1. Invite Target to group.
2. Set Target role as only one that can be deducted by for group accounting.
3. Divide 32ksqm plot into 2000 x 16sqm plots.
4. Set each to advertise themselves.
5. One week = -60,000L$ / Week .
6. ???
7. PROFIT!!

Honestly, quite scary that it would only take a simple invite to completely reverse their money balance. Group deductions are special you see, they can go into the negatives, you could get into serious debt unless LL would be smarter to have considered this implementation better. (Some people have lost 3000L$ over only from a couple plots owned by a group over an extended time and they didn’t know where it was going)

So yeah, the moral of the story is to be careful in consideration when joining a group, you might think your safe but your not, unless LL fixes this exploit. Money should never be able to be taken from people without their permission like this… via.. a simple.. tick.. on.. a.. checkbox.. of a role.

The new secondlife version is rick rolling over the grid bringing Mono and..

most importantly to me..

The new llDetected* Touch functions.

Wewt!

Incredibly useful in many things, for instance one prim interfaces, I could make my fabled custom-attachment unit creator and most importantly allow the HUD to recognise where a user clicked on the HUD which can be translated back into a world position through some nifty geometric functions for my game.

My head is just bursting with innovation with all these new possibilities being open now.

In fact I will publish the source code for converting HUD pos to world coordinates if anyone is interested.

Also:

Because Mono has been integrated in to Second Life alongside the original scripting engine, scripters are able to opt in to Mono. Unless scripts are explicitly converted to run on Mono they will continue to run on the existing scripting engine. There is no automated conversion to Mono and all existing scripted content will continue to run on the original scripting engine as before.

I really that we have the option to return to the old LSL compiler if there is something wrong (Quite likely since the entire grid would be being really tested now against the myriad of different combinations).

Although I think some of the decisions regarding breaking content are quite abstract and just plain dumb. For example the triangle prim has the texture face horribly squished which was fixed by the linden but then people complained that their workarounds this bug were then broke, so the lindens threw in the old buggy code, without even making a survey about the complaints thrown by a few lonely people compared to the future development of fixing these bugs.

Also, I questioned the lindens a while ago why most prims have such a horrid amount of triangles. A virgin plywood cube has about 168 triangles. Yes 168 triangles for a cube that should really only have 12 triangles. This is apparently because of the lighting. But I have lighting switched off, so why are my cubes and prims still so horribly laggy? Just lazy coders? Lazy of making the difference between 2000 and 2 million polygons? Would be an incredible optimization in my opinion.

..that is the progress of development I have achieved, my original strategy game that started a year or two ago has jumped into a new revival; And now I have powerful LSL scripts Arcs completed vital to certain basic foundations:

• Linked-Tier Hierarchy

Imagine being able to simulate a skeleton, an entire avatar, or rather a mechanical structure and being able to flexibly adjust one piece of the limb with each child following suit. Basically I would be able to easily mix&match some prims to make a tank and effortlessly turn the turret to face enemies while leaving the main body in the direction of movement. I could even put a small machine gun turret ontop and have that turn around to face a different threat!

• Heavily optimized A* Pathfinding

I now have in my possession the ability to do realtime pathfinding in LSL itself just about sufficient and effective enough to be capable on running on multiple units at once.

• Pseudo Random number generator (+Perlin Noise)

Doesn’t sound interesting but it means something special to me, first off all I would be able to assign listener channels specific to my units for damage control on a much more efficient basis than running hundreds of objects on the same heavily spammed channel.

• Geometric Library

This is an incredible masterpiece of scripting that I was proud enough to give back to the community in a bloody fantastic documented way. Shame it is under-used and most developers don’t know what to do with it, I have heard a fellow game dev make an awesome spaceship battle game whereby the weapons would fire a message that would be intercepted and each spaceship would work out on their own wether it hit it than rely on the shaddy + laggy havok physics. Oh and it means instant-hit weapons such as lasers would actually work properly now without waiting a supposedly instant-hit weapon to reach its target.

• Interpolation Library

Interpolation is quite important and an underestimated aspect of movement. It is useful and in my case could be used for future aircraft as a way to plot smooth transitions and paths from current position to a target and then back, like a bombing mission run coordinated with other aircraft for best potential destruction.

• Physics Library

Just some odd pieced together functions, one of my favourites being a trajectory calculation function for computing the angle needed to shoot an object, such as a bullet or artillery shell, that has a specific initial velocity, also allows for the complementary angle.

• Knowledge of Quaternion math

My new found knowledge of working with quaternion rotations is an incredibly useful asset and can now fully use its potential as seen from my rotation functions in the interpolation library.

• Proper health bars via llSetText

I have now successfully created a low-lag effective way of displaying bars such as for health, shield and/or power on llSetText together with the special block characters.

and thanks to Niles’ help:

• Efficient Encryption

His encryption functions are incredibly simple but very safe that I could even trust handling transaction data between two objects.

