Fractal "tree"

About a day after registering I'd like to show off my first build before finally getting some sleep. It's a fractal self-rezzing tree-like structure. I have to say that self-replication is a bit counterintuitive at the moment, but the wiki was of some help.

Here's a timeline of sorts: (there's a waiting period of 16 seconds between each iteration to make sure that each sub-object has recieved a copy of itself, and everything but the trunk de-rezzez itself after a timeout)



Some questions:
- What's the "community standard" for the acceptable amount of prims to rez in a Sandbox? (and perhaps a prims/second limit?)
- What about the number of active complex scripts? The next thing I'd like to try is some flocking behaviour, but that would take a considerable amount of entities.

Some observations as a newbie:
- People are very friendly in SL compared to most MMORPGs I played. I was shot at once during coding, but that is quite inconsequential compared to the general attitude.
- LL are my heroes for creating this marvellous piece of software, but I'm more than a bit surprised that these same people cannot support international keyboard layouts correctly. It isn't a problem for coding, as I can use an external editor, but coming accross as a half-wit in chat because of stuff like "Zoure using mz script#" being produced when typing "You're using my script?" is quite annoying. Has anyone found a workaround?

I guess that's more than enough for my first post, so I'll just say this: SL rocks!
(And I haven't even been out of the Sandbox yet!)

Dude, you're hired!
The Linden trees are fractal BTW

Keyboard workaround:
Set your keyb to US English in the control panel and learn the US layout.
I can't believe how many programmers don't use the US Layout... it's so much more comfortable.

Sandbox usage:
Go crazy. That's what they are for. But please bear in mind that other people will want to use the sim so if your scripts are causing a lot of lag, add some llSleep() / llSetMinEventDelay().
Most importantly, DEREZ after you're done playing.
If you need to set up some type of permanent content like a server I can let you use my land. I like supporting talented noobs. Feel free to IM me for any sort of advice

I thought everyone used the german layout....

Waaay cool, Mono!
I've been waiting for someone to impliment fractal trees like this.
I may be mistaken, but aren't fractal "trees" grown this way called Lindenmayer systems or something like that? If so, it's an appropriate coincidence.

(If not, go easy on me)

~Olympia

Real programmers use Dvorak
But, seriously, I agree that the US layout is better suited to programming, but if you've been writing insane amounts of code and text with the german layout for 5+ years just switching isn't really a possibility.

I plan to have all my stuff that uses a lot of prims derez automatically, in addition to having a "sudden death" chat command AND a global timeout date for everything self-replicating. (The first two are already implemented in the "tree"

Thanks! I believe that I'll not get out of the sanbox for a week at least, but after that I may take you up on that offer.

I will take you up on that offer for sure. There's a lot of stuff that's a bit counter-intuitive, at least at the more complex building level. For example, I was somehow disappointed earlier today after "realizing" that nested linked sets are not supported. After some reading I now believe that they are indeed supported, and that I was misled by Ctrl-Shift-L unlinking recursively.

Anyway, it's 3 AM here and I just had 4 hours of sleep last night, so I'll really get to bed now.

Thanks! Wow, people here sure are knowledgeable. I based my tree on a theory/technique that I knew just as "L-Systems", and after a quick Googling it turns out that the L indeed does stand for Lindenmayer. You learn something new every day.

(Yes, I know that I should be sleeping now, but upon seeing the new reply after posting my last message it felt like a very rude thing not to answer )

It's just a coincidence though. LL picked its name due to being located on Linden street, at first. Now they are on second street =)
I don't know what exactly you are talking about. We don't have hierarchical linking. I don't know the inner working of it but we certainly can't, say, rotate a subset of prims in an object, they have to be rotated one at a time. Which sucks.
BTW, if you IM me while I am offline I will get it in the mail, and if I reply to it, you will get it in an IM. Neat, huh?

Very impressive stuff... what is it with the recent flood of talented noobs? They're making me look bad, fer cryin' out loud.

I really like that you are already thinking ahead with the automatic re-dez of objects. You'll make your neighbors very happy.

One thing about your screenshots, though.. there's a debug menu you can activate (umm... I think its Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D to bring it up). In it there is the 'world' menu, where you can either 'force sunset' or 'mouse moves sun'. Either of those will enable you to light up what you want to take a screenshot of, the second allowing you to put the sun exactly where you want while in mouselook mode.

Anyway, welcome to SL and keep up the good work!

T-hehehe

I just want to say for posteriority that Jesrad's tree rocks. He even commented his code! Unbelievable!

Very cool! I happened to stumble across one of your trees in the island sandbox the other day. I've done research on fractals in the past, so I instantly recognized it as an L-System. Programs like fractint and others use a somewhat-standardized syntax for producing L-Systems from a very simple text-based grammar. I wonder if you could write an object that did something like this? Maybe the input could be written on a note-card.



I saw the version I found in the sandbox puke its guts out at about the 4th iteration, as every copy whined about not being able to rez the next iteration because it didn't have the object in its inventory. D'oh.

I've heard rumors of the ability to create an object with a recursive inventory. I wonder if this is actually possible.

Either way, bravo, and way to make a splash!

Yes, I already thought about that. From what I gathered from some forum threads, parsers have already been written for simple languages, and the grammar for an L-system specification would be even simpler. However, I'm currently occupied with getting my sheep (or anything non-physical for that matter) to move smoothly, so it will prbably take some time before I try this.

That most probably was an older version, the latest one only dies horribly if the sim lag is extremely high.

It is, I found that out by accident. I actually thought that my instance passing code was working correctly when it wasn't, because I tested with just 2 iterations and had recursively put an object with an older version of the script into the object I put into the inventory. I had to do a lot of frantic debugging befor completely figuring that out. Anyway, it's not really practical and a logistics nightmare.

Nice work on this.... If i remember right Alpha Zaius (i think..... is he the little blue alien that sells guns and made tetris? If so, then that's the right person ) has a fractal tree generator for sale.