Arranging llDialog buttons

Okay, back in Second Life! And/or OpenSim.

A purely Scripting-geekery post today, on a really niche topic.

When you get one of those blue dropdowns (or pop-ups, or drop-ins, depending on your viewer) with a number (up to twelve!) of buttons in them (when you touch a danceball for instance and it asks you what dance you want to do), the piece of LSL (Liden Scripting Language) that shows you that thing with those buttons is a built-in function called “llDialog“.

(All of the built-in functions start with “ll” which presumably stands for “Linden Lab”, but which has made many beginning LSL scripters, including Yers Truly, wonder how an identifier can start with eleven at all.)

One of the arguments to llDialog is, naturally enough, a list of the strings to put on the buttons. And the order in which the strings are copied from the list onto the buttons is… perhaps counterintuitive. For instance, if the list looks like:

[ "one", "two", "three", "four" ]

then the dialog as displayed will look like:

which might not be the first thing one would have guessed.

It basically starts at the bottom, filling rows upward as it goes, until it runs out of strings.

I have sometimes fiddled around to make things come out how I want them to manually, and more often have ignored the problem entirely and just not cared that the buttons were in a stupid order.

But for some reason today I got tired of it and decided to fix it; so here:

list arrange(list l) {
list outl = [];
integer n = llGetListLength(l);
do {
if (n<3) return outl + l;
n = n - 3;
outl = outl + llList2List(l, -3, -1);
if (n==0) return outl;
l = llList2List(l, 0, -4);
} while (TRUE);
return []; // UNREACHABLE
}

This will take a list in an order, and return a list in a different order such that if you pass the new list to llDialog, the labels on the buttons will be in the order that one might expect, left to right and up to down. As in for instance:

llDialog(avatar_id, prompt, arrange(button_list), channel);

It basically just divides the input list into pieces of size three, and then reverses them, with complications in case the input list isn’t equally divisible by three. And because if you ask LSL to copy the first through fourth-to-last (inclusive) elements of a three-element list, it silently copies the entire list rather than (as one might have expected) copying nothing. And because it doesn’t realize that a “do while(TRUE)” will never exit and without the unreachable line you get an error saying that not all code paths return a value. And because llGetListLength is said to be computationally expensive. And because LSL does let you use negative indices (roughly) on lists!

This works in both Second Life and OpenSim, because the scripting languages are extremely compatible for obvious reasons.

Many, many, implementations of this same algorithm no doubt exist all over the place :) but this is mine, for the moment and for what it’s worth!

A virtual museum done right

So there’s always been lots of talk (and perhaps somewhat less action :) ) about how virtual worlds are potentially great delivery vehicles for education, and schools, and museums, and all like that there.

There are a number of different ways to approach the idea, from wild “pretty much Not Possible In Real Life” things like that amazing and/or disturbing Virtual Schizophrenia build from the other year, to simple “upload my 2D art and put it on the walls of a virtual room” galleries, to novel interactive things that are about other things and that are yet to be built.

As an example of how to build a virtual museum about real-life artworks and artifacts, I can’t recommend highly enough the Peter Vos Museum in Second Life, as covered briefly in these two notes in NWN, and as covered most visually and memorably in this Yesikita Coppola machinima:

The machinima is very well done, and if for some reason you can’t get to the museum itself, by all means watch it.

But if you can get to the museum yourself, I’d suggest doing that first! Or at least second. :) I went the other day (and then got sick and almost forgot that I’d wanted to weblog about it), and am glad I did.

I knew nothing about Peter Vos before visiting the museum, and now I feel both fascinated and well-informed, as well as having come home with some nice souvenirs. The museum is a lovely build, perfectly fit to the purpose, and taking advantage of the SL environment in subtle but effective ways; the lighting is dark with focused lights, as a museum should be, the synchronized slide projectors are definitely synchronized slide projectors, making just the right soft sounds, the little peepholes that let you examine some of the smaller works close up are perfect little peepholes, that zoom your default camera position right in where it ought to be, while making your avatar bend in just the right “museum visitor peering into one of those little peepholes” pose.

About the art itself I won’t say much; it should be experienced. :) Nothing conventional, many many birds, and considerable surreality.

(The story behind the museum, the connections between the artist, the museum builder, and the machinimatographer, are quite a story in themselves, but I’ll let you discover that for yourself also!)

