Portals, Gateways and Slide Shows

After almost 10 years of fiddling with pictures in boxes I have broken things down into what should be a fairly stable set of tools. Some "mop up" needs to be done. They can be mixed and matched in creative ways.

OBJECTS

  • Gateway will work on face 0 (top) of a plain prim, normally tipped 90% to face like a picture. Such a prim can be given a frame using taper and will still be just one prim.
  • A double prim configuration can be used for a slide show, portal and/or gateway. The advantage is that the title appears in the face rather than over the prim.
  • A mesh object (LUCY) can host any combination of scripts but shows the title over the prim (at present)
  • Several 3rd party  (Jumbo Core) crazy mesh objects with exotic shapes that produce different transitions. Original scripts removed and replaced with general purpose scripts compatible with this project.
SCRIPT TYPES
  • Slide Show show pictures placed in the prim or in link 1 in the case of the double prims
    • There are sub-types of slide shows according to the transition effect. I like the "fader" but others are possible. Script types depend mostly on the shape of the host object.
  • Mover uses experience to send the avatar to a location normally shown in the picture. Experience permissions on the parcel where it is installed are needed. Display options are provided in a menu for the owner. "Mover" can be placed in any object with or without a slide show. If there is a picture in the object will be shown on face 0. The landmark becomes the title and name of the object.
  • Gateway acts like mover, except it doesn't use experience. It is useful where it is installed in places where the parcel owner doesn't have permission to set experience.
SCRIPT LIBRARY
  • To make script update easy, all script types are available in short versions that use #include. Update to the included file can be made by a simple re-compile.
  • Script library is provided in a separate object. Scripts can be installed in the users library, normally on his or her host computer.
  • Full script versions (without include) are also available but would need relatively complex and messy update when new scripts are available.
  • Consistency in scripts - color names, object names, use of description field ....
IDEAS
  • It would be elegant to combine gateway and mover scripts.
  • Slide show script should detect whether it is running in a 1 prim mesh object or a 2 prim setup or in one of the 3rd party objects. Number of sides is the main way to tell one from the other. Actual logic can be very different depending on the shape provided but, from the user's point of view, global parameters are the same and the effect is to display all contained pictures.
  • A similar mod can be made to "mover" whose logic puts one texture found in inventory on face 0. This should be only in cases where there is no slide show - maybe only one texture in inventory.
  • For the sake of elegance, gateway and mover could be combined so that mover (experience) logic is evoked when experience is available, otherwise "plain old" teleporter logic (gateway). experience_permissions_denied( key agent_id, integer reason ){ ; } event gives error code 17 (not allowed on this land). We need to unpack gateway logic to integrate. May be easier to just include gateway rather than mover, rather than integrate the scripts. This works now, without modification, in all prims. 
  • All scripts should (optionally) re-name the object with type and version information to make it easy to find objects that need updating. 
  • Header consistency and maybe new globals such as WANT_SLIDESHOW, WANT_EXPERIENCE ... to take some of the guesswork out of configuration. Still check for consistency. Use description for options as in MOVER.
  • Gateway logic uses dataserver. Mastery of dataserver could open the line to nc configuration, for example -- basically asynchronous queries to the server.


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