Viewer that uses feet and inches

While reading about inches and centimeters and such tonight I came across the following passage at as site called "Women with Powertools", with the slogan "Making changes in the physical world through the application of raw feminine energy" at ttp://www.womenwithpowertools.com/v2n3.html .



There's something funny about this. I know that half of one and a half is three forths without thinking about it, contrary to the author's statement, but I have to think a teeny tiny bit about what a half of 39 is. I've used "half of one and a half is three forths" thousands of times in my life, while the need to calculate Jack Benny's average age comes up only rarely.

A half of 39 is 19.5, not 16.5 as stated in the passage.

If calculating half of 39 is daunting...

This page, and the error, has been there 4 years now.

At the end of the day what difference does it make?

if you think in blocks of 10 then you can build anything.

Think about it this way, most people will use the linden viewer because of the reasons given, coding in a conversion and toggle may be more difficult than you think because of the complexity of the linden viewer which was never designed for it. Bolt on code can cause serious bugs when it conflicts with existing code. Hence companies like ESRI although they promote customisation of their products, will not support anything they see as caused by this third party customisation. Even if the root cause is a small problem with the base code.

An example of this happened at work. We traced the problem to being with ESRI code and called them in. They disputed and we had to back out all of our customisation (that in some cases THEY had developed) to prove to them that the problem lied with the base code.

Anyway I digress.

If you think about it, any kind of change of this kind would have to be supported by the Lindens, as it would affect things like land sales. instead of xL$/sqm it would be xL$/sqft.

Both would have to be supported, and you could end up with some horrible fractions which won't suit anyone.

There had to be some standardisation. Linden Labs chose the ISO standards that suited the majority of the world. There are so few countries that aren't metric, that forcing Imperial on them would confuse the hell out of them. Most people can use base 10 systems (decimal) and all you need to know to work in SL is that there are 10 milimetres to the centimetre, 10 centimetres to the decimetre and 10 decimetres to the metre. Easy. If you get stuck you can count fingers and toes...

Oh an btw changing to metric in engineering is EASY. We did it in the UK ages ago. We have miles, yards, chains etc as legacy, they are never used for engineering purposes any more.

But I think you'll be stuck with having to scale-up everything anyway. Stuff in SL is just way, way bigger than stuff in RL. I mean, even Tinies are huge: the average SL ferret would weigh, like, 10kg in RL--a formidable ferret indeed.

There's a freebie Frank Lloyd Wright prefab floating around, at something like "actual size". It's completely impossible for normal avatars to use for anything. (Coincidentally, FLW was notorious for aggravatingly low ceilings in RL, too--but not like this.) I've even been dinged for my 6.5m ceilings in some builds being "too cramped." To SL *building* scale, 8.5x11in paper would appear about the right size for a 5x8 memo pad in RL. SL *avatar* scale is slightly less over-sized, and a lot of the reason for the two different scales comes from the fact that our third-person cams aren't at our avatar's eyeballs but hovering above and behind us all the time. So if builds were to avatar scale, we'd always be looking at the floor of the level above us. (The reason avatar scale is so huge is, I think, simple vanity: everybody wants to be taller than average--at least until they realize everybody else pushed the sliders to the same maximum, so the effect is kind of lost.)

Make sculpties in an external modeler or cad program. Any I can think of allow user specified units as a given. SL is not designed to be a "real" modeler. You delude yourself if you think it has any degree of "accuracy" at all. The program's foundation is eyeballed duct tape.

Damn what a wast of a new window, there weren't any pictures of scantly clad women posing with power tools at that link like I expected

Metric is AWESOME to handle in code. No better way. But along the lines of Metric / English units...

It is unfortunate that the people at LL used a broken calculator when they designed the base avatars, as the average height of SL females seems to be about 6'8". Worse, create an Avi of normal size / proportions (breasts less that DD) and you are labeled a child Avi and banned.

Hurray for the "Barbie-ism" of SL... (Not.)

Metric rules. Metric is Da Bomb. Instead of an english viewer, we should change ALL real life measurements to metric. Scientists, even in the US, use metric almost exclusively.

The metrification program failed in the US because it concentrated on conversion. All those pesky conversions...2.54 cm per inch, miles to km, gallons to liters, etc etc etc.

CONVERSIONS are a royal pain.

What should've been done is to simply switch over. Once you have a "gut feel" for what a meter is, what a liter is, what a kilogram is, you have no problems using metric.

Suezanne...embrace the metric. Become one with the metric.

You can change the default camera offset in the debug settings, It's called CameraOffsetDefault. I just set mine at -1, 0, 0 . You have to restart SL to make it take effect.

