Daikon Forge

I’m going to frikkin die

May
17
2008 in off topic.

desert-sun I’m very nearly done with the insane schedule I’ve been following to meet my deadline for the trade show/convention. I’ve got one task remaining, not a very large one at that, and I have until the end of business on Monday to complete it. All in all, I’m feeling pretty relieved.

I’m not feeling very refreshed, however. On top of the exhaustion built up from working 15 hour days for a week straight, it’s 90 degrees and very humid today. I know that’s no big deal for a lot of people, but I’m used to much colder weather than this, and I feel like I’m going to die.

Consequently, I’m not feeling very motivated to sit in a hot house (we don’t have AC because we almost never need it) in front of my computer and work on the Taketori Katana update that I know is *long* overdue. I’d rather go sit in the back yard under a shade umbrella with my iced tea and watch the Bald Eagles play with the ravens across the pond, taking the occasional opportunity to run through the sprinkler with the kids (yes, I still do that).

So, to those of you who are waiting and wondering just when the hell I’ll get around to making that update available, I ask for just a little more patience please. I need a break, and today is the day I’m taking it.

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Still alive and kicking, but busybusybusy

May
09
2008 in off topic.

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Just wanted to drop a quick note for those few of you who might actually care a little bit that I’m not spending much (or really any) time in-world lately or blogging because I’ve been fully consumed by getting the product I am working on in my RL job ready for a dog-and-pony show at a trade conference next week.

The 15 hour days should lighten up within the next few days (I HOPE!!!) and my schedule will slowly get back to normal over the next week. I’ll still try to get the promised update for the Taketori out this weekend, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to do much else for a few more days yet.

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WTF is the ‘Release Keys’ button for, anyway?

May
01
2008 in JIRA, Rants and WTF.

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I’ve been reading a very disturbing thread on the SL Forums (registration required) that points to a new type of inventory loss bug : VWR-6610 - Detaching a HUD could lead to the permanent loss of the detached item.

There are multiple ways to detach a HUD, of course, but far and away the most common ‘accidental’ detachment comes from the Second Life® viewer’s damned stupid user interface design. When you click the ‘Release Keys’ button, it blows off every attachment that has scripted access to your movement key. This could include nearly all animation overrides, C:SI swords, most in-world weapons of just about any flavor, and even the key display HUD that I created for Aimee.

And it makes me wonder, just why the hell is it necessary to do that? Why is it necessary to have a button taking up valuable screen real-estate, and even sometimes (depending on what viewer version you are using) intentionally placed as if to encourage accidentally pressing it? If the devs over at The Lab deem it to be such an indispensable feature, even though it’s almost certainly very rarely used once a person finds out how horrible the results are, couldn’t they at the very least place it in the Tools menu alongside the nearly-useless ‘Stop Animations’ item?

/rant off

Please note that the JIRA issue mentioned, while it gave me a chance to rant about something that irritates the crap out of me, is not limited to problems encountered using the ‘Release Keys’ button : It would appear that under some (unknown) set of circumstances, detaching a HUD by any means could result in the permanent loss of that HUD and all of its contents, which may include very expensive animations.

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Think the Naginata has a long-range kick?

Apr
30
2008 in Testing and C:SI.

22 Comments

kick Well, it just might turn out that you’re absolutely correct. I admit that I haven’t spent a great deal of time fighting with or against the naginata, and that may be a part of why I was unaware of the long range of the naginata’s kick. With all of the comment’s I’ve read lately on both sides, I decided to see for myself and headed to Meiji to nab the nearest volunteer (I forget who it was now though, because Second Life has the most annoying habit of forgetting my chat log preferences and it didn’t get recorded as I expected it to).

In order to test this, I took one of the non-phys vehicles that I recently coded up, and changed the code so that I could sit on it and specify a distance and it would move precisely the distance specified from a given avatar. This allowed me to very precisely control the distance in order to find out what was or was not in effective range, and I felt that it was more reliable than measurements taken using prim rulers or other similar methods.

So here’s what I found : I was able to be kicked at distances up to 3.8 meters by the Naginata. Yup, more than a meter more than the Taketori and Wave.

And that brings up another interesting point, actually : I have now checked and double-checked the code on the Taketori and the Wave, and they are specifically coded to have a range of 2.5 meters, but today’s testing showed that they worked up to 2.7 meters. Not much of a difference, perhaps, but it does indicate yet another way that Second Life doesn’t typically do what you tell it to do

I don’t feel that this was a really robust test, since it’s possible that other factors came into play. For instance, sitting on an object changes your bounding box size to include the object being sat upon, but it shouldn’t change the center of mass that is supposedly what is actually tested for using this method, but I wouldn’t bet too much money on that since Second Life has any number of quirks that don’t exactly follow the documentation.

Also, I only performed the test on a single region and on a single day, so it’s also possible that it’s an issue with that region’s server-side simulator code that may or may not exist in previous or subsequent versions. Again, I wouldn’t bet any significant money on that, it’s just an idea that occurred to me.

Still, at least I’ve been able to independently verify that reports of the naginata having a longer kick range are true. Now maybe it’s supposed to be that way, I’ve never been curious enough to ask Archanox before now, but Esprite’s comment on the CombatSI forums leads me to think that it’s not supposed to be that long.

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