This is why you should comment your code

This morning I opened an LSL script that I last worked on in 2007.

It's a bad sign when your own comments have no idea what the code is doing.
It’s a bad sign when your own comments have no idea what the code is doing.

“FORCE_WIBBLE_MAX”? Really? I know I wrote this thing, but I’m awfully confused here.

Fortunately, it works. I can’t remember how or why, but it works.

Second Life aircraft “makers”, we need to chat

I tweeted about how beautiful aircraft were in Second Life.
I tweeted about how beautiful aircraft were in Second Life.

I took a little tour of Second Life airports recently to see what aircraft designers have been up to lately. Although I haven’t been gone from SL, I haven’t released anything new for quite a while, and I wanted to see how the advent of mesh — the ability to upload 3D wireframe models — had influenced aircraft design.

I was, quite frankly, blown away. The realism in the models and texturing was head and shoulders above what I’d seen in SL before the advent of mesh uploads. And having done some 3D modeling myself, I was astonished at the level of realism and accuracy. I saw fighter jets, World War II planes, commercial jets both large and small, and helicopters of all types — all of them faithful reproductions of the real-world aircraft. That the price tag on some of these aircraft was a hefty L$6000 (about $24 US) wasn’t surprising — until I started learning more about mesh.

Continue reading “Second Life aircraft “makers”, we need to chat”

This is not the droid you’re looking for

London Drugs now sells a “Grillbot” for cleaning you barbecue grill. This is so phenomenally stupid, I don’t know where to start.

First, it’s almost certainly not a robot, which implies a level of autonomy and decision-making, but rather an automaton, which simply bounces around the grill spinning it’s feeble little brushes.

Second, a simple steel brush and a bit of steel a wool would be more effective because a person can not only apply force when needed, but can also identify dirt spots and focus more attention on those.

Third, after you’ve run down the batteries on this gadget, you’ll have to clean up after it anyway. Check the results, scrub missed spots, rinse the grill, etc.

Fourth, as any Roomba owner knows, maintenance is time consuming and expensive. Dirt gets into the inner workings, parts need to be replaced, batteries charged/replaced — all of this costs you money and time. At huge expense, you’ve given yourself more work than you had before.

Finally, if I had a gas barbecue, I would definitely buy one of these, because OMG TINY GRILL-CLEANING ROBOT!

TerraVend system is offline

If you own and operate a TerraVend vendor, you may have noticed that it’s switched itself off. This is because there is a communication problem between the system’s in-world server and the web server side of things. In short: It’s borked.

I’m looking into possible ways to fix this, but until then I hope I can ask for your patience. Sorry for any inconvenience.

If you’re looking to try or buy Terra products, you can still do that at Abbotts Aerodrome!

First Terra aircraft in OpenSim

Well, I’ve done it. In fact, it was absurdly easy to do. I brought my first Terra aircraft into OpenSim.

My first object imported to OpenSim from Second Life

The Imprudence viewer exported the biplane model as XML, minus any textures I didn’t actually own (I’m not sure which those would be, since I textured this myself). Then I ran Sim-on-a-Stick, logged in with Imprudence and imported the XML. Over a period of about 30 seconds, I watched Imprudence assemble the plane in pieces — all 248 of them and all textured correctly. Proof of concept: Now I can start migrating my content away from Second Life.

Just to be perfectly clear, I’m not abandoning Second Life. I just think that it’s good to have a lifeboat available if the Titanic goes down.

UPDATE: After playing around with Imprudence in Second Life for a bit, I find that I can export almost nothing, because there’s always at least one part of the model or textures that have someone else as the “creator”, even if that name is my own alt account. What I need is a viewer that ignores the creator tag. Without that, all of my content is stuck in SL.