I will not be updating this blog. Instead, I'll be using the wordpress for further updates at http://imakehuddles.com/wordpress/

I am ready to release the HUDDLES Rental Box. I've been testing this for about 4 months now at Animation Warehouse and it is now ready for public release. I do want to make sure I get some early feedback however and so I'm initially going to charge about a third of what the actual price will be. So for a limited time you can buy the system for only 99L.



As I said before, what prompted me to make this was the desire to get a mall rental script that only used 1 script per stall. It's not as fully featured as some, but you would be hard pressed to find one that takes up as little script resources. On my sim it usually only uses 0.001 ms of time from the script scheduler (occasionally it has read 0.002 or 0.003).

It's for sale at HUDDLES Headquarters and at OnRez.com.

I previously blogged about this product here.

Moved to new blog.

Are there really only 155 people who care about inventory loss in Second Life? Why haven't more people voted for this jira issue to be a priority?

Meta-Issue: Inventory Loss: issues, fixes, development

A few months ago, I expanded my mall, Animation Warehouse, to an entire sim. I had to decide whether I would use my old mall rental script or buy another one. I went out shopping and found that the device that many people were using to rent stalls in malls had a lot of scripts in each one, 16 scripts to be precise. Well, my new mall might need 50 or even 100 of these. There was no way I was going use 1600 scripts to handle rentals.

So, I did what I normally do in these kinds of situations, I made my own script rather than buying one. The first thing I decided was to get rid of the cube design that many of these devices use. I wanted something a little more classy. My friend Trinity Cole suggested that it have a display with the stall number and I agreed. Also, I didn't want my rental box moving around and getting really big when the rent was past due. A simple sign would do:



Now to handle the input, at first I tried to decide whether I should use chat commands, a dialog menu or a notecard to change all the variables you need for one of these. It seemed that a notecard would be the best way to handle the basic configuration. There is notecard inside each where you can change the stall number, rent, number of prims, length of rental period, email address and other things:


(click the picture to enlarge)

Next for all the more fluid data, I added a blue dialog menu. Here you can add or subtract days, weeks or months to your tenants rental. You can evict them, send them IMs, refund their money, etc.



I've been testing the rental box and a new registration system to make sure it's as bug free as possible. All I need to do now is finish up with the documentation notecards and make an ad texture and I'll be done. Well, I might need do one more pass as the code to see if I can free up a little more memory.

So, the idea was create a rental box for mall use which only used one script, had all the features I needed, had 0 open listeners, can be easily updated, and was otherwise low lag. It looks like I succeeded, the time required for each box is between 0.001 and 0.003 ms.

I hope to have it for sale by Friday at HUDDLES Headquarters. If you want to see what they look like up close, please come to Animation Warehouse and see them for yourself.