Call guestures via script...

With 1.4 we have much better fucntionality with the guestures and they are now inventory items, I would like to see an ability to have a scripted item call a guesture in its own contents just as we can now do with animation. I can think of a ton of uses for this.

Oh my goodness ... you mean this feature is missing?

Why specifically do you need to call gestures from a script as opposed to calling an animation directly? What exactly do you mean? Do you want to activate the gesture (so that when they press F3 or type the trigger it activates it) or do you mean to activate the gesture immediatly when called by script?

I think he means that if the animation is exposed as an object or function in script--i.e. something like "runAnimationOnAvatar(contentAnimation1);"--he is unaware of it.

I for one am not proficient in scripting enough to know whether this is indeed available, but I do know that if it's not available, I am rather saddened, because scripting avatar animations w/ sound in association with objects (beer cans, etc) is something I wanted to get into.

BTW AFAIK this has nothing to do with gestures. Currently, I know that gestures can be scripted to the avatar freely. But as you know, v1.4 allows Poser animation exports to be passed around as Inventory items.

As it stands in 1.4, a gesture is basically a macro. Everything that can be done with a gesture can also be done easily through script. The only benefit of supporting activation of gestures through script is not having to write the script to activate each individual animation/sound - you could define the gesture and then play it back. Definitely not a crucial missing feature, just one of those things that is nice to have.

Remember, gestures are not animations. Cris is correct: a "gesture", insofar as SL is concerned, is essentially a macro.

It occurs to me that perhaps a new permissions constant would have to be created for this to work, so it might not be as quick as one might imagine.

I assume the rationale for this is so that a scripted object could be sold or distributed with the ability to have, say, F2 trigger some action. (That is, assuming they've fixed the "function keys don't do jack" gestures bug by the 1.4 release.) If that's the intended function of such a feature, the process for providing a gesture along with instructions on how even the slowest of newbies could install it would be easy enough to implement in LSL.

I'm actually not sure I'd like an attachment or other scripted object that tried to take over my keyboard.

Of course, as always, my opinion is that if the community or Lindens deem it to be worth the time and effort required, then it's something they should get cracking on. In this case, maybe a bit more debate is needed?

I have not heard of this one?? What do you mean function keys don't do jack?

I see two ways this could work:
Perform gesture X in inventory NOW.
Activate gesture X in inventory while PERMISSION_TAKE_CONTROLS and PERMISSION_TRIGGER_ANIMATIONS are granted.

I kind of like the second one, actually. Then I could have a gun that took controls (needed already), and animations (already needed as well to look good), and have some gestures activated so that while the gun was attached pressing F2 could switch modes or something. Or a vehicle I was driving could effectively remap some F keys for special functions.

Hmm, okay... I figured it out. I have F4 bound to "/5555 toggle 100" In the 1.4 gesture, it's not automatically added to Chat, it's under "Replace with". Moving it to Chat fixed it.



Hmm... I dunno. I don't like the idea of it reconfiguring my controls without my input. Maybe if we got a dialog box to indicate whether or not we wanted to accept or not? I dunno... it couldn't be tracked by key, and it'd be inconvenient to have it come up every time it was attached, rezzed or the script reset... to say nothing of teleports.

With PERMISSION_TAKE_CONTROLS you are already giving the object the right to , well, take your controls. It is true there are some cases where this is implicitly given, however there is a fairly obvious button on your screen to release controls in this case.

There have been other feature requests to be able to take controls of more of the keyboard. This could add that I think, if done right.

What about gestures being like, you load 3 animations into a gesture then put it in an object that you want to trigger that gesture that does those 3 animations.

Although I suppose you could just load those 3 animations into the object too.

Any of the suggestions made here would be nice though.

Great to see all the responses on this!

The primary need for it is within the new gestures you can define wait times as well as have it wait until an animation is done, there is no script call that I am aware of that will allow you know when an animtion has finnished playing so you can know precisely when to start the next one. Sleeps and whatnot could work but the gestures stuff is really well setup and calling a gesture would be great when doing multi person dances like tangos, slowdancing etc, calling a gesture from a script would allow you to start two gestures at the exact same time so the animation remains in sync (or closer than two people trying to coordinate a button push)

At least thats my primary current desire for it but I am sure there are a million other uses.