Erica Driver posted a very positive, ind …

Erica Driver posted a very positive, independent, and interesting response about IBM’s integration of OpenSim into the Lotus product.

It has been fun working in the small way I can outside of main job priorities on these projects. I have struggled isolating the best way to contribute more than just conference room chairs, animations and various gadgets. My first planned contribution in 2009 is MoPose 5.0 with full support for OpenSim and Second Life. That will provide the basis of other work creating animations for business furniture and builds.

I was also very pleased to get an AO working on ReactionGrid and will build that into business AOs with animation as well.

I already have many of the animations necessary for gestures, a big part of participation in a business context for hand raising, hand shaking and the like. I will focus on this in the first quarter of 2009 over other work to build out prim hair, skins and other clothing, which has always been something on my TODO list for our internal IBM grid as well.

MoPose 5.0 is now driving Yman Juran’s …

MoPose 5.0 is now driving Yman Juran’s latest trapeze. She and her sisters use a HUD I created that captures the animations available in a given item, in this case the trapeze, and makes them available by just clicking. She has 45 animations loaded currently, the most we could fit vertically on the screen. I used a new AnimAdjustmentFinder script to quickly resolve all the offsets of different animation start positions. I will be adding a HUD to go with it making it even faster to create the animations notecard that goes with the MultiPose script inside the trapeze.

The good news is that all of this should work with OpenSim, which I need to test later. Yman has a big inauguration celebration that she and the sisters are doing although I don’t have a link at the moment.

Why use an AO with a listener? I keep ru …

Why use an AO with a listener? I keep running into them, like the popular Framation ones. Anything that has /ao on and those kinds of commands that listen on channel 0 are just absurd, useless wastes of system resources. Even a small just with buttons that react to touch events is so much better on any sim. It seems SL is doomed to these kinds of things. It just makes me want to discourage even /1 show for poseballs all the more. Perhaps I won’t even enable that as an option in MoPose 5.0. If I do leave it in, it will be with a strong warning about the lag for a largely idle command that goes unused. I already have the simpler scripts for those who don’t want the extra lag.

Beware of llGetObjectDetails() is my les …

Beware of llGetObjectDetails() is my lesson for this week. I ripped it all out of MoPose 5.0 after getting all excited about using that over corrections to buggy sit target values. Turns out you cannot get a reliable capture of the avatars position when it sits–especially if the object being sat upon is moving, as this script also concedes even though it uses other detection methods.

I did leave this function in AnimAdjustmentFinder, which I am still fleshing out and will add a HUD to rather than typed commands soon. This has made getting extremely accurate animations adjustments very easy for items with multiple animations, the bane of multipose animation in general because no two animations start in the same place.

Besides, I don’t think OpenSim yet supports llGetObjectDetails() so this renders MoPose 5.0 much more OpenSim compatible.

Completed MoPose 5.0 design and project …

Completed MoPose 5.0 design and project plan. Has already helped organized order of feature development and code branching at appropriate points. Here is a class diagram of the scripts, which might still undergo some consolidation and a feature breakdown, which has kept me sane and helped consolidate all the feature requests and ideas over the last year. But keeping each script as focused as possible is part of the plan. Perhaps the best thing so far to come out of going through this road map design step was realizing there are really three core scripts: Pose, MultiPose, and SequPose. I really think this is going to keep the most folks happy and enable the most use on OpenSim as well as Second Life. When complete, this suite of scripts should be available to all for free (BSD) and hopefully displace the pose/animation development kits running for as much as 14k Linden in Second Life. Pose and animation is such a basic, essential requirement for any immersive virtual world experience, this stuff should really be available to all.

More later on that, but after almost all my free time during Christmas vacation working on this, I think I get a few programming blocks, but my other skills have sure suffered for lack of practice this last month.