MEAO (finally) updated for Mono

Sorry for the long delay in getting this one out there. The Mono rollout on Second Life went poorly at first, but we really wanted to use it for this version, so we waited until they could whip it into better shape.

Aside from Mono and much more free space, the 2008-10-05 edition of MEAO includes "fakesit" in the menus and the command line. You may be familiar with this feature from other AOs, it runs the current "Sitting On Ground" animation no matter what the real animation state is. It's nice to have if you want to sit on a floor without pose balls, or even in the air. (The script isn't picky, you don't have to use ground sit animations on that line, go ahead and be silly!)

The other new little feature is deferred stopping, which can help smooth animation transitions in the face of network latency or overloaded sims. The old animation is stopped a short time after the new one begins, reducing the chance that Linden defaults will leak through and increasing the chance that ease in will happen.

As usual, you can get the update for free from Xstreet SL or at our little shop.

To install the update, turn the (old) AO off, delete the old MEAO Core and MEAO Interface scripts and the "READ ME FIRST - MEAO" notecard from your MystiTool, and drop in these new scripts and readme notecard. It is a good idea to detach and reattach MystiTool after this kind of change, Second Life remembers attachment changes more reliably that way and it makes sure that MystiTool and MEAO agree on channels and such. Do see older entries in this weblog about attachments with no-copy animations in them, those warnings are still very current!

Oh yes, if for some reason you want to tweak the source code, you will want to use an RC or Preview version of the SL viewer. The 1.20 and earlier viewers don't know how to compile to Mono, and at this point we really need mono to make everything fit. 1.21 "should" be the official viewer fairly soon, so hopefully this inconvenience will be short term!

Mono goodness and not so goodness

Just a quick note about the 1.24 server release. Both of the little add-ons we hand out for MystiTool, the MEAO AO scripts and Inco's chat toy, do compile and run OK under Mono.

Timing is a little different in this server release, we are going to play with potential tweaks from the last few months to see what looks best in the final product.

Meanwhile, you can recompile the existing ones if you want to play. It's fine to mix and match Mono and regular LSL scripts, so you can do this in your exiting MystiTool. You will get a whole lot more memory for stuffing in animations, but you may notice that default animations leak through. You can always go back to regular LSL if you don't care for what you see, and again we'll have something to smooth it over shortly.

*SQUEEEEEEEE!* LL finds gobs of lost inventory!

Last night, the Lindens quietly announced that they were able to recover lots and lots of missing inventory. Some no copy animations I felt bad about losing came back, so maybe you will be lucky and find some too.

What you need to do is clear your SL cache, relog, wait and wait and wait and wait for your inventory to reload. Then, have a look in your Lost and Found folder. I hope that you find the same pleasant surprises I found! This little present from LL hasn't found everybody's lost stuff, but there are quite a few happy people tonight.

See LL's blog entry for the rest of the details, they plan to make this an automatic thing in the future.

Yet another MEAO update, more notecards.

Today's little update was inspired by an old ZHAO-II bug noticed and patched by Lyssa Varun. It would display its disheartening "You cannot have more than 12 animation notecards." message before subtracting the help cards, so the limit was even lower!

If people are actually running into this limit, even one or two shy of that, then it's time to allow for more notecards in the menu.  So that's what today's update brings, you can now choose from as many as will fit in script memory.

MEAO has actually had a "secret" way to handle more than 12 notecards all along, by using the "/1 ao load notecardname" command. But now that's available to people who prefer buttons too!

The updated boxes are out at the usual spots, the vendor in our shop and at SLExchange.

To install, take the old MEAO Core and MEAO Interface scripts out of your MystiTool, and drop in these new ones. It is a good idea to detach and reattach MystiTool after this kind of change, Second Life remembers attachment changes more reliably that way.

And once again, please take care when using no-copy animations inside attachments! See our earlier entry for why.

Silly walks (MEAO update)

There are a few smallish changes today, in MEAO 2008-05-25a.

1. Second Life used to leave animations running after you teleported. This was frequently seen as a bug instead of a feature, so the Lindens changed things so that it no longer happens.  Unfortunately, that "bug" was also a feature in ZHAO-II. So, this MEAO update includes a new event handler to fix things up after teleports.
2. There was an ongoing battle of sorts between controls used by ZHAO-II for walk corrections, and by MystiTool for its move lock toy.  MEAO sheds the control event so that conflicts are now avoided.
3. The teleport tweak ate a little precariously into what little free space ZHAO-II had, so Inco took to the scripts with blunt implements of destruction and made our bloated notecards fit again. There are actually a few more free bytes than when I started!

The updated boxes are out at the usual spots, the vendor in our shop and at SLExchange.

To install, take the old MEAO Core and MEAO Interface scripts out of your MystiTool, and drop in these new ones. It is a good idea to detach and reattach MystiTool after this kind of change, Second Life remembers attachment changes more reliably that way.

And once again, please take care when using no-copy animations inside attachments! See our earlier entry for why.

Teensy optional MEAO update

You can take or leave this update as you wish.  The free memory display is in bytes instead of percent now so that the numbers won't look silly under Mono. Also, if you couldn't get the mysterious "curanim" command to work, that's because I left out an 'r' in the help text. It's curranim. Doh!

As usual, pick up a fresh box at our little shop or on SLExchange.

To install, take the old MEAO Core and MEAO Interface scripts out of your MystiTool, and drop in these new ones. It is a good idea to detach and reattach MystiTool after this kind of change, Second Life remembers attachment changes more reliably that way.  Do see older entries in this weblog about attachments with no-copy animations in them, those warnings are still very current!

