanks for any enlightenment. Carbon

I use mega sculpties to make my boat hulls and it's quite successful. Even moreso now that you can make your own specific size megas up to 64m Just remember the bounding box issue - if you have bulwarks/upstands you won't be able to walk directly on the deck. You'll need to set it phantom and have an invisible regular prim as the deck surface. If you're not up to speed with sculptie building, head to Tradewinds Yacht Club in Dex. In the boathouse there Manul Rotaru has made a hull sculptie map available for free which you can set to whatever dimesnions you want. I've just taken a look at it and I reckon it could well do as a houseboat hull.

Hi all. Maybe this is not the correct forum - apologies if so - but not sure where else to raise my query. While exploring the waterways recently I came across New Port Yacht Sales which appears to have Linden supplied slips for boat manufacturers to display their creations. After a bit more looking at About Land and Group Info I also found reference to Busy Bens Vehicle Lot and subsequently tracked down reference to Linden Lotteries where creators could register and possibly be allocated free space to display products for sale. The last active dates for this lottery I could find were for 2009 but both Busy Bens place and the New Port Yacht Sales areas look to be pretty active in respect of up to date vehicles displayed and for sale. Can anyone give me any more info on this lottery process? It seems to be highly unpublicised and a bit of a closed shop - no pun intended - but I'd be interested in getting on the bandwagon and having at least a chance of a space to sell my own cars and boats.

Thank you both for the responses and assistance. It may well take me some time to get the proceedure bottomed out but with your directions I'm sure it'll come good. Then I'll need to finally work out how to rattle my av's teeth with the boat hitting wave crests at high speed.

Thanks, Void. Not wishing to sound ungrateful but could you add a little by way of expalanation - I'm not so far along the LSL learning curve as others here and hoped for a bit more in the way of clarification. I don't understand how hover affects whether the front end of the boat is up from level - I see how it affects the level at which the vehicle rides, over water, land, or global. And does your flags reference mean these are switched on or off? Carbon

Hi all. Is there anyone here fully conversant with the complexities of vehicle parameters/flags, who could offer some advice about scripting a boat? I've got almost everything working as I want with the exception of the bow of the boat lifting out of the water as its speed increases. It must be possible to simulate somehow as the Flying Tako sailing scripts by Mothgirl Dibou allow planing but the scripts are no-mod and I have little idea whether it involves serious physics and calculations or can be readily achieved. Can someone knowledgeable please confirm firstly if this is actually possible in a relatively simple way, as to my mind it means that the root prim, which needs setting to 0 rotation for the script to work correctly, would rotate away from 0,0,0. I've waded my way through the Wiki vehicle tutorial but some of the terminology is hard going for a non-scientific mind. Would the llSetVehicleRotationParam(VEHICLE_REFERENCE_FRAME, rot) parameter be the thing I should be looking at or something to do with the Vertical Attractor settings? Any assistance or a snippet example of how to fo about making my boat that bit more realistic would be much appreciated. Thanks in anticipation. Carbon