Thinking about ZHAO-II...

Thanks for the beta copy Ziggy, it looks and works great.

The one thing I think might look better is if the menu button was a different icon. Although the curent icon looks like a menu, I'm not sure it's meaning is immediately clear, and it's not inkeeping with look and feel of the on off button.

Something like the 'eject CD' symbol might work better both in terms of being recognisable and being consistant with the other icon.

No bugs as yet!

Regards,

Dave

Dave, I really don't follow.

An "eject" button would be confusing to me. The menu button was immediately obvious in purpose, and IMHO the graphics of the two buttons seemed consistent (though I'm no expert there).

And, if you don't know what it does, click it and it becomes pretty obvious.

Since the textures are mod, you're free to roll your own! If you come up with good ones you'd like to share, I'd be interested to see them.

Photoshop isn't in my skills list So yes, feel free to create new textures and send them in to me, I have no problems with considering other ideas for the textures.

Can't wait. I'm an animator myself and I'm really looking forward to trying this.

Thanks for all youe work Ziggy, its really appreciated.

Err... I started a 'Beta testers wanted' thread in the Help Wanted forum yesterday, and a bunch of people offered to help me out. I think I have all the beta testers I need at the moment

I'm assuming you'd like a copy too Drop me an IM in-game if you can, whenever it comes back up, and I'll try and give you a copy when I log in tonight.

/118/a5/196418/1.html

That's the thread, and it contains a description of the changes from the current ZHAO.

Sorry I haven't had a chance to get back to you on this, but I've been away for a week. I will make it a point to spend some time with it, and give you feedback.

Token-delimited text is fine. It's not the greatest, but people having been doing CSV (comma-separated values) config files for years. Plus, it's already a common mechanisms, and there's a lot to be said for following established conventions.

What's bad is hardwiring a particular line number to a particular configuration item. Add an extra comment or a blank line, and everything below that point breaks.

First thing I noticed. If it you use one of the standard SL default animations on the card (i.e. backflip for [ Jumping ] ), then it will treat that as an error. Perhaps a check against the list of SL built in animations?

Perhaps this string to check against would help. (However, it may use up more memory than it is worth.) One other thing this would be good with, would be to marry expressions with various poses and such, allowing smiles to be added to stands with the ',' separator.

Stand time: I'd like to be able to enter a time in seconds myself rather than choosing from a list. But I see the practical reason to keep it like it is. Perhaps even more choices like:

0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 60, 90, 120, 180, 240

Good point. I'll change that to a warning message instead of an error. That's better than adding another long list/string to check against.



Yeah, that's easy to do. Someone could easily tweak the Interface script to change that too. Good suggestion.

Thanks for the feedback, let me know of anything else you find.

Why would using a built-in anim cause an error?

Because I was checking to make sure every animation in the notecard was in the ZHAO-II's inventory, and a built-in animation wouldn't be in inventory. It's a bug, I fixed it.

Hi Ziggy, I was just experimenting using the built-in animations as listed on the LSL wiki:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Internal_Animations

I still get the warning message telling me the animations were not found, at least for the ones I tried (yoga_float and the four stands). The animations still worked, though... although never for very long. It kept reverting after a few seconds (priority problem?).

It used to say "error" and stop reading the notecard, now it'll warn you and continue reading. I figured that if you're using a built-in anim, you know what you're doing, and you know those animations aren't going to be in inventory. If you typed something wrong, the warning lets you know that you need to check the notecard. I know the messages are a little terse... if you think the warning could be clearer, let me know.



Maybe... I'm a scripter, I don't know too much about animations If it does anything different from playing the animation by hand over a running AO, then I'd like to look at it. If you have stands cycling while playing a built-in anim and your stands are higher priority, I expect the built-in anim would be overridden?

Ah, I see... then it is working as expected. I think maybe just include something in the documentation about this, so people know to ignore the warning.


With normal animations the override works just fine. It was when I was specifying the built-in animations through the AO that they were reverting. I'm assuming that trying to override the built-ins with the same built-ins means they are both at the same priority, and so they will conflict.