I would commend this both to anyone as a museum to be visited, and to anyone thinking of building a virtual museum (or gallery, or school, or…) as an example of one very effective way to do it. It’s just one point in the (big!) space of possible approaches, but it’s a very well done one, and definitely worth a visit.

Happy New Year!

Despite the silly atomic body being busy fighting off some “cold germ” sort of replicators, I managed to make a New Year card! And this is it here!

(I decided not to spam it out to everyone on my friend’s list, ’cause that seems spammy; have I actually done that in the past?)

It’s been a nice low-key sort of year in SL (at least to the extent I’m willing to publicly divulge, mu-hahaha). Lots of things have happened in the world, and I have for the most part just sat (or flown or danced) in more or less my usual places, and smiled benignly at the thought that other people were doing them.

Also I have not written in my weblog much. :) But I am still here! And still infinitely appreciative of my SL friends, creators, people in AVs normal and lovely and ugly and wild, who make the world the amazing thing it is.

(And I will believe in Sansar / useful VR goggles / sustainable server-side rendering when I see them. I am so crotchety!)

Girl Dale notes that her hair actually looks much better than that, and the “capture depth” feature of the viewer camera works with limited success in the presence of alphas.

(Pretty background is the Neva River sim, somewhat the worse for my post-processing.)

WaterMoon Breeze: stuff and scenery!

I haven’t done one of these Neat Things I Found In SL posts for awhile, both because I have been just hanging around the Rise and other familiar places a lot, and because when I do find new neat things, I am too lazy to organize about a post about them.  :)

The other night, though, I followed the usual SL chain of nice pointers and coincidences to WaterMoon Breeze, the sim and build and inworld store and probably also home of MenuBar Memorial, who (among many other things) made the wonderful crazy 50s-style Lucid Dream Together poster for Chasing a Butterfly, the machinima we posted about here the other week.

Turns out this MenuBar feller has some Mad Skillz, and his stores (inworld and marketplace) contain some Really Neat Stuff.  It’s Old SL stuff in the best way (crazy, fun, creative, offbeat, brightly colored), but also extremely polished. Not only can he script and do amazing things with particles (more on that below), but he also does graphic design like a person who does graphic design, so the offbeat brightly colored things actually look good!

 

See?  How brightly colored and well-done?  And there is a smart umbrella, and a Breedable Pet Rock, and Weather Devices, and all sorts of things!  Here are more of them:

Bird-things, and water-things, and all kinds of things! And if you aren’t careful, some things that sort of, well, explode…

(Hint: something about putting things into Coke…)

Spot the Pun in this one!

Witty, brightly-colored, and useful…

There is also a long swaying bridge up to a mysterious floating island…

with interesting things up top which might include, say, a zipline to get back down…

and at the bottom, naturally, a Hieronymus-Bosch-based merry-go-round.

In terms of buying things so far I have mostly bought this amazing Orb

which I have installed at one end of the Park in the Rise (as pictured) where I can sit and alternate between zoning out and wondering how the heck he does it.  (Just when I think I have a pretty good feeling for how particles work in SL…)

So that is that!  Another example of craziness and creativity in SL, for your consideration.

(Oh, and I still have a marketplace store myself, come to think of it!  But I never add anything to it, and no one ever buys from it, so that works out…)

Canary Beck on Ambient Sound in SL

Although it is apparently based on a NWN article that I do not have the patience to read today (NWN is so often annoying; see prior satire), this piece by Canary Beck is well worth a read (and not long):

Ambient Sound in Second Life

and there is an optional pretty and instructive “Sights and Sounds of Basilique” video that you can watch / listen to.

I have a couple of “pretty nature sounds” objects that I tend to drop copies of onto parcels that I own, but I may be inspired this Canary Beck post to put a little more effort than that into it…  :)

UWA time again!

I know, all I ever weblog about these days is machinima.  That is because I have already weblogged about trying on clothes from Sn@tch, the other main thing I do in SL these days :), and I can’t imagine that you want to see more and more postings about that.

Anyway!  It is time for the annual University of Western Australia themed machinima and 3D art contest thing again, and as usual I will highlight the entry that I made some small contribution to!  It is of course by Karima and Nat, and is of course wonderful.  :)

I will not say anything about the premise, because it is so delightfully revealed in the film itself.  See also Karima’s post on the subject for more insight and background.

