MLPV2 questions & bug reports

Wish list item for future tools.

One of the aspects of life for people selling MLP products -- well, for me anyway -- is the daily round of stores to check my balls.

- Did someone testing a demo product tp away or crash, freaking out the MLP product s/he was sitting on?
- Did someone leave the product on a pose where both balls are buried in the sofa, so the next customer thinks there are no pose balls?
- other things that can affect the demo products we set out in stores.

What I'd like is a tool (script.) You drop it in a demo product. You get to specify what the default showroom pose should be. Then every 24 hours, say, it just resets all the scripts in the MLP product, reboots it, and fires up the default pose -- so that your MLP demo product is always looking its best and ready for customers.

Good idea, Chaz, and you can write that yourself. Just look in ~sequencer to see how it's done.

Try the wiki:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/MLPV2_Tutorial

If that doesn't help, ask a specific question or explain which instruction you don't understand.

Yeah, but I guess I was thinking that other people might like the tool as well, dunno. And for stuff to be included in the distribution MLP, I know you prefer it to be your own scripting?

Ok. this is a problem I have run past the beta group several times and noone seems to have a fix.

When first sitting on a pose with a prop, rotation (which seems to be dependent on the avatars position before they get ion the ball) is added to the saved rotation in the .positions notecard. The result is the avatar appears to be rotated about the Y axis. It also appears (but is difficult to confirm that) this effect is additive, i.e. if you stand and sit again the problem sometimes becomes worse.

There appears to be a workaround, to remove the added rotation selecting a new pose and then returning to the original seems to often (but not always as far as i can tell) remove the added rotation.

Now for the freaky bit, while running tests on this behaviour, I edited the ball and kept an eye on the rotation values. There was no reported change in the rotation of the ball even with visual rotation of the avatar of 50-60 degrees.

Anyone providing any ideas or feedback on this would be greatly appreciated since I have been stuck on this for about a month now.

Please note; the poses affected have no hip rotation in the original pose and most are centered at 0,0,0 in poser, this issue has affected at least three products and impacts upon newly created poses, the poses involved do not demonstrate this behaviour when played as standard animations from the inventory item.

With the latest RC client, I was seeing some odd rotation behavior, esp when running two clients. Haven't seen enough to really characterize it, but latest RC client (or perhaps sim changes) have certainly messed things up in some cases.

I don't think this is a script issue, because I don't think anything in MLP scripts have changed recently in that area, and it's been working fine for a lot of people for a long time.

yeah i'm kinna suspicious it might be a viewer/sl issue too. Just wanted to see if anyone else was seeing this.

Good news is if it is a viewer issue i can just pin it on sl and stop obsessing about trying to fix it.

Oops, forgot one potential culprit. Are you sure the anims you're using have hip positions set? If not, you get different results depending on which pose you ran last.

That is, if you have 3 anims, 2 with hip positions and one without, the hip position for the one without will be left over from whichever of the last two anims you used. That doesn't sound exactly like what you reported above, but it would be best to double check. I'll send you some anims ingame to try (or just pull the sit anims from the MLPV2 distribution on XStreet). If you have the problem with your anims but not these, then the anims aren't suitable for use with MLP-like scripts.

I read a couple of comments about the dissapearing hair.. and I have noticed this a lot too. It only seems to happen on MLP items for me though. Is there anything in the MLP that does this? I have been opening up windows to cover it .. as it is awful to look at lol.

The disappearing hair, and other prims is not isolated to MLP objects. Pretty much anything you have a sit position set on seems to show that behavior. Possibley even just sitting on anything but I haven't tested that.

It also seems to be dependant on camera position and angle, a small change can make a difference.

Ok all my hips are currently set to 0,0,0 no rotation. I switched to doing this after mlp demonstrated that it would remember hip rotations from one pose to another. Could this now be causing this issue?

If this is what is happening I am assuming a one degree rotation would solve it?

Oh and the disspearing hair thing? Definitely a known issue in the latest patch don't have a jira number but it's in there and I have seen a linden comment that it is due for a fix.

First, it's not "MLP remembering rotations". It's the way SL animations work. If there's no change in any joint between the "T" frame (first frame in bvh file) and the first animation frame (second frame in bvh file), SL ignores that joint for the whole animation. And when all other animations are turned off, this means that these joints are left free todo whatever SL does with them. It leaves them as they were from the previous anim, or overrides them with SL builtin motions like typing, head movement, arm pointing while editing, etc.

Second, the values in the hip joint aren't important, but the fact that they're different between T frame and 1st animation frame.

If the problem doesn't happen with animations that are known to work, then the problem is likely in your anims.

I need to write up a good explanation of this and put it on the wiki! It's a common problem.

BTW, I think I found the reason for the problems I saw earlier, and they were cockpit error on my part, due to use of 'edit linked parts'. Oops! Can't have that checked when moving poseballs and expect things to work correctly.

I'm getting a lot of this as well. With hair, jewelry, shoes or anything I'm wearing that has an alpha texture. I've only noticed it when running my animations via MLP2 and only since the last viewer upgrade. What's strange is that when I test my animations by doing a "play in world" there is no problem. So as mentioned above it may have something to do with the way the latest viewer is interacting with animations and sitting. Also note I get this with two different computers running different OS and video cards.

Everyone is being very demeure and not mentioning the biggie :} your Xcite! bits appear to fall off :}

But they are still there, it's just a display issue when you zoom in. The lindens caused it by mistake, presumably someday they'll fix it by mistake. Until then I reckon, all we can do is wait as fast as we can.

