Building over 768m or Turning Invisible

Hi,

I have a futuristic construction that I wish to place in my sim, but it is out of place, as the sim is 1001 Arabian Nights themed.

Two solutions I have thought of are:

1) Build way above the Arabian theme (which currently goes up to 750m), say at 1000m
I have read that building over 768m is not possible, but building below 768m is fine, followed by moving the build to over 768m is then possible. Can anyone confirm if this is true, and any caveats? This is a single build, of 116 linked prims.

2) Build at any convenient location in the sim, but turn the entire build invisible, so it does not clash. As I will only use it occasionally, and I have only 12 tenants on my sim, and rarely more than 2 on at any one time, and as I have a sim scanner to see when the sim is empty, apart from me, this could be another possibility. I have seen scripts on slexchange for L$10 that you drag into a prim's folder, and it will render the prim invisible or visible by voice command. But I am wondering if this would also work on a single 116 linked-prim build.

Any advice or thoughts on the either of the above two possibilities welcome.

Rock

Well, it's possible to rez a build above 768m. (One way is to just temporarily stack prims on top of each other till you reach the desired height, and rez on top of the stack.) But life is really not nice up there. For example, you can rez stuff from inventory, but you can't move anything you rez. And any *scripts* that try to rez at an offset from some prim will instead rez back at 768m (if at all... can't remember if the 10m rez distance limit reigns).

It would certainly be possible to have an entire build switch back and forth from full-opaque to full-alpha. llSetLinkAlpha() would work (though it may take a few seconds to work through 116 prims, unless there were parallel slave scripts doing the actual calls in parallel... but that would still be vastly preferable to having a script in each child prim that sets its own alpha). It would get a bit tricky if the "on" state of some prims is partially transparent; those would have to be handled specially (so I'd be inclined to replace them with alpha-channel textures, if there are any).

If you only want to use it occassionally, why not just rez it when you need it, and take it back when you've finished?

Because a few other SL friends may need to use it from time to time, maybe when I am not in world, so I need it permanently in place, but it must be out of sight.

Another idea might be to cover it in another prim (disguise its presence), for example a large hill from the outside but transparent from the inside.

Rock

Or... have another build completely swap with it, having some prim rez either one or the other build on command. (For that to work, though, everything in both builds would have to be copy-perm, at least.)

Actually, if you're already looking to disguise it, why not cover it to look like any other building on the outside, but your futuristic building is on the inside. If you cheap it by putting it inside of a large cube (or cubes), your disguise could be 8 prim (you might consider landscaping the ground lower to make up the difference if it's a tall structure. I figure at least you'll get the best of both worlds: Arabian Nights theme on the outside to keep people happy, and you get to keep your build in the sim without any issues (I hoping you've got some spare floor space say in a corner of the region or something).

There's no reason you couldn't set it up so with a single command you could swap out the prim structure and make the non-active one invisible.


Or possibly even shrink it, but that would be more complicated. You'd have to have the script remember the link offset position of each child prim. Not impossible, and certainly can be done with a single script, but riskier.

OK, first set of test