No problem, though, I was just experimenting with them to gain better control over cycling of the default stands. If I decide to use them I'll just upload the animation files myself to make normal animations out of them, and with a higher priority.

BTW, the ZHAO II is very cool. Good job!

I really, really, apologize for not getting back to you earlier. Between RL and other SL commitments and chaos, I wasn't able to get to this until now.

I don't know if the version I have is your most recent, but I love it.

My most important suggestion, for the benefit of people with red-green color blindness, is to change the icon for on/off as well as the color, perhaps by putting a slash through it when it's off. If that's too slow or difficult, then maybe a secondary cue might be to change the color of the menu button from white to a medium grey. I'm not 100% sure that will work, but it's probably better than nothing. About 5-8% of all men have this sort of color blindness.

I have no trouble editing the HUD while it's still attached, without having to drag it to the ground. Unless there's a reason I'm missing, that would make the instructions much simpler.

Leave out the free memory report on load. Most people have no clue or no interest in it.

Consider adding some help text to the dialog. The Mystitool HUD does this quite effectively.

The rest are just suggestions, nothing critical or that I feel strongly about:

Instead of having both sit on and sit off, consider having just one with appropriate text, e.g. "Enable sits" or "Disable sits", depending on whether sit animations are currently off or on, respectively. Likewise for Random and Sequetial, though it's harder to think of good wording for these.

I don't know if other people do this, but I'll cycle through stands quickly. For that reason, it would be nice if, after pushing the Next Stand button, I got a new dialog box instead of having to hit the menu button again. You could even have the new dialog box have only two buttons, next stand and prev stand.

For that matter, consider adding a Back button to all of the submenus. Navigation is one of the more prominent usability issues.

Personally, I'd prefer a comma or semicolon to the vertical bar, because it looks so like an l, but it's common enough to use the vertical bar that I can live with it.

Thanks for the feedback. I think you might have a slightly older version, because some of the things you're talking about have changed. The sit on/off and random/sequential is difficult to combine, because one script is generating the dialog box, and another script knows the state of the AO (because of how I split up the core functionality from the external interface). But I've cleaned it up a little bit. The on/off color change is green/grey.

If you have a non-full-perms animation, I think SL won't allow you to move it into an attached object's inventory, you'll need to rez it on the ground.

The free memory is mostly a holdover from old scripts. I think it's useful after a notecard reload, since people can add as many stands as they want now. I could turn it off on each attach.

I've had someone else request a re-menu option... I guess models would find this useful. I'll think about it. Or someone else could easily do a mod that has that and some other features.

Speaking of mods, I'll be setting up something soon - a couple of people have contributed interesting mods that I think others would be interested in, so I'll be distributing those as well.

This is a question I have always wanted to ask. (not a suggestion, just a question, so sorry for using this awesome thread for my question) My groun sits always seem to put me about 2 feet underground. Is that a bug? I always assumed I was doing something wrong, but could never figure out how to fix it. 0.o

That would be the animation/animator itself

Ziggy I think a new version would be great, mainly to reduce load on the server, other than that I don't see anything wrong with the current.. thanks for all your efforts, they are greatly appreciated =)

Well, the new version's been out for a few weeks now. Check my profile in-world for landmarks

Zigs, I know you're gonna hate me for this, but...

When does work start on ZHAO III? *grin*

When are you taking suggestions? heehee

For future reference, in case I forget when the time comes (and we've talked about it)
I would LOVE to have the Standing poses on a seperate notecard from the rest of the anis, so that switching from one to another (By the way, GENIUS idea, giving the user the option of using a bunch of different sets!) that much quicker.

Jus' my L$24.5

Are you a furry or a kid? That would explain it. Animations are made for average height avatars. If you are significantly shorter, you will sit underground. I have the problem too. It's really annoying because I cannot use the ground sit that came with the AO I bought. You have to use it seperately by "play in world".