Coupla gripes....

Dear Mike,

Why don't you stop complaining and learn how to do something for yourself. You seem like a smart guy, but for some unfathomable reason, you're waiting for someone to come along and hold your hand. Do you think that there's enough LL staff to give every user a personal tutorial? Do you think that other paying users, particularly Live Help volunteers, have nothing better to do than jump whenever you have a question?

Maybe, instead of attacking LL and other SL users for not holding your hand, you should post questions like the rest of us and research the available sources of info, like the LSL wiki and the online help. You could attend classes, and post questions to the scripting forum.

There's enough info if you just bother to try looking, instead of waiting for someone to nurse-maid you. Tech support is for problems, not for how-to. Learn to do something for yourself. It's not hard.

And if you can't figure that out, you can always go back to playing TSO.

-Cubey

LSL Scripting Resources...
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LSL Wiki (Offline Copy since the Wiki is in transition)
http://lslwiki.sdfjkl.org/
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University of SL In-World Library (Lots of LSL Examples, Free Textures, Sounds, etc.)
USL Library, 5th Floor, MetaTower ^1 in the BonnyDoon Region
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LSL Scripting Forums
/54/1.html
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LSL Scripting Library
/15/1.html
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Lots of Scripters, Builders, Creative Folks hang out on IRC 24/7...
Efnet IRC Network (http://www.efnet.org), #secondlife room
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Linden Lab did not invent quaternions. It's not up to them to hold hands with the clueless until they are comfortable with advanced mathematical concepts.
SL is a platform. An editor, and a host, for 3D interactive content. If you dont know how to do something in HTML, you will not get any support from Microsoft, just because you are using Frontpage. You wont get any support from your colo, and you wont get any support from the W3C. It's up to you to grab a book and learn from it.
If you for some reason want to learn quaternions, there's this thing called a university...*cough* ...or just google!
You shouldn't mess with quats directly anyway. It's just silly. No one does that.
I've been here since beta and I cant remember ever needing to create my own quat.
I vaguely remember them being vectors extending from the center of the object though.
Its not directly possible for an object to rotate around a point other than its center. I have no idea about the direction of rotation. When I want to make an object point somewhere, I use llLookAt.
These are things that you can easily try out for yourself, you know, to see which is which.
There are 2*PI radians around a circle. I learned that one in high school myself.
The "difference" between two rotations... llRotBetween?
Any more questions?
If you could perhaps be more specific about what you are trying to achieve, I'm sure some of us could point your code in the right direction.

I think Mike had a reasonable complaint. I have run into the same situation. I have had a simple question, asked a Linden, received no answer and no suggestions about how to find an answer.... figured out the answer eventually on my own.

SL needs better documentation and technical support. The forums can be one resource. And knowing who to ask for help can be another. But they don't address what I think is a reasonable expectation: that the software designer provide technical support for their creation.

Putting some of that $8M towards developing a knowledgebase which "amateur" experts can contribute to would be a smart move.

Now perhaps I am biased in that I am a online help developer in RL. But effective technical support is proven to enhance customer satisfaction and retention and to save $$ spent training your own staff.

Surreal

Mike, they don't have the time to help everyone with scripting issues. That isn't their JOB. If you want help with scripts, ask a scripter. SL tends to attract fairly cool people, just give it a try.

The answer that Mike was given was a good one, his question was answered in the forums.

To present the other side, although Mike was not satisfied with his Live Help answer, there are MANY that are. As Loki said the "array" of questions that come in are pretty amazing. I dont think LL could easily create documentation for all the answers, some issues need to be sorted out as they happen.

I have seen scripters in Live Help go to the person with the scripting question and work out a problem. The same with building issues, clothing issues, etc... Maybe the problem lies in the fact the Live Help is a group of volunteers, (and not tech help), and need to be more clearly recognized as such. I cant answer a scripting question, and I will say so, and then point the questioner to the forums or the wiki instead of no response at all. I can understand someone's disappointment with this response if they think they are paying for this type of support.

Although there is an intrinsic reward in being part of Live Help, I agree LL may need a paid, trained, and nonvolunteer version of Live/Tech Help. But on the other hand, I have never seen in any other online game anything as LIVE and interactive-inworld as Live Help, it seems to fit in very well with the social dimensions of SL. SL and its content grows and evolves because of its users, who better to ask but users?


fen-

I'm cronically afk , but ask me questions about things and if I don't know the answer I can find out in short order.

p.s. ~ if second life is a game, and games need goals and challenges, then the pursuite of howto and who are second life's.

One problem I see in having official "paid" help is that many questions cannot be answered unless someone is an experienced resident - and for new people, it can be hard to know which questions to direct to residents, and which to LL.

For example, I've seen newbies who came from other types of games where player content is not common, who've asked LL such questions as "Why doesn't my couples dance bracelet take the same commands as my old single bracelet?", "What button do I press on this vendor to cycle through the products?" and "Where can I get an anime AV from?". Before Live Help, it would have been almost impossible for those questions to be answered through an official help channel.

What it boils down to is that LL can only provide support for things that LL have developed - and as the world grows, those will make up an increasingly small percentage of the things for which support is needed. And it will become increasingly difficult for people to know which avenue to use for the answer to their particular question.

I think we're looking at an in-world knowledge base here AND the expansion of Live Help with a mix of residents and liaisons.

This morning I was contacted by a Live Help represenative to assist a resident with some animation questions and trouble he had... I was more than happy to help, I don't see anything wrong with that. I don't expect each Live Help represnative to know everything about SL and it's productivity. As a matter of fact one time I had a Linden ask me to assist someone with animation questions.. I think as long as the Live Help representatives know how to direct them into the right direction for assistance, all is well.

Cheers!

You're correct. The answers are out there, but LL doesn't have time to put them together; and if you don't know who or where to ask, then you're stuck. People do want to help themselves, but when they ask the source (i.e., LL) and are just told, "Sowwy, we don't do dat." they get frustrated as all hell.

I'm hoping that Live Help pointed him to those locations that Hank suggested. In fact, those listings should be stickied somewhere on the forums and bookmarked so that each individual in Live Help can at least point to the locations of the answers; and if a curious user is wanting assistance that they can find them.

Why not put those as a sticky in the Technical forums until the KB can be updated? At least, a curious and intelligent person would be able to find them.