I will be trying to keep up with correspondence and blog comments going forward from today.

When people talk about couples dance animations, they are usually talking about the syncronised pose balls you see on the floor at many clubs. They are slow dances or salsas or some other dance, they are designed to work inside poseballs and getting them to work in a HUD is often either difficult or impossible.

The reason they work in poseballs is because you can easily align two avatars correctly with a set of poseballs. In order for the avatars to look like they are dancing together, you really want them in just the right position with just the right rotation.

Now, HUDs can handle some syncronised animations, but they need to be designed to work with them. The best example of this is a hug animation. When you initiate a hug, the two avatars are squished together and the animation begins. These hug animations are designed to look right if the avatars are facing each other and squished together.

Will a dance work as a hug? Well, maybe, if you are lucky. If the dance animations just happen to look decent when avatars are facing each other and squished together, you can try it as a hug. And of course there are some couples dances that are designed to work in a hugger. Abranimations has some in their couples animator for instance, and those can be used in the EZ Animator Deluxe.

I suspect that most of the available couples dances that poeple would want to use, might not work very well, however. It might be worth a try, but there is no guarantee.

Here is what the macro might look like for a hug for dancing:

[NAME]Slow Dance|[HUG]dance_ani_his,dance_ani_hers,3600,TRUE,/me dances with [TARGET],would like to dance with you.,0.0

• The first part will make sure the name of the the macro on the button will be Slow Dance.
• Then it tells the HUD to start a hug macro. “dance_ani_his” would be the name of the animation the EZ Animator owner will use.
• “dance_ani_hers” would be the name of the animation of his partner.
• 3600 seconds is the duration of the hug
• TRUE means that the avatars will move together before the hug begins.
• “/me dances with [TARGET]” is the emote that will play when the hug begins.
• and “would like to dance with you” is the message the partner will see before the hug begins.
• 0.0 is the distance between the avatars. This tells the EZ Animator to get the avatars as close as possible before the hug begins.

This macro should all be on one line on your notecard, by the way. And the animations would need to be taken out of the poseballs and put inside the HUD. Putting the actual poseballs into the HUD does no good.

Will the EZ Animator ever have better support for couples animations? Well, maybe, but it’s unlikely in the near term. The problem is that you would need to rez poseballs from the HUD to make it work well, and the whole point is that people want to use their couple’s dances without rezzing poseballs. For now, I suggest keeping your couples dances inside the poseballs they came in and rezzing them whenever you want to use them.

We will be talking about the EZ Animator Deluxe. Topics will include:

• New features of version 1.2.1
• How to update your HUDDLE to the latest Release Candidate version
• How to update your AO notecard to the ZHAO II format
• How macros work with the EZ Animator Deluxe

I posted the transcript on the website.

Originally Posted by TearSong Vaughan

Ok this might be a really stupid question and I’m prolly overlooking something, but here it goes:

The dances: does huddles switch to the next dance as soon as a certain dance loop has ended or does it have a set time for each dance and then switches to the next? I’ve been loading my dances and it keeps switching somewhere in the middle of the dances, at least it looks that way to me. Is it possible to make it change to the next dance as soon as another dance has ‘ended’ so it won’t change in the middle of dances anymore? Or can anyone reccomend an interval time that works best with most sine wave dances?

You can set a time interval for each dance on your dance notecard (or just some of them). For any dance you want to add a specific time for add the number of seconds after it, like this:

caramel sundae|20
dip me in butterscotch|15.5
bailey’s fog|30.2

The number following the animation tells the HUDDLE how long to wait before going on to the next animation. Notice that you use decimal places to get even more precise.

You could even set up a sequence of animations:

cherries|10|monkeys|17.0|backflip|3.1

This macro will play each of these animations in turn, with pauses that correspond to the numbers in between.

You can also add [REPEAT] to the end of the macro and it will repeat indefinitely:

cherries|10|monkeys|17.0|backflip|3.1|[REPEAT]

The [REPEAT] command will be ignored when in Dance or Random mode though.

After you have moved a large number of animations into a HUD or other device, let the HUD sit on the ground for a few minutes. It doesn’t have to be an hour, just an extra 5-10 minutes. This should give the server enough time to properly save the current status of the HUD, so that when you pick it up, you get all your animations too.

Again, I’m not certain about this, but it seems to fit my experience with the Asset Server: Sometimes if you pick something up shortly after you edit it, the changes you just made appear to be lost.

I’ve made a lot of progress on these help pages. I need to make a little more headway before I send out the new version to my beta testers. I hope to do that before the end of the weekend. If you would like to be a beta tester, IM me. I’d be happy to send you an advance copy as long as you are a current user.

She writes:

1. This is my biggest frustration. I have entered the stands into the config card correctly. I don’t get any script errors BUT I can’t figure out how to bring up the menu to choose stands! What button do I use to access different stands that are in my config? It is kind of a pain to load all animations and try to find the stand I want to use :-}
2. It seems to be trial and error for me when I hit the open button. sometimes I get the notecards and sometimes I get the configs and I have not figured out what to do to so I know when I go to load things if I’m going to get the notecards menu or the config menu.

Here are my responses:

1. How can I choose my stand?

For sits, ground sits and walks, choosing which animation to use is easy. You click the button at the bottom of the AO buttons and then pick a number 1-5. The assumption is that you will pick one walk, sit or ground sit and not want it to change until you select a different one.

However the assumption for stands is completely different. Instead, an AO assumes that you will want to cycle through your stands, changing each one every 30 seconds or so. A lot of people, myself included, don’t like the cycling. I like to choose my stand depending on my mood.

But there is a way to do what you want. Set your stand time interval to 0 seconds (the button that looks like a watch next to the AO buttons). This will turn the cycling off. Then use the Next Stand button to choose which stand you want to use.

2. How come sometimes the load button brings up regular notecards and sometimes AO notecards?

There are actually two buttons to load notecards, I guess the confusing part is that they are in the same place and use the same icon. When you use the flip button, the little circular button, to flip between the regular dance buttons, the AO buttons and the admin buttons, you change which load notecard you are using.

For instance, if you have the Dance buttons showing (and see the All and Me buttons), then you can hit that load button to see the regular notecards, like the dance notecard. If you see the AO and Sit buttons, and hit the load button, you get those AO config buttons to choose from.

If you have an EZ Animator Deluxe and you are wearing it. You might try the /99reset command. However, if you are getting a script error, this will not work. Instead find a sandbox where you can build and do this:

1) Drop your EZAD onto the ground

Right click on the EZAD and choose “Drop”

2) Select your EZAD

Right click on the EZAD and choose “Edit”

3) Reset Scripts

Go to the Tools menu at the top of your screen and select “Reset Scripts in Selection”

4) Hit close

When the scripts are done being reset, the close button will highlight. Click it to finish.

Then just right click on the EZAD and choose Take to get it back in your inventory. Wear it from your inventory and it should work like new. If it doesn’t, contact me via IM. I may need to come take a look at it.