Oh, about that Mono thing. Yes, we are testing on the beta grid, and yes, at the moment everything works fine. Things could change in the next few weeks before Mono goes live on the main grid, but so far it looks like it will be a painless recompile. A more capable replacement AO is in progress, but we won't tempt fate and try to make two big changes at once.

More on HUD inventory loss

In our last episode, I wrote some rather dire things about being careful about moving HUDs around because they and their inventory can be lost. If you have been affected, you might be interested in this JIRA entry (log in and vote if you want to get Linden attention on the matter!) and also a recent blog entry (and another) from Keiki Lemieux about getting Linden support assistance.

Some anecdotes suggest that it might be less risky to do things one at a time. That is, don't try to wear a HUD that is rezzed on the ground, or replace one attachment with another. Instead, detach or pull objects into your inventory first, then wear in a separate step. That does seem like a reasonable possibility, since you are hitting the servers with fewer transactions at once that way.

If you have especially valuable no-copy animations and are afraid to lose them, it might even be safer to use them the hard way for now: play them directly from your inventory so there is no rezzing involved.

MystiTool 1.0.23 is out but be careful!

It would be best to NOT upgrade your MystiTool right now, because at this writing the Second Life asset servers are having trouble again. In fact, if you are using any attachments or HUDs that are no copy or have no copy contents, don't try to attach or detach them now. Watch the Second Life blog for news, and remember that they often say everything is fixed when it is really NOT fixed yet.

When the asset servers come back, moving your animations and MEAO to the new version will work just like the last time, see our earlier blog entry for instructions.

MystiTool 1.0.23 now lets you use custom textures on buttons, so if you are using custom buttons for the AO functions you can make them look like their ZHAO-II counterparts.

The texture for AO on/off is e470eec7-0c82-98b2-ac3c-dee6e2b3b4e7 and for the menu it is b205e7dd-3855-98cf-e090-1f6af934b784 . So, using the examples in our instructions, you could define your MEAO buttons like so:

/1 c1 set ao toggle
/1 c2 set ao menu

Then, to make the buttons match those settings, use:

/1 c1 set_texture e470eec7-0c82-98b2-ac3c-dee6e2b3b4e7
/1 c2 set_texture b205e7dd-3855-98cf-e090-1f6af934b784

For Inco's little chat script, just move your old Chat Phrases notecard into your inventory, then to the new MystiTool HUD. Copy a fresh Chat Script from your inventory into the new HUD. Make sure it is started correctly, as with the MEAO notes linked above.

A giant L for your forehead

Inco brings us this incredibly useful item. It is exactly what it looks like, a huge L you can wear on your forehead on days when you feel like you need one. Pick it up from SLX or at our little shop in Hanson. 5L, that's about two cents!

A new little toy and a new face

Incoherendt Randt is now a Toritoys script kitty, and is offering an inexpensive little MystiTool add-on called Inco's Chat Script that lets you simply say, shout or whisper commonly used phrases to public chat with a button press. Drag in the script and notecard, change the notecard to include things you might actually want to say, and you're ready to go. It is available in the new Toritoys shop for a whopping 5 lindens, mod/copy/transfer OK!

"Error reading notecard. Please try again." fix

If you like, you can pick up a teensy update to MEAO.  It is only a one line change to the MEAO core script, to suppress the "Error reading notecard. Please try again." message that would turn up if other scripts inside MystiTool also used dataserver events. It was a leftover assumption in ZHAO-II that it had the whole HUD to itself, harmless but annoying.

You can pick it up in the usual place, well, the new usual place, that is =)

To install, take the old MEAO Core and MEAO Interface scripts out of your MystiTool, and drop in these new ones. It is a good idea to detach and reattach MystiTool after this kind of change, second Life remembers attachment changes more reliably that way.

Moved to, uh, whiter pastures?

Toritoys has a permanent home now in Hanson, right behind the infohub! Here is a SLURL for the relocated shop, still a temporary structure until I get more time.

MEAO and MystiTool 1.0.22

First the good news: everything seems to be working just fine here after the update. The bad news: with a HUD update comes moving over your stuff!

You can migrate your AO stuff just as you would move from a standalone version of ZHAO-II, see the MEAO instructions for details. In a nutshell, copy your animations and notecards to a fresh folder in inventory. Leave the old MEAO scripts behind in the old HUD and copy fresh ones into your new copy of MystiTool along with the animations and notecards.

If you did copy the old scripts back into the new HUD (naughty naughty!), you may find that they are stopped from the shuffle. That's OK, they can be fixed! First, wear your new MystiTool loaded with scripts and animations and notecards, and let it do all its startup things. Then, right-click and edit it. Go over to the Contents tab and wait a couple of minutes for Second Life to properly fill in the entries (it can take a while before all the contents are really there and the menus work). Right-click and open the MEAO Core script, make sure the "running" box at the bottom is checked, then press the Reset button. Close it, and repeat with the MEAO interface script.

Feel free to contact me in world if you find any issues. My network access may be funky for the next few days while some fixes are done around here after some storm damage, but I will get back to you when I can! If you don't hear back within a day or so, try again (perhaps with a notecard) - I simply don't trust that SL communications will always get to me the first time :/

MEAO bug fixes

Thanks for the feedback so far!  Getting the scripts in the hands of more people did uncover some issues as expected, so i have some updates. You can get the refreshed scripts from my little box in Marwood.

To update:

1. Take the old MEAO interface and ZHAO core scripts out of your MystiTool,
2. Drag in new MEAO interferface and MEAO core scripts into your MystiTool.
   
3. When you get the last memory free message after the AO tries to load the default notecard, detach and reattach your HUD.

Changes this time around:

• Some little changes have been made to the core so that the huge animation sets from Vista will fit without running out of memory.
• Flight assist would sometimes act strangely after a relog, this should now be fixed.