Animations - 30 second restrictions

Can someone please inform me of the technical difficulties in expanding the animation uploads beyond 30 seconds? Some animations just don't work with looping and it would be nice to be able to make animations that last longer than 30 seconds.

use a script

only issue is that if its laggy the transitions between them will not look right

How would you script that?

I just tried stringing 3 animations together with timer events. The result was very unsatisfactory even without major lag. Is there a better way to do that?

I think it's simply to limit resource usage, same as limiting audio to 10 seconds.

You both seem to have missed the point of the question.. I was wondering why it is restricted to 30 secs, the same as music files only being 10 secs. I've had no problem stringing animations together, with great results, thanks to a wonderful scripter i found. But there are some animations that i would like to make that would last longer than 30 secs, stringing them together wouldn't be ideal for me in these situations. It would be much easier to make a couple animations that lasted a few minutes each, rather than have to make 60 animations to fill a 30 min 'routine'

Again, the question is, why is there is a restriction on animations being only 30 secs and would it be possible in the future to have the length of uploadable animations increased? I would put it to the Lindens, but they like to have it discussed in forums first..

You seem to have missed my reply above.

I doubt there is any technical reason other than discouraging rampant resource usage. I sure wish the sound file limit was 5 minutes rather than 10 seconds, so I could put my own music on an SL CD without needing a web feed of some sort. But I suspect that this is exactly what LL intends to discourage.

Of the resource types, I would rather see the limit on animations raised, and raised to a number of bytes rather than a number of seconds. Of all the resource types, anims are the smallest. However, I might be missing the point of this limit, and size is only one consideration of course.

No, i didn't miss your reply. Thank you for that.

You have no way of knowing how long it takes for the anim to load, so if you start a 30 second anim and a 30 second timer and it takes 5 seconds for the anim to load then you'll be off by 5 seconds three times. On the second iteration things will work, because by then you have the anims cached.

If I come along, the same thing happens to me, everything will look fine on your screen this time, but it will look very off to me.

Even assuming we both have all the anims cached, if you tp me, the first anim will again look off to me because it just starts playing from the start for me, even though for you it might be 20 seconds into it, but as soon as it switches the first time, things will be smooth again.

Yes, I can understand that. My question is, if it doesn't work with timers, how is it done then? Craig Altman's "Love Scene" for example consists of 8 stringed animations, and it works impeccably. So there must be a way ... how? (I'm not asking for a script here, just a general idea.)

I wish lol

Kittys reply was probably the best Ive ever seen at explaining what I often try to explain to people when they ask about "jumps" at the joins where one anim stops and the other starts.

If all the anims are in your cache, that dramatically reduces the jumpy issue, to get the anims into cache all of them have to have been played to the people watching the anim, the second issue is lag and the accuracy of script timers.

I generally set my timers between 29.8 and 29.95, but Im living in a dreamworld if I think a script timer can ever be that accurate, I recently played with making a sim crash sensor script, it works by taking a unix time stamp, running a 30 second script timer, once the timer finnishes the script checks unix time again to see if its 30 seconds later,if it more, it means the timer was stopped by a sim crash - thus it detects sim crashes.
The reason I mention this is that this script was giving false positives all the time, even when I was giving it a tolerance of +5 seconds, only saying sim has crashed if the time difference was over 35 seconds.

I dont know if that made any sense but what it means is a script timer of 30 seconds can easily run a lot longer, so me thinking I can set it as accurate as miliseconds for anims is wishful thinking!

Ok so it would be great to have a scripted method to tell when an animation ends, but this actually would not fix the problem of caching, animations are client based, an anim is at a different stage for every person watching it, its a bit like giving 20 people a DVD of a film and asking them to go home and play it, all will not be watching exactly the same bit at the same time.

Having spent absolutely ages trying to improve this situation I can maybe save you some time and maybe upload money:

I make the anims in my multiple anim ones UN-looped, this way I dont need to use a stop animation command before starting the next, not sure if this helps any but figure it doesnt harm.

I tried making a period of inactivity at the end of each anim to try to make it smoother into the next, I found this is a waste of time, the long pause looks unnatural and better to have the occasional little jump than to have that guaranteed every 30 seconds

I tried using LLSleep instead of a timer, this creates too many problems, if people get off the anim ball it will run the duration of the anim for them in world because while asleep the script wont notice they got off.

More recently in an attempt to appease those who think poseballs are responsible for all lag in SL, I changed all my sync sets to only use one listen script(not a listen in each ball), I use a master script in one that comunicates to the other through link, when I came to changing my multi anim ones I realised this system would also be great for the timer, so I put the timer in the master script also, this way they can never go out of sync like they can with a timer in each ball, both are always told to change at the same time.

I recently had a scripter suggest I pre-cache the anims for people, have the script play all the anims in the set for a second when they first sit on the ball, basically when they sat it would cycle through ALL the anims before running the first, although Im sure this would work I think the 4 or 5 seconds spent doing wierd contortions when you first use the ball would maybe put people off.

Sorry for long post, hope it helps, Im not really a scripter so there could be much better methods I dont know about.

What I was thinking about was a couple dance ball... as soon as one hops on they go into a - priority 4 - static pose, with the actual dance - at priority 3 - playing at the same time, but not visible.

When the partner hops on, the same thing happens with them and after a short few second interval, it starts only playing the dance which - if everything loaded - should sync right from the start.

But I don't know enough about animations to know whether it's even possible to animate properly at priority 3, and it would still only "fix" things for the two people on the dance, everyone else walking in later could see things a little off.

And there still isn't any way to account for lag, I've seen animations take close to a minute to finally decide to play in the worst conditions . I think what we have now is about as good as it gets .

Craig, if you weren't in my personal Hall of Fame already for your work, you would be now for this post. Thanks a lot!