What's been happening?
Not a lot.
I have been away and working so my SL has been more like my 3rd or 4th
Not a lot.
I have been away and working so my SL has been more like my 3rd or 4th
But I am holidays now for a few days, and while I still have to make a block for this month's MBOM quilt (it will have owls.. lots of them) I do plan to spend a good portion of time in SL.
Yesterday I decided it was time to work on some scripting.
I have made a tiny dress with flowing tentacles for the skirt and decided it needed something to wear with it on my head. So.. Googly eyes on curly eye stalks seemed the way to go!
More and more I am working on going a little further with my building. Keeping up with the crowds of people in SL making things. The people I admire are constantly moving the goals and while sometimes I don't feel in the mood to keep learning, essentially I don't want to be left behind.
So! If I am making googly eyes, simple balls on sticks are not going to be enough. I wanted them to wink.
Ahhhh well I could skip the bit where it took me hours. Looking up scripts in the wiki, going through all the scripts in my inventory and trying to see how I might do this. But then there really wouldn't be anything here to read.
A fun script I have used in the past has a torus close its hole on touch. What I wanted was a sphere that opened and closed its dimple on a timer. What I hadn't realised I wanted was for that to happen simultaneously for as many eyes as I chose to give myself.
So I needed a script to control the parameters and a script to act as a timer. And to work out how to put the two together as I don't understand the grammar of LSL. (Jo: if you are still reading this blog, scripts are the programs that make the chunks of graphics do stuff in SL).
I stared at a lot of scripts. Trying to find the patterns. Trying to see what I needed and where I should substitute. The change params was in the LSL wiki and was much more useful than the torus one I stared at for ages.
I needed that timer still. Finally after a bit of browsing I ended up at a site I have been to before
that generates a script on demand. There are only a few options but one, "move an object" sounded like I would easily be able to identify the timer part of the script and the "move" part and swap in my "change parameters" script.
Blow me down! It worked.
I had a blinking eye.
I copied it.. I had two blinking eyes...... that didn't blink together.
sigh
I linked, saved to inventory and hoped that when I rezzed them, they would blink together.
Sure enough they did. Amazing!
Fiddled with the timing to get the blink faster and lost the synchronisation. Bother. Somehow I had deleted the saved working copy. And then spent another hour trying to insert a line of "reset script on rezzing". Which promptly killed the whole thing every time.
.........gnashes teeth.
I came back to SL a few times between domestic chores and finally decided to unlink and relink. One eye had been the prime prim just by accident. I linked it with an unscripted prim being prime, took to inventory......
...... and they are blinking together at last!
I know this stuff is easy for some folk. And I am not writing these things from scratch so I am not any version of a genius. But I do take quite a lot of pride in these achievements. When I went to Uni, the computer sat down the hall in a few rooms by itself. It was a DEC-10
Yesterday I decided it was time to work on some scripting.
I have made a tiny dress with flowing tentacles for the skirt and decided it needed something to wear with it on my head. So.. Googly eyes on curly eye stalks seemed the way to go!
More and more I am working on going a little further with my building. Keeping up with the crowds of people in SL making things. The people I admire are constantly moving the goals and while sometimes I don't feel in the mood to keep learning, essentially I don't want to be left behind.
So! If I am making googly eyes, simple balls on sticks are not going to be enough. I wanted them to wink.
Ahhhh well I could skip the bit where it took me hours. Looking up scripts in the wiki, going through all the scripts in my inventory and trying to see how I might do this. But then there really wouldn't be anything here to read.
A fun script I have used in the past has a torus close its hole on touch. What I wanted was a sphere that opened and closed its dimple on a timer. What I hadn't realised I wanted was for that to happen simultaneously for as many eyes as I chose to give myself.
So I needed a script to control the parameters and a script to act as a timer. And to work out how to put the two together as I don't understand the grammar of LSL. (Jo: if you are still reading this blog, scripts are the programs that make the chunks of graphics do stuff in SL).
I stared at a lot of scripts. Trying to find the patterns. Trying to see what I needed and where I should substitute. The change params was in the LSL wiki and was much more useful than the torus one I stared at for ages.
I needed that timer still. Finally after a bit of browsing I ended up at a site I have been to before
that generates a script on demand. There are only a few options but one, "move an object" sounded like I would easily be able to identify the timer part of the script and the "move" part and swap in my "change parameters" script.
Blow me down! It worked.
I had a blinking eye.
I copied it.. I had two blinking eyes...... that didn't blink together.
sigh
I linked, saved to inventory and hoped that when I rezzed them, they would blink together.
Sure enough they did. Amazing!
Fiddled with the timing to get the blink faster and lost the synchronisation. Bother. Somehow I had deleted the saved working copy. And then spent another hour trying to insert a line of "reset script on rezzing". Which promptly killed the whole thing every time.
.........gnashes teeth.
I came back to SL a few times between domestic chores and finally decided to unlink and relink. One eye had been the prime prim just by accident. I linked it with an unscripted prim being prime, took to inventory......
...... and they are blinking together at last!
I know this stuff is easy for some folk. And I am not writing these things from scratch so I am not any version of a genius. But I do take quite a lot of pride in these achievements. When I went to Uni, the computer sat down the hall in a few rooms by itself. It was a DEC-10
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10
Truth is I had the very slimmest of understanding what I was doing. We were programming the simplest adding of columns of figures. And I was way out of my depth. To me, it was a very inefficient calculator.
After that the nearest thing to a computer in my day to day was an autoteller. I left work after a while, had kids and returned to work which had been transformed in my absence.
Fortunately... very fortunately.. I had got into quilting while out of the workforce, which has a very strong on-line community. So I started playing around on a computer at home. I published patterns which required me to teach myself Word and how to use a graphics program.
So slowly I have been exploring and learning this world that my kids have grown up in and take for granted.
After that the nearest thing to a computer in my day to day was an autoteller. I left work after a while, had kids and returned to work which had been transformed in my absence.
Fortunately... very fortunately.. I had got into quilting while out of the workforce, which has a very strong on-line community. So I started playing around on a computer at home. I published patterns which required me to teach myself Word and how to use a graphics program.
So slowly I have been exploring and learning this world that my kids have grown up in and take for granted.
It feels pretty good to make eyes blink.
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