pose ball question.

i've noticed in a lot of places poseballs tend to vanish, I know that some of them are easy to hide perhaps by clicking on them, but a lot that i've noticed had no obvious ways to hide them they just seem to break and I can never get them to appear again. a lot of the times these pose balls will show up again maybe...a week later when I re log on which tells me there's probably a way to fix this and I would like to know if it's an easy fix or if it's something that I have to rely on other people to do.

Have you tried doing /1 show ?

Most of the popular ones work on channel 1.

Probably other people have been fixing (and breaking) it for you up until now--by accident.

/me visits newbie sex club and shouts "/1 hide"

Many poseballs have a script for "Show" and "Hide" commands, as has already been explained in this thread.

There is not necessarily any consistency, though, on which channel the poseballs might be listening to receive the commands. So you could very well go up the progression of, "/1 Show", "/2 Show", "/3 Show" on up to "/99 Show" before you find the right channel. (It does stop at 99, right?)

However, sometimes, the poseball description field will have the channel listed. So if you click on "Edit" from the radial menu of a poseball, the Description field may contain the channel on it. Hopefully the script hasn't been altered to change the channel, without updating the Description field to show the correct channel.

And of course, if the poseball is transparent, you'll have to turn on "Highlight Transparent" to find it so you can check the Description field.

Haha Amity. You can go way above 99 in the channels. I think above 2 million. You can also use negative numbers for the channel but no avatar can talk on a negative channel.

So finding the right channel could be a process similar to Stewie Griffin attempting to call home without knowing the phone number.

(Dialing) "000-0000 ... Hello, Lois?" (Hangs up phone.) "Damn!"
(Dialing) "000-0001 ... Hello, Lois?" (Hangs up phone.) "Damn!"
(Dialing) "000-0002 ... Hello, Lois?" ...

LMAO - now there is another new way to amuse myself inworld next time I am bored.

Much, much worse. It goes to integer max, 2147483647.
(Actually, 2147483647 is reserved for script debug messages, so it's only 2147483646).

thanks for your help. I'm not going to waste my time checking a bazzilion channels but at least I have a better idea of what i'm doing.

I gave you some gestures that will do it for you.

The poseballs still work even if invisible. So you can press whatever key combination to show invisible which will make them appear red. You can also click drag your mouse over the invisible balls and you should see the edit outlines on them. Then you can right click on these to use them unless the balls are coming out of an mlp type system where they won't show up as invisible.

Hahaha! that is evil! I like you.

ya thanks, Ill send the several "my poseballs vanished" IMs I get per day to you then and maybe you can explain to them why

The actual solution, if anyone is interested, lol. I have had this dilemma as a builder. And i can't really script very well. So removing the touch hide/show is beyond me to repair the damage. But if you set the veriables of the hide/show to the same, then it won't cause them to vanish. Just for the script-ally challenged like myself. Sometimes I just set them to invis anyway and keep them hidden. But on publically used objects its good to keep them visable.

Better than 95% of the pose balls that I have seen respond to "show", "hide", "/1show" or "/1hide". I have a few others that use other numbers, but the number is usually less than 10.

If you go to the View menu and select "Highlight Transparent", the invisible pose balls can be seen. If you click on them and look at their description, the ones that use odd channels usually tell you what channel to use in the description.

The above all assumes the pose balls are always in-place. Multi-pose furnishings, like sex beds, can generate and discard numerous sets of pose balls, for different functions, or can hide the pose balls completely. Touching the furniture item should give you a menu to select sets from.

And as Atom and others said, some pose balls show and hide on touch.

I've actually known "non hiding" poseballs to vanish -- usually because someone crashed while on one. Their texture becomes completely transparent and thus invisible. Once a week I have to run the circuit of my lands, resetting the transparency on those that've vanished. I wish I could figure out why this is, because I cannot find a common thread between those that vanish (different creators, etc.).

I wish builders would stop putting poseballs on their furniture. Poseballs are ugly, and take up unnecessary prims. I know of at least one system that allows you to embed the poses in the prims and position the avatar so that when they sit on the prim, they'll be in the correct position. And this system is only $1L on SLX, can be freely distributed (ie. full perms).

http://slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=318690

*waves to Quaintly*

I've been using Lex Neva's sit pose setter for a while now, and it's great. No pose balls. The only issue are poses in multi prims and people maybe not knowing which prim to click on to sit -- which is why I use the toggleable hover text. On the other hand, SL is so "pose ball" driven that it's what people expect and want. It's a tough call but I'm always in favour of saving prims

SLX is blocked at work, so I can't check the link, but I was wondering whether the new owner can (easily) adjust the positioning once they've got the item home? Not all avs are the same size and I know a lot of people prefer pose balls for the ability to tweak height, rotation, etc, of a furniture pose.

I love that pose setter script thingy, it has saved me loads of prims. It should work on anything that is modifiable, I'd have thought, although it is not quite as simple as dragging a poseball around.

Poseballs have their uses too - for menu-driven items with lots of animations, in particular. Also, as Lucrezia says, people sort of expect poseballs - they know what to do with them, so they are very useful for public builds, especially places geared towards newbies.

I hadn't thought about that. I think I'll offer people pose ball options in my creations then. Thanks for brining up that point of view!

I may have seen something that does this already, but I'm pretty sure the existing sit target positioner scripts* (from Lex and Lear) don't do this out of the box. I'm thinking that one could fairly easily add a state to the pose script that took a touch from the seated avatar (only), and then temporarily grabbed controls so they could position themselves with the arrow keys and pgUp/pgDown, and then remember the positions for the past few avatars who made adjustments. Getting the control behavior to be intuitive might be the challenge here.

Extending this idea a bit, one could retain the per-avatar adjustments in a sim-wide animation server (yes, I make one of those, but it's not for sale), and possibly "discover" the avatar's geometry, such that sitting on a new target would get a better-than-default guess at where that specific avatar would want to fine-tune the position.

The full-bore ape-shit crazy version of this is to have a webserver somewhere that remembers everywhere you ever sat and how you adjusted the position, both to get it really right the next time you sit on the same target forever and ever, and to make a really good guess the first time you sit on a brand new target. This, however, would be quite insane.

(Incidentally, one thing that lots of scripters have tried--myself included--is to adjust the seated position based on avatar height. I think this would be almost practical if there were no leg-length sliders in Edit Appearance. As it is, though, that approach just can't produce satisfactory results.)

________
*I just want to say that this bit of scripting is a stellar example of scripters collaborating to make something useful for everybody. It may not be obvious that Lex must have done a *bunch* of "empirical scripting" to figure out the constants that go into that script.

integer count;

default{
state_entry
{llSetTimerEvent(.01);}
timer()
{count=count+1;
if(count>200){count=1;}
llShout(count, "hide";
}
}