Posts filed under ‘Technical’
Rotation pinning on new PhotoStand
You would think that a pose stand is something very simple: you sit on it, move forward and backwards through the list of poses, and little else. Most nice stands also incorporate a rotation feature, so you can adjust the angle of the model on the stand as necessary. And that’s about it, most of the time.
However, some situations require more. Imagine that you are using your run-of-the-mill pose stand at your studio, where you also probably have a backdrop and some other elements and tools. Most likely, you want your models facing you, the photographer, most of the time. For some of the poses, you may want to rotate the stand to one side or the other in search of that perfect angle; you may even rotate it 180 degrees for a back shot. In any case, the “default” position of the stand, the most common one, should be facing you. Bear with me.
No-transfer textures failing to show on the PhotoStage backdrop
We have detected that no-transfer textures fail to show on the PhotoStage backdrop. You can add a no-transfer texture to the backdrop, but when you try to use it by navigating to it using the Previous/Next buttons, the backdrop turns white (or whatever other colour you had it set to) and a script error is shown.
We have traced the cause back to the SVC-368 issue documented in JIRA. It seems that the llSetLinkTexture() function does not work well with no-transfer textures.
The obvious solution is to use transferrable textures with the PhotoStage. We are updating the User’s Manual to reflect this.
In addition, we will study the feasibility of modifying the PhotoStage backdrops so that they work around the bug. This is not a trivial change to make, and it may take some time. We will announce any progress here. In the meantime, please stick to textures with transfer permissions.
We hope that you understand that this is not an issue with PhotoStage, but a documented error of Second Life.
Oh, and thanks to Corbin Carling for raising this issue with us.
After the 1st February blues
Now that the SL glitch that broke the PhotoStage’s scripts has been solved, we can spend some time explaining exactly what happened.
Linden Lab announced an update of the server code on 31st January. This was applied as a rolling restart, which caused no apparent problems other than the sims going offline for a few minutes as it is usual. However, the server update changed something that was not documented, announced or advertised. Before the update, the Description field of any prim could contain many characters, including (why not, one could ask) the character called a pipe “|”. This character is often used by scripters and programmers as a delimiter, i.e. used to separate blocks of text or values from each other. The Description field of prims is also used frequently as a common place where data can be shared by multiple scripts running in a single prim. Finally, I must point out something that is pretty evident, but apparently needs pointing out (you will see why in a minute): when you put some text into the Description field of a prim, you expect it to stay there, unchanged, until you (or somebody else) changes it. This is just common sense.
After the update, things changed. You can still put a pipe character into the Description field of any prim, but that character is automatically and silently converted to a question mark “?”. Imagine that your script puts the text “hello|there” in the Description of a prim; next time you look at it, it will show “hello?there”. As you can imagine, having characters changed by SL under the hood, silently, and without your permission, is not a good thing. Your script relies on finding some text there and, instead, it finds something else. As a consequence, what used to work before doesn’t work now.
I am going into rant mode now.
Ananké Media Systems 