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.

Does your HUDDLE look like this sometimes lately?



Unfortunately a few weeks ago, a new bug was introduced into SL by update 1.17 of the SL client. Sometimes after logging in or teleporting to a new sim, floating text fails to appear on HUDs and on other objects. It seems to be intermittent and random. I have two avatars and I've only experienced it once with Keiki. However with my alt, I experience it nearly every time I log in.

It's important to note that this bug is not just affecting HUDDLES and has nothing to do with it's design. It's not a bug I can fix. It's a general SL bug affecting anything with floating text. If you are experiencing this, please log into jira and vote there to have the bug fixed. It's important to let them know that it's affecting a large number of users and should be a priority to fix.

If you do experience it, it seems to correct itself if you detach and reattach the HUDDLE. I've also had reports that doing a manual reset of the HUD might help, but I'm not sure about that.

UPDATE: It appears that they have fixed the bug, but I'm guessing it may be a few weeks before they actually get it into the viewer.

It's update time again. I've been working on this update off and on for a few months. There were some bug fixes that got things rolling, but as time went on I added some new features as well.

First things first, new features!

Function Keys! F2-F12

I added some gestures that you can activate which bind the function keys on your keyboard to the EZAD. In other words, when you press F2 on your keyboard, it's like touching the first animation on the list of text buttons. F2-F11 correspond to buttons 1-10. F12 is the stop button.

Notecards

Macros can play animations and sounds, map landmarks, and rez objects. I thought since the beginning that they should do something with notecards but I never was sure what. Then one of my customers suggested there should be a quick way to switch notecards. If you had a macro which had the name of a notecard on it, when you click it, it should load that notecard. So that's how I set it up.

Don't worry, if you are in Dance mode or Random mode, it will just skip over the macro with a notecard name.

Chat Commands to Turn Your AO On and Off

Once again this was a user requested feature. In addition to touching the AO button, you can now use these commmands:

/99ao on
/99ao off

A Couple of Small Enhancements

If you click the Me button to turn off Self Animation, it will now turn red. I've had a few people who have accidently clicked that button and then not realized what the problem is when they aren't animating anymore. I hope that will help people figure out what they did.

Also, I added an error message when you try add a gesture to the HUDDLE and try to play it from a notecard.

And finally, I added a warning so that when you drop your HUD on the ground to add animations, it tells you to add no copy animatios one at a time to prevent inventory loss.

Bug Fixes

- Fixed a bug in the emoter script which wouldn't allow you the HUD to broadcast on channels 1-9.
- Fixed bug where setting AO Stand Time Interval to 0 did not work properly.
- Fixed a bug where touching the Load Notecard button would behave like you touched it twice.

If you don't recieve the update automatically, you can always wear your HUD and request one by saying /99update.

There are few things worse in Second Life than losing inventory items. Nothing can ruin your day like losing a folder full of no copy animations. Things like this used to be rare, however for many months now, it's been sickeningly common.

When I hear about it, it usually happens like this: Someone buys one of my EZ Animator HUDs and starts to transfer animations from various places like collars and AOs. They move their animations into their inventory and then drag them, often en masse, into their HUD. Most of the time, there is no problem. But occasionally, the no copy animations don't make it. I've heard at least once someone getting the following error message:

Inventory creation on in-world object failed

When an inventory loss happens, you should not panic. Don't log off in disgust. First, make a note of the time and your location and take a look at this blog post on inventory loss.

What can you do to prevent inventory loss?

1. Move No Copy Animations, One at a Time

There are two reasons for this. First, if you do have a problem, it will only lose one animation. Second, I can't prove it, but I think moving one at a time makes it less likely you will lose it.

If you are moving copiable animations, it doesn't really matter, you can try moving multiple copiable aniamtions at the same time. If they don't transfer, you should still have a copy of them in your inventory.

2. Confirm That Your Animations are Transferring

Each time you move an animation, you should wait for the contents of your HUD to update. This usually takes a few seconds. You know that the list of animations has updated when you right click on an animation and see only four options: "Open, Properties, Rename & Delete". So if a no copy animation doesn't transfer into your HUD, don't keep moving more over.

What can animators do to prevent inventory loss?

Sell your animations copiable/no transfer. I know that the common practice is to sell animations no copy/transferable. But the inventory loss issues are too serious. At the very least you should give your customers the choice to buy animations that are copiable. This doesn't make sense for some kinds of animations, but for animations that are intended to be used in dance HUDs or Animation Overrides, it's makes good sense for you to make them copiable/no transferable. It should greatly reduce the customer service requests you get from people who have lost their anis.

Anything else?

Sign the Project Open Letter project to encourage Linden Labs to fix their inventory errors and other critical bugs before adding new features.

Also, log into the Jira bug tracking system and vote to make this bug a priority to be fixed: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-114

One day your EZ Animator starts to act up. It starts to spam the word "Touched" every time you touch it. It doesn't matter why you are touching it, it always says "Touched". Maybe it even says it several times each time you touch your EZAD. What is happening?



While very annoying, it's actually very simple fix. There are some extra scripts in your EZ Animator which shouldn't be there. When you are editing an object and looking at it's contents, you will notice a button which says, "New Script." If you click that button, a new script appears in the object. By default, new scripts always respond to a touch by saying "Touched." At some point in the past you must have accidently hit that button once or twice.



Fixing it is pretty easy:

1. Right click on your EZ Animator and choose "Edit"
2. Hit "More" and then "Content" to see the contents.
3. Search through the inventory for scripts named "New Script"
4. Right click directly on these new scripts and delete them one at a time