The Case of the Mysterious Disintegrating Dove

heyas;

not sure if this would work better in a building forum, but its sorta a general question/mystery, so i thought i'd start here. feel free to move me.


so i have this little pet bird (marvin the mourning dove) i made. now he's fine as long as he sits on my shoulder, but when i put him out in-world, weird things happen that i can't explain.

1: marvin has two fx objects over his head: a raincloud and rain. when he's touched, a random trigger might go off and cause it to rain on his head for like 6 seconds. or, this can happen if his owner gives the 'rain' command on the proper channel.

the particle systems built into the clouds and the rain have a lifespan of 6 seconds. which means, they do their burst, then they turn off (or 'die'). the object turns this on via a linkmessage.


but when i set marvin out on the ground, his personal raincloud keeps firing off, over and over again. for the life of me, i can't figure out: WHY?????????



2: so i have marvin sitting out on some land where friends have granted me permission to park him, and have him for sale. i put him out, set him up, put a note on his description that he does NOT rain constantly when worn.

i come back a day or a few later and find that he's either A: been turned from one object with 23 parts into 23 separate objects or B: everything but his main body is just GONE. and for the life of me, i can't figure out: HOW??????????????

(as a side note: one of my objects -- a cylinder my kiosk was sitting on -- was rotated up out of the ground one day. i can't figure out how THAT happened, either!) my stuff is not set for 'anyone to move' or 'anyone to copy.' how can these things be moved or unlinked? im certain my friends aren't going over and messing with my objects. (i dont even think they can, even if it is their land -- except to delete/return things.)


does anybody know how this spontaneous disintegration could be occurring? or how griefers could be messing with things? please, enlighten me.

I'm suspecting a scripting problem, though I'm not sure if it's possible (I suck at scripting).

I may be the script is "killing" the root prim instead of the effects. While worn, an attachment can not be delinked/linked so that would prevent that from happening.

In-world, an object's own scripts ~may~ be able to have an object delink itself, and then delete the prim(s) in question.

Again, this is a PURE guess on my part, but I'd suggest asking this same question in the Scripting threads. People there might have more of a clue. At least to tell you if I'm off in la-la land or not =^.^=

~Jessy

Make sure you aren't setting the prims as physical.

heyas;

well, the script doesn't really kill anything. the parts with particle systems have the systems set with a limited time to be active. and the main script is the same one (with edits to text and such) as im using in my other two birds, who don't fall apart. and without linking or anything, only link-messaging. but i will double-check.


darien, could you shed a little light on why/how turning things physical would cause such problems? or do you mean if the paving stone were physical, someone might have kicked it up? hmm...

If your dove had the prims set to physical, it would experience collisions while sitting on the ground. If the prims are tiny, and tortured, sometimes SL will just go nuts with the physics, I've seen things zoom offworld or yes, even explode apart.

My Cousin ran into something like this with particles. Turns out there is a bug at the moment that doesn't let the call to shut off the particles work all the time. Only way she has found to fix it is to unlink the particle prim, relink it, pick up the object, then rerez it. Fixes it every time.

oh, i see!

that's interesting. but no, he's not physical.

thats weird, bones (though with lsl, im not surprised :X ). i thought i fixed it by adding an empty particle system call in the state entry... or was it on rez? anyway, that seemed to work.

i'll have to check my demo doves. i marked them not for sale, then told people to get them from the nearby vendor. that seems to avoid problems with that.

I thought the turning-particles-off thing was fixed in 1.15.. If not, to turn off particles, do something like..

llParticleSystem([]);
llSleep (1.0);
llParticleSystem([]);

...and it should work.

edit: it's VWR-126 and should already be fixed.

Yes to clarify, you need to explicitly turn off the particle engine when you are done with particles. If you let the engine die by itself using a time to live for the particle generator, then every time you come into view of it and it rezzes in your sight it will pop off a particle burst. You see it ALL THE TIME with poofers and canons and other momentary particle scripts that don't do this.

So you are saying particles will cause a linked set to unlink? The OP said his build turned into 23 seperate pieces. I don't see how particles could do that.