Fix rotation imprecisions! Keep builders from being banned!

From my IM log moments ago:

[19:56] Rickard: When are they going to fix the angle drifting thing? I broke my keyboard :/
[19:56] Francis: lol
[19:56] Francis: WHAT?
[19:57] Rickard: at some angles things won't go to the right angle, and if you have things at a lot of different angles andthen link them some of them move
[19:57] Rickard: pissed me off so bad I snapped my keyboard in half
[19:59] Francis: LOL OMG
[19:59] Francis: Poor Rickard Have some cocoa
[19:59] Rickard: not a bad idea, but I think I'm going to get food
[19:59] Rickard: then I'm going to find a linden and get banned

While I think this is the funniest thing that's crossed my desk in a while, I do understand Rickard's pain.

SL represents the orientation of objects/prims/avatars as quaternions. As I understand it, there are imprecisions in the implementation, due to quaternion<->euler representations, and just working with floating point numbers in general.

After you work with a very precisely-set model for a period of time, you might experience "angle drift", where you might notice your prims get out of alignment. Which seems to have cost Rickard his keyboard.

These angle conversions are kind of irritating. Can we do something about it? Such as maybe use double-precision floating point numbers in quaternion conversions, or allowing rotations to be stored in fixed-precision Eulers?

Rickard with his keyboard snapping skills sounds like a strapping young lad. Is he single?

Just for the record it wasn't broken completely in half. The plastic contact sheets inside just bend.

and hey... this is a transcript of an in world conversation!!!! abuse abuse!!! Fran is sullying my shiny reputation... oh wait she asked. never mind .

It really depends who you ask, and more importantly, how you ask. I am confident that if you inquire discretely and provide a photograph, you will get the answer you desire.

Oh, and it was a conversation on Trillian, not in-world so maybe I'm exempt

*Looks around at her angle.. looks ok to me..

lol, ah Drift, you're so angular... that's a good thing in this context .

after sleeping on it, and meditating to save a linden, I've come up with an idea...

How about an alternative rotation editor that just about skips degrees altogether. the editor screen inputs would consist of a vector (not normalized client side), and a scalar which is rotation around said vector. essentially one step below a quaternion. All that would be needed on the backend would be a few sines, a cosine, and some multiplication.

Now I am NOT suggesting that this replace the degrees altogether for any naysayers who were happily preparing to blast me for thinking. I am suggesting a button at the bottom of the edit window which can switch between the two.

The graphical representation in world for this rotation method would consist of a one ended vector (ray) extending from the center of the object out along it's local x axis. this is your axis of rotation. the arrow point of this vector would be draggable much like an object, using the three colored vectors. Ideally it would also be snappable on a grid centerered on the world and zero rotated, a grid centered on the object and zero rotated, and a grid centered on the object and rotated to the starting orientation of the object. once the axis of rotation has been set there should also be a nice purple (or some color) ring around the axis of rotation that would allow for spinning the object on that axis. also snappable. Idealy 0 for this rotation would be the most upward angle. and failing that, X Positive. I'm not sure where 0 reference is around an axis in a quaternion.

This is definately a math nut and nitpickers feature request... but sl has a much higher ratio of nitpickers and math nuts than most populations. I'm not asking if people think this is a good idea. I want people to post if they think they could figure out how to use it.

and if you feel like asking "what if I want to point something other than the x axis at something", it's possible, it's not even that hard. This is capable of setting up any rotation in a logical manor I think without causing the conversion errors we currently have.

Of course if you'd just like to fix the current system by all means do that first!

(EDIT)
Hiya
(/EDIT)

I have had the same issues, slight rotation messes with the final products rotation. but if you type it in directly (VS using the mouse) it seems to solve some issues.

also when moving items around they jump and seem to adopt a different value (even linked) its a small difference but it creates lines in my floors and walls, which drives me NUTZZ!

to scale an object is a toss up, i take a copy first because half the time scaleing breaks my object too!

wow that turned into a little rant so I will end with, hey whats going on? and can we get it fixed? it seems to be all relatively similar in nature.

The jumping you're seeing might ("might, but only might" be caused by packet loss, and that's due to the fact that sl uses udp exclusively meaning you should set your bandwidth down until you see little or no packet loss because the protocol doesn't regulate itself and will throw packets at your connection to overload. And ya typing it in fixes it about 30% of the time (assuming your keyboard survives). but 70% of the time it seems that 2 or all of the degree fields will not agree and modify each other as you try to even them out. The self modification would be irritating but livable IF they modified themselves consistantly. but a prim 180 off in one axis as many prims do come in pairs, will produce totally different results. Sometimes you can work around by having both prims at the same rotation and cuting and torturing until they look mirrored but this becomes problemattic with twisted prims and cuts that need to face a certain direction, and top sizes that can only effect the top.

I too have worked around this, only a couple of times now, by backing up and re-aligning prims as Rickard suggests. I'm still relatively new to this modeling, but right now, it's only caused me minor headaches, up until I find myself reaching for a magnifying glass to find the "last" bit of flicker in the seam of the build.

Rickard, thanks so much for that synopsis on the how to determine where your bandwidth should be set, didn't know that. I don't pretend to understand everything you said, hehe, but I can follow those directions through well enough.

hehe i know the feeling , want to smash something hard sometimes, you need to get a cloth or the laser keyboards, good luck smashing those