There are no doubt lots of other extremely worthy entries, which we should all attempt to find time to watch!  But right now I must rush off to continue the ongoing RL battle with entropy.

(There’s an interesting question: does SL, or the virtual worlds in general, have any inherent entropy, not counting what they inherit indirectly from RL?  Probably so; for instance empty land with rezzing turned on gradually accumulates trash.  Expand and generalize.  But first watch the machinima!  It is on the You-Tube, so you can even Like and Comment and generally social-media about it.)

Drax does Machinima!

The Drax Files, which is a great collection of SL – RL videos / documentaries about interesting things, almost none of which I have actually managed to watch, has recently done an episode about various SL machinima-makers, which I saw an early version of that was very good, so I bet the final one is too:

(Why, you wonder, did I get to see an early version?  Because one of the featured machinima-making entities is the redoubtable team of Karima and Nat, to whose creations I’ve had the privilege of making various scriptish sorts of contributions.)

For more thorough coverage :) see Karima’s writeup and Nat’s German one.

Definitely worth watching!

Mesh bodies, you say?

That’s me in the demo version of the latest (or at least the most obvious when you walk into the store!) Maitreya mesh body (including the demo undies that come in the box).

I thought I should at least try out the Latest Thing so as to be open-minded. :)

It’s really quite nice; the mesh is much prettier than the standard SL built-in AV mesh, and since it doesn’t touch the face at all I still look like me there. Also it’s fitted mesh, so at least to a degree the overall shape is still me. Being still me has always been my main worry about mesh AV-parts, so…

(Friends have told me that they’ve had to tweak the underlying shape a bit, but not too much, to really get it just right.)

Classic non-mesh clothing that the maker hasn’t made a mesh-AV-applier for will still of course be a problem; I haven’t heard any convincing stories about how that will ever be fixed. But of course one isn’t obliged to wear the mesh body all the time. It could be just part of the arsenal.

As Evil Spock said, I shall consider it!

Belated videos and a picture

I meant to post this awhile back, but I have been (a) lazy and (b) under the weather.  But anyway, here is the actual video of the great SL/RL machinima I reblogged last time:

In case people didn’t click through on the last post and scroll down and therefore missed it.  :)

Here also is a “What does Second Life mean to me?” video from Natascha Randt (Nat!):

which is apparently part of a whole series of videos like that, related (or not) to <a href=”https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Your-Avatar/The-What-Second-Life-Means-to-Me-Video-Share-Project/td-p/2941693″>this thread on the SL Community Forums</a>, which might be of interest to anyone who reads the SL Community Forums, and/or watches videos.

And finally here is a picture of me at SL12B.  SL12B happened, hurrah!  I spent a total of not very much time at all there; as usual, I love that these things occur, but don’t generally get to them as much as I might, because they are crowded, and I’m doing other stuff.  But I did hang from the ceiling!

So that’s all those things that you probably knew about anyway.  :)  But still it’s nice to post here once in awhile!

Follow Your Road…. All The Way To Success!!

I know I mostly reblog other people’s things these days :) but it’s because they are cool. This is another Karima and Nat machinima, this one with a great RL aspect to it. I was one of the actors again (in a bigger role even, he said modestly), but what those two, and the RL band, have done with our actors’ posing about is really amazing; watch and enjoy!

Digital Rabbit Hole

Costa Rica’s Own..Home-Grown Band

(Version en Español aquí)

  This isthe case of the hottest new Latin Musical group,” El Combo Style,” from my home country, Costa Rica. Really, just keep doing what you’re doing and share your talent with the world!
I love a good cause, and for me, people with artistic talent, dedication and humility are always a good cause.
The first time I heard this group, was in some studio recordings from the University of Costa Rica.
Even though the quality was not the best, I saw, felt and most importantly heard, the talent of this very tight and charismatic band.
David Mendez who plays trombone and maracas, (blind since early childhood) and David Jimenez (singer-guitarist) are part of the backbone of this band. D. Jimenez writes all the songs and lyrics and D. Mendez  along with Gerson Rodriguez on keyboard make all the musical arrangements…

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How old are Dales and some gnomes?

So yeah, How Old dot Net is all the rage, and I’m sure I’m not the first person to point it at various digital-realm avatars, but here we go!

