Svetlana Mosienko: YES we use EZAD! Don’t know what we would do without it:)

To see more examples of how people use HUDDLES products to dance in second life, see part II and part I.

The group is called the Phoenix Embers Showcats and they put on the kind of dance shows you might see in Las Vegas. Laurina Hawks is the founder and choreographer. She made this video by cutting together several rehearsals and events.

The key line of code is this:

llHTTPRequest(“http://” + llEscapeURL(user) + “:”+llEscapeURL(password) + “@twitter.com/statuses/update.xml”, [HTTP_METHOD, "POST", HTTP_MIMETYPE, "application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8"], “status=”+llEscapeURL(msg));

User is your twitter name, password is your password and msg is the message you want to send.

I’m thinking that it might be nice to add this to the EZ Animator Deluxe, but I’m wondering if anyone would use it and what features would they want. What do you think?

Oh, by the way, you can follow me on twitter, my name is KeikiAtHuddles.

To get the latest update, go to the update area underneath HUDDLES Headquarters. Use the following SLURL to get there directly:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Animation%20Island/120/82/28/

Once there, click on the green ball to get the updater object. Rez it and follow the directions that are on the object. The directions are also on this website. And if you want to see what has changed since 1.2.1, check out the change log.

If you have an EZ Animator Deluxe, head to HUDDLES Headquarters. The update area is directly below the store on the island. Use the following SLURL to get there directly:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Animation%20Island/120/82/28/

Once there, click the orange ball to get your updater object. Rez it on the ground and follow the directions right on the updater:

Click this Orange Ball to get your test version

The directions are also on this website. And if you want to see what has changed since 1.2.1, check out the change log.

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.

The problem is that when you say something on channel 7 that the HUD doesn’t understand, it gives you the feedback:

HUDDLES EZ Animator Deluxe v1.2.1: I don’t understand

While informative, this can be annoying and confusing, especially if you use channel 7 a lot for another device. To change the channel it listens to, go into the script, find the line which says “integer COMMCHAN = 7;” and change it.

Here are the step by step instructions for you if you need them:

1. Rez your HUD onto the ground.
2. Right click on the HUD and choose Edit.
3. Go to the Content tab (click More if you do not see the Content tab).
4. Find the script named “~Flight Assist 1.2.1″.
5. Right click on the script and choose Open.
6. Find the line near the beginning of the script which says: integer COMMCHAN = 7;
   (it’s on line 90 in the script)
7. Change the number 7 to another positive number and click Save.
8. Close the Script and the Edit windows.
9. Right click and Take your HUD.
10. Wear your HUD from your inventory.

If you don’t use the flight assist, you can just delete the flight assist script. This should cause no problems.

The directions for updating are here.

What’s new?

• A button to sit on the ground anywhere
• Flight assist
• Improvements to the hugger
• New commands like /99set name
• A way to play macros by their name
• New macro tags – [NO_DANCE], [TARGET_LAST] and [TARGET_FIRST]
• Generally faster and more efficient dancing
• Numerous small bug fixes

You can read the release notes on the web, however they may be incomplete. More documentation is in the works.
If you have previously upgraded to one of the Release Candidates, just come grab the final and run it again.

Please note, only people who own the EZ Animator Deluxe already can get the update. If you think you own one and it’s not giving it to you, IM Keiki Lemieux.

Also, if you were using version 1.1.3 or earlier you should look here on info about how to upgrade your AO.

P.S. I think most current users could say /99update and receive the most updated version this time. However, this will not work for future updates. Future updates must be picked up in person below HUDDLES Headquarters.

Since RC4, I’ve fixed two bugs (changing just two lines of code):

• The new ability to choose a dance to play by touching it WHILE in Dance or Random mode was not perfect. When using a notecard to dance from, the dance you chose would likely be cut too short. This has been fixed.
• After teleporting, if you were using an animation (for instance the Sit Anywhere button), you would appear to not be in that animation, however others around you would see the animation. This is actually a bug in the SL client, but I inserted a short correction for it in the ~Animator script.

When will it be available? Probably tomorrow. I want a day to let me test it with some alts. I’ll post it here on the blog when it’s ready.