It is indeed a shame there's no first person view that other than the mouselook "lousy first person shooter" mode. I can barely stand to be in mouselook mode due to the changing of the left and right arrow keys from pivot to strafe. I do know how to change the keystrokes iusing the keys.ini file or whatever the proper name of that file is. I'd also like to have a view from the front of the avatar looking at the avatar, with avatar motion based on screen direction, like in Spiro the dragon.

Some of the other virtual worlds I visit have the avatar turn translucent when useful, too bad SL doesn't have that ability.

Avatar sizes might be more realistic, for humanoid avatars, if they had the appearance editor ask "how tall do you want to be?" and allowed you to enter a value in meters or inches. Whether more realistic or not, they at least be what people wanted, rather than a size chosen from a unitless slider. If entering height values directly is too much of a challenge for LL programmers, a texture showing heights in centimeters and inches, like the backdrop for a police line-up area, could be added to the appearance editor.

I would lose my job.

I'm not opposed to the metric system. I want to be able to make some shelves I have that I know the size of because I read the label when I bought them. I want to be able to enter the values as I read them. (That's just one example.) That is not equivalent to saying something bad about the metric system.

Well, like I said... there's the source. Do it!

I mean, if it is so simple, then what is holding you back?

I've done probably a dozen different expression parsers in the last 30 years of software development, too. Some are easy, some weren't. The one you describe is not trivial, because it also takes into account unit specification as well as operators and operands. The syntax is not as straightforward as you might suggest.

Anyway, like I said. If the need is great enough, jump right in and make it happen!

"Modifying the building editor to display size and position values in alternate units and to allow entering numbers in different units is not a big programming task. "

Thank you SuezanneC, i dont feel so alone now...

I found what looks like it might be a nice units conversion calculator at http://www.katmarsoftware.com/uconeer.htm#download.

It has options for area, density, energy, enthalpy, force, heat capacity, heat transfer, length, mass, and more. It has buttons for copying results and pasting from the clipboard. It has the more common units like meters and acres and such but leaves out things like hogsheads. I'm sure someone would find it of interest for some project.

The math is trivial to a computer, yes. But programming in the bowels of the LL viewer is anything but trivial. By the time you figure anything out, they release a new RC.

There's a little display at the top of the screen that shows position, rotation, or size. The part of the code that displays that might be a good place to start adding an alternate units display, output only.

What is that display called? I tend to think of as "weird little display, gee I wish I could enter numbers there".

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One can put .3048 in the Grid Units field in the build editor Grid Options dialog. This will make the grid size be one foot. Also check the "Enable Sub-Unit Snapping". That will make the grid subunits be things like 3 inches.

Alternately one can put .1016 as the Grid Unit size, and enable sub-unit snapping. This will make the grid unit size a third of a foot, which is not too useful, but the subunit will be an inch.

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Adding a script like below will cause the hovertext to show the object's dimensions in inches.



Adding code to round the display off would make the result look better.

I've never written a line of code of C++. This presents a bit of a problem.

Actually, I would expect a person reading a comment about a programming task being simple to grasp that it means to someone already skilled in the language and familiar with the Linden code. It shouldn't be necessary to explain something as obvious as that.

I've also not compiled the viewer. The instructions I saw back when I tried presumed knowledge of Linux, which I have essentially zero of.

Also, I'm not as sharp as cookie as I was when I had my Atari 800. Times passes. Things wear out and break down.

However, if you'll get on an IM client and walk me step by step through the compilation of the stock viewer, I'll give a shot.

If you set your Grid Options to .3048 for Grid Size, and then in Debug Settings , set GridSubdivision to 12, then when you zoom in while building using the grid, the main markers on the grid will be a foot, and the small markers will be inches.

So what you're saying is that you'd rather have something that matches some RL measurements (i.e., a totally different universe) than something that looks right to you?

Is your goal to build models of RL stuff? SL isn't particularly good at that, for reasons having nothing to do with the measurement system. Otherwise, I don't understand why you're putting so much emphasis on having something match RL measurements. That's not what makes something right.

I said nothing to suggest that I wanted to make things that don't look right to me.

Things made to accurate dimensions will look right to me when my goal is to make thing to accurate dimensions.

I'd like the process of making them look accurately sized to be simple and effortless, with results as perfect as the limit of floating point notation and the quirks of the SL position and sizing system allow.

The easy, simple way to make a shelf with shelves 18 inches deep, 36 inches across, 1 inch deep, vertically spaced at 18 inch intervals, is to be able to enter dimensions by typing 18 and 36 and 1 into the shelf's x,y, and z positions, put the bottom shelf's vertical dimension at an even inch value, say thirty, and then put the next shelf up at 48 and the next shelf at 66. That would be straightforward and yield perfect results.