• World Coords to HUD

I had been working months on this small piece of code but Niles managed to write it down which I simply couldn’t get down in maths, I am not sure why but I think I had the same thing, Writer’s block that affects writers, except for mathematics. This function allows me to convert a world position to precisely the same location as on the HUD which is vital for certain important ideas I wanted todo in my RTS game.

• Effective synchronized prim animation

I had been planning for a while on this sort of system but Niles beat me to it and I wish on using prim animation for certain cool sequences which will be in the game, primarily what comes to mind is unit and building animations such as when a building is to be constructed I wish it to be quite detailed.

RTS Progress so far…

[ Todo: Youtube video ]

[ Todo: Pictures ]

[ Todo: Well..more stuff here to show what I have done so far ]

Interface

On a slightly related note I have a hurdle to overcome due my perfectionist/OCD attitude if I wish to keep this project alive.

Specifically, I need my Heads Up Display for my RTS aesthetically complete so that I can script that. I tried to make it but I just can’t do it, so I am asking You in a plead for help, do you know any texture artists/interface designers? Or perhaps are You one? Then please contact me here in a comment or on SecondLife and IM Nexii Malthus.

Some random notes on the interface:

• Basically it has to be an RTS game HUD, like C&C or other strategy games.
• Has to use the least screen real-estate as possible but look good and quick to the point of keeping the player updated.
• Has to have place for a bar of Power/Electricity.
• Place for a counter of the Monies. (ie. how much cash the player has)
• Buttons to sub menus: Build, Design, Research..and something else, can’t remember. Just keep it flexible so I can add/remove buttons/menus.
• I would like it if it fit into the Dazzle skin but isn’t a must.
• Place for icons of currently selected units. They will mostly float under the menu.
• Sub-menus will slide to the right.
• Main menu/Entire HUD will be placed on the Top Left (But actually attached to the Centre2 spot for certain reasons), unless other places may be more suitable?

I will place a reward of 4kL$ if I am happy with it, even though I don’t have much money but rather to show the urge that I need this.

I pushed the button on this, and it was for about 15 minutes. I had no idea that that was the message it was giving people. The database was running hot because some connections had hung while holding a lock (this is getting fixed with very high priority) and I had to make a call whether to lock everyone out or just some people. I decided to just lock out some people.

Whether or not someone has paid us money on a given account turns out to be a crappy metric for whether or not to lock them out. This won’t be happening again. I certainly had no intention of insulting people, and seeing what the message says I don’t blame anyone for feeling insulted and like we don’t love them.

Posted by: Sean Linden | June 13, 2008 at 05:51 PM

That clarifies the situation pretty much over the confusion of blabber whereby I found this little gem.

Also regarding free accounts.. it is marvelous how friendly SL is in terms to free accounts. Go anywhere else and your treated like waste as this comment by Artemis Fate states better than I could:

Really the free accounts in SL have had it VERY nice, more so than most places like Active Worlds, Hellgate or Anarchy Online, where the difference between free and paid is worlds away, in Second Life, the difference is minor. This alleged, temporary and rare event (so rare that there is debate as to whether it actually exists, because apparently not many people noticed it), is about the worst treatment free accounts have gotten in all this time. But they’re allowed to go to the same places, allowed to wear whatever they want, attach as much as they want, hold as much as they want in their inventory, they can have land by renting, and for the most part they’re treated the same as premium accounts when it comes to preference and general resource use. Really this is where I see this indignation of “We deserve better treatment!” as coming from, because you’ve been spoiled by LL giving you wonderful treatment. In Active Worlds (an early precedent to Second Life), free account users could only wear one of two outfits (male and female tourist), were restricted to only certain worlds, and their builds were public mod so anyone could delete them or change them if they chose. So before you start complaining about being treated so poorly, recognize that you could have it MUCH worse, if it were up to me, free accounts would be much much more limited.

Posted by: Artemis Fate | June 13, 2008 at 09:17 PM

And it really is true, I am surprised that people can complain about something so minor compared to what else could have happened in terms of restrictions of the divsion line between free and paid.

My life is screwed up enough as it is as I have crappy grades and really hardly any qualifications that I can show, since employers in the UK only care about bits of paper than real skill, so I am having a lot of trouble getting myself a job.

I doubt I will be able to come online for a very long extended while.

However productive I am, Life sucks.

A bit late to post this but I have been selling my most awesome avatars and if I get a good response of demand and feedback I will make much more and far more better avatars.

Going to put up some pictures here soon and upload a video of my av transformations onto YouTube.

EDIT: Added cubitar picture here, next the video.

Got annoyed at Dazzle’s blinding skin, so I made a variation, a basic hack at trying to reimplement the basic dark colours of the old clients. It ended up looking really awesome with the new blue icon images.

Download nexiiSkin 0.3

Just simply download it, unpack it into

C:\Program Files\SecondLifeReleaseCandidate\app_settings