Yes, Monique, this is about the viewer and sitting (and nothing to do with animations, as far as I can tell). It also has nothing to do with MLPV2 other than that you sit on it.

When you sit on something in SL, you become a part of its linked set, and I suspect that's at the bottom of this bug.

There's nothing to do other than wait for them to fix the JIRA, and meanwhile, move the camera when stuff you want to see disappears. Sometimes the problem is excessive. When trying to take a picture of a product, I couldn't find any angle where I could see my face and my hair at the same time. So, in my marketing photos, I'm bald in one shot! Thank goodness it was me and not her.

I didn’t think MLPV2 was the culprit other than as you mentioned above a sit is involved when using. What made me think animation may come into to pay is that when my char first sits on a ball before giving permission to animate everything appears fine but as soon as it starts I’ll get the transparency flicker. I’ve also noticed it doesn’t seem to appear on static poses. Do you have a link to the JIRA on this issue?

Thanks for the link. Hopefully the 1.22 viewer which supposedly resolves this issue will be released soon. I still find it hard to believe that LL released 1.21 when they were aware of this bug for several months.

Hi all!
I would need to build a pose menu just for the purpose of producing a sequence.
For that reason I would rather not show the menu in the Main Menu or elsewhere.
I do know it can be done for I did it once accidently ... but I can't repeat it ...
I guess I did it with TOMENU in a .MENUITEMS.xxx menu...

How should this be done properly ??

Currently, it's tricky. For this to work, you can't use the AUTOMENU feature, which plants any unplanted menu in the main page. Therefore, you can't get what you want AND have modularity (the ability to just drop in a .MENUITEMS.mymodule file along with positions and anims, and they automatically get added to the main menu). That's a pain, because the .MENUITEMS.reorient module is very handy -- but when necessary there's a workaround.

Try this:

1) Delete AUTOMENU from .MENUITEMS, if it's there.
2) Explicitly configure main menu buttons to your submenus using TOMENU lines in .MENUITEMS
3) Create your hidden menus and don't plant them anywhere (don't put them in any TOMENU lines in other menus)

Perhaps we need a "HIDDEN" parameter for menus, to avoid this complication. This would allow you to override the AUTOMENU feature for a given menu. It would replace the "ALL/GROUP/OWNER" parameter.

I don't know why you'd want to prohibit someone from using the poses in a sequence, but it's your product.

Oh, if you put a menu in a "TOMENU MyMenu" line in any menu above MyMenu, MyMenu won't get automatically added to the main menu. So, you can just have a menu that contains nothing but TOMENUs to the sequence menus, and bury that someplace where it isn't distracting. That's probably what happened to you earlier. In that case, you don't lose the modularity capability.

One reason I have for doing this is when doing an animation sequence where one animation leads to the next some of the in between animation my not make any sense when played alone.

I was able to do what you listed above and was able to get the results I wanted. I have still been unable to get an animation sequence to display the necessary prose balls unless they are already there. So what I have had to do as a work around is have a tomenu in the main menu point to a menu that has a button for some sort of basic sit type animation to get people seated on the ball and a button that does the LINKMSG to the sequence.

I the long run this works fine but hide menu option would work for me.

Hello there Lear. Recently my wife and I were looking over your MLP v2.2 scripts as a way to upgrade all her old things, Xpose *shivers* She has a build that well can support upto 15 people at once. Now from the reading I have done so far, I only see that you can support 4. Is that correct? Or is there a way I can write in code to allow for more poseballs?

Also, Is there also a way of making those 15 balls swap into any position, Or is there a way to at least make the 4 balls swap into multiple arrangements?

This would be brilliant if you decide to go to the trouble. I was thinking earlier about the same issues faced by Monique, but hesitated to bring it up.

To clarify my reasoning:

- it's not about *prohibiting* use of individual animations, it's about not confusing customers with extra menu items for things that make no sense out of context. For example, there's not much use for a menu to play each individual non-looping chunk of a "Lovescene"-type sequence.

- thanks for providing the workarounds mentioned, but without a non-arcane toggle of some kind for the hidden aspect of the menus in question, I'm thinking end users will never be able to adjust or save positions on sequences. A HIDDEN flag serves this purpose perfectly, and it can be documented by the seller if needed.

Thank you for your answer concerning the hidden menus for building animations.
For the time being your solution works fine for me, no doubts a "HIDDEN" parameter for menus would be a far more elegant solution.

Now my question is rather different, it's about props in a pose ... as far as I understood there is just one prop per pose available. So if need be to have two, they will need to be linked as one object in the inventory. Assuming I'm right so far, would there be a possibility to have two different props in one pose, without the need of linking them as a pose specific prop?

The adjustment issue is a good one. Actually, it's a good one to make each pose explicitly selectable, to make adjustment easier. The HIDDEN parameter wouldn't make adjustment any easier, it just makes it easier for the builder to put together the product (a lot easier, frankly).

To adjust hidden poses in a sequence (regardless of whether using the current workaround or using HIDDEN), the user would use adjust mode and pause the sequence. Hopefully the pose steps wouldn't wisk through too fast to be able to catch each pose as it's played.


BTW, an undocumented feature of sequences is (IIRC) if you configure a step that's not a built-in sequence command, it gets sent to MLP just like hitting a button, so anything you can do with a button you can try to do via sequence. Of course, some features may not work well this way! But it's worth playing with.