Girl Dale and Boy Dale both seem to be mid-20’s, which is plausible:

Even drowed-up for Fantasy Faire (see Michele H’s very nice coverage although given how late I always am it is probably over by when you read this):

On the other hand Spennix is, well…

as is her alternate-realm self, the Arcane Mage Tashalorum (now level 100 also with her own Castle; I think we may have seen her here or on Flickr before, at like level 12; leveling is sooo easy these days):

The human PNC architect there is handled more plausibly, so probably we just need a different version of How Old dot Net for each of the races of Azeroth. (But what of the half-gnomes??)

Amusingly, the male version of Tashalorum (two words: Transmorphic Tincture) is apparently an even harder problem:

Maybe facial hair isn’t supposed to be pink?

That’s all for now. :) All various things have been occurring as always, but I have been lazy and not weblogging them or anything. Which means they didn’t really happen yet at all!!

All is Vanity

This gorgeousness doesn’t take care of itself, y’know!

Well, actually it does, but this vanity (zebra ottoman and make-up clutter included) was in a D thing at Sn@tch, so I got it.

I have it up in my Unpacking Place high over the Rise, where I unpack stuff and try not to get to attached to it so that I can later derez it to make room for other stuff. I like it up there.

Sheer little top also by Sn@tch, house from me (available on the Marketplace I think!), other stuff pictured from other places I forget.

These atomic persons…

I have hardly existed at all for some time, as my atomic counterpart claims to have been “out of the country” and to have “jetlag” and “a plugged ear” and all sorts of unlikely-sounding ailments of that kind.

Also to be in dire need of “sleep”. (I don’t understand why the atomic person can’t sleep while the SL person is inworld doing things, since the converse seems to be well-supported.)

When I have been in, I have been mostly (a) checking the riotvends and lucky boards at Sn@tch (see above), (b) sorting inventory, and (c) now and then going to sets by ‘leet DJs.

None of which have inspired me to weblog about them much!

But here is a neat thing, that I can claim some connection to: Karima and Nat have posted on their entry for this year’s UWA Machinima contest (with the very SL-ish theme of “Transcending Borders”), and you can see it on the web and leave comments and stuff (Karima also says some Wise Things about the Culture of Easy Likes, which should be read and commented on). For this film, I got to gallop about as a horse some (see the amazing scenes with horses emerging from water and walking on tabletops and such), and I helped a little with some of the “data flowing” effects; also it includes inter alia some memes and clips from prior films of theirs, some of which I also did scripting and/or galloping about as a horse and so on in. And it is a great film, perfectly on-theme and very worth watching.

So I bask in the reflected creativity! :)

And I urge my atomic person to drink some green tea with honey, say, and get back in shape so that I can exist more often…

Updated: because in the original version I forgot that some stuff that I did was for this movie, because I always forget things.  :)

The New Gallery again

Wow, I haven’t posted here since April? At least it was April of this year. :)

So the other night a friend and I wandered downslope from the Rise into Mooter, where Gee Blackadder has some nice stuff, and in the nice stuff we discovered this piece of art for sale (“Afrodita”, by Kyra) that I thought I would buy a copy of and put up in the Gallery, so I did; here it is up in the New Gallery:

I really ought to put a little TP to the gallery somewhere, or even list it in Art Galleries of Second Life or something, as it’s kind of as nice little place (I say modestly) with a slowly-evolving set of pieces by various people, mostly not me.

And then at the top you can sit on the viewing blocks and just bliss out staring into the ThingMaker (which is by me) and listening to the SomaFM music on the stream (assuming I haven’t changed it to something else).

Some random Thingmaker-as-art snapshots, with Shadows on, taken just at sunset. Or perhaps sunrise.

That LM again! :)

(Hm, I really ought to install some instructions in the little ball-controlling game that’s outside the gallery, if I’m going to tempt people to go there. Or maybe it’s sufficiently intuitive…)

Sn@tch will have all my monehs!

From that Ivey:

As you will see there are no Sn@tch-n-Grab or Woeful Wednesday Specials this week. That’s cause I decided to try something new! Rob made me this cute little Mesh @ sign with an arrow and this week you can find them all around the store next to certain vendors. When you find them, the item it’s pointing to is on SALE! Everything with the @ arrow pointing to it is marked down between 0L and 50 L! There are several things this week scattered around the store on every level (including the Bargain Pit) and there is something FREE this week too! I’m hoping to mix this mini sale hunt into the regular line up of specials every week if it goes well! Happy Hunting!