Nothing insurmountable. If you've done as much programming as you intimate, the learning curve from one programming language to another is not nearly as steep as if you were starting out as a newcomer to programming.



Yes, but it is still an assumption. Maybe it is a simple task. Maybe it is totally non-trivial. Until you get your hands dirty in the bowels of the code, it's all just pie in the sky presumptions about what is and is not easy.



Only if you are compiling the Linux client. The Windows client is compiled using Visual Studio .NET 2003 or VS 2005.

Here's the relevant page: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Get_source_and_compile



Everything you need to know to get going with it is in the Wiki. If you have questions, there are in-world groups, and the SLDEV mailing list where you can pose them. I think there is also an IRC channel on efnet where you can get immediate assistance, too.

Thats a social problem, not a technical one. Don't shift the blame, it's the user base that chose to have larger then real world avatars. It's not just avatars that are out of proportion, look at the buildings, they are huge and have nothing in them. SL Furniture is isn't small either, it's out of proportion most times to the out of proportion avatars.

I don't see any of this as a problem. In a world where biology and physics don't provide constraints things will wander out of proportion. People don't want smaller, they want bigger, so it is to be expected that things are bigger then they really need to be.

The alternative is Procrustean.

I didn't say I'd done much programming. Expression evaluators are something one finds in books on compilers, and it's quite common for beginner forth programmer-dabblers to write an infix evaluator for when they want to easily enter physics formulas which are not usually written in postfix notation. Simple expression evaluation - determining whether a token is a number or not, whether something is a plus or minus sign, and what to do with it, is not advanced programming. It's beginning programming.

I'm a signmaker. I did work as a programmer for about six months, roughly twently years ago. Not having any formal education in programming, and being hired by a somewhat crazy person with a really poorly timed business plan, it didn't work out too well.

I didn't ask for links, I know where the wiki is, thanks.

I asked for realtime help using an IM client.

I just signed up in the SL Open Source Discussion group, a Linden sponsored group, and asked if that group was a place to get such realtime help with compiling the source code for a grossly ignorant person, but there was only 4 folks online, and no one answered. Whether they were ignoring the question or whether group chat was failing again I don't know.

If it's as easy to learn C++ and the in and outs of the code as you seem to think, you should be able to start helping in 5 or 10 minutes, I would think, if that long.

Well, we'll probably not agree on the subject, but I tend to think that things like Finite State Automata (which is a common way to do parser implementations) and compiler design are at least intermediate topics. In addition, I already stipulated that the level of difficulty in implementing a particular evaluator is wholly dependent on the complexity of what it will be evaluating, and that some of what you have suggested you would like IS more complex than a "simple infix evaluator".

When people sit back and tell me that non-trivial programming tasks are trivial, I presume they REALLY must know what they are talking about, and that I must be a pretty dumb wet-behind-the-ears newb for doing it the hard way all these years.



*shrug* I've been trying to help as much as I am able at present. Sorry if it isn't good enough for you.



Well, if you can whip up complex expression parsers in your sleep, it shouldn't take you more than 10 or 15 minutes to grok the process without any help at all.

The expressions needing to be evaluated to assist builders in Second Life can be very simple - the ability to add, subtract, multiply or divide two numbers is all that would be required. This would benefit builders without regard to what units are being used. There's a Jira issue on it at http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-675 .



The development environment recommended for VS 2005, which is what I have installed, include:



The Cygwin homepage describes Cygwin as: "Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows." It is a way of accomplishing certain Linux-style tasks in a windows environment. That is where my reference to Linux comes from. I don't know Linux, hence I don't know know how to use the Cygwin sort-of-Linux-emulator.

The wiki page there doesn't include detailed step by step instructions sufficient for someone completely unfamiliar with the process to compile the viewer. They assume some prior knowledge that I don't have.

Heh, that's funny, there's a new junkyard around that has a big picture of scantily clad young women with tools in their hands dismantling a car. I suspect it will cause some traffic problems.

I really have no idea why this idea has been meet so negatively. There wasn't even a call for this to be the main viewer, just an alternate viewer. I mean geez.

I ranted and raved myself, but that was about measurement in general and my inability to do so, not on viewers.


Personally I just want to be able to see. If I want to see in anything other than mouselook (which I hate being in), then I need to be in a building that has high-ceilings and big doors. They do have those in real-life. And seeing more than just a mouselook issue - just seeing myself, bad eyes I have. hehe.