So, being unable to resist quality things under about 75L, I have yet even more Sn@tch outfits to catch up on opening and admiring myself in!

Share the joy and/or poverty! Sn@tch LM

(There should be a picture here of me wearing clothes and all, but I am too lazy and/or busy! It is amazing I have even weblogged…)

“Vector’s Vortex” The Movie by Natascha Randt and Karima Hoisan

Another lovely machinima with my name in the credits — erhm, I mean — from Karima and Nat! Which I helped a tiny bit with the scripting of the world that it is taken in! Kitely has some really interesting stuff in it (if only one had the time to explore…).

Tongue out of cheek, this world is really lovely and contemplative and worth a visit; the movie (also lovely) shows only some parts of it. Give it a look!

Digital Rabbit Hole

This is number 14!
14 collaborations with Natascha and my heart tells me, we might just keep going!
This one, came obsessively fast, just because we were both in “starburst mode” and as I was madly finishing the build, Nat was filming at amazing draw distances of over 2000(those who cruise in  virtual worlds will know that is being able to see very very far indeed!) For those who love to film, Kitely – Virtual Worlds on Demand is like paradise, where you can actually use these kinds of high graphic settings, and still get 70fps. I have posted aboutmy world here, and also shared a poem  that was born as the world was developing, and now I give you Natascha’s beautiful camera eye, that tantalizes more than it reveals, because I hope you will actually make the journey yourselves to see it on Kitely. Nat…

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Cat and Samurai

Just to show I still exist. :)

The looks go together surprisingly well, don’t you think?

Second Life is the only reason I need a computer

That may be a slight exaggeration. :)

But my fancy Alienware laptop, which has had various power problems for some time, has been ignoring its power cord for a few days now, either to operate or to charge its battery, and the local convincing-sounding person that I found on Craigslist to fix it says it’ll probably be next weekend.

And the only thing I find myself missing (aside from a few media files trapped on its hard drive because they were too big to keep conveniently in the cloud), is Second Life.

For work and general keyboard-typing, I have this worked-owned Chromebook Pixel, which arguably counts as a netbook rather than a laptop computer. To do work-related stuff I use that to talk to a computer under my desk at work (it’s running a Linux variant, and I don’t even know what brand of hardware it is), and use that to talk to hundreds of other computers out in the cloud somewhere, but those aren’t really mine.

For music and some games and things I have an iPad. But even that I haven’t been using all that much lately, because I finally got my first smartphone, and it takes care of a surprisingly large fraction (near 100%) of the things that I can’t conveniently do on the Pixel.

Which fits in with this whole bizarre thing about how PC sales are down by more than 10%, due almost certainly to how everyone else is also buying netbooks and tablets and phones and things instead.

This suggests that things like Second Life (and for that matter WoW and so on) do need to figure out how to get onto netbooks / tablets / phones, if they want to be relevant to anyone but hardcore gamers with needs for more muscular PCs.

One way to do this is with server-side rendering, but not much seems to be happening with that. (Whatever happened to that server-side version of the SL viewer? Is that still a thing?)

Another way would be to have some lower-resolution world with a lightweight client that could fit onto an iPad, say; maybe something like a more Linden-flavored Minecraft with cute little — ohhhhh, I get it.

And a third way would be to have netbook / tablet / phone viewers that did actual client-side rendering of the usual SL world, and let you interact with it. Hm, anyone tried out Lumiya lately?

Maybe someday I will say “the only thing I need a computer for is taking high-res pictures in SL”… :)

The Drax Files: Creations for Parkinson’s

I hardly ever take the time to watch machinima by people I don’t know :) but this is just wonderful…

So very much the good spirit of SL.

Pardon me, I seem to have something in my eye…

My acting career continues! :)

Marvelous talented friends Karima and Nat have another movie out, Drink Me With Your Eyes; another rendering of one of Karima’s poems (a passionate piece in mixed English and Spanish), in amazing visuals of dancers and horses and eyes and… well, go see it. :)

I got a little bit part in the bar scenes (expertly sitting on a poseball!), and also in the horses-running-about scenes (as the Slightly Confused Horse), and got to contribute a little miscellaneous scripting also. But mostly just watched Karima and Nat and wondered to myself how they do it.

I will stick to scripting. :) Although I understand some people find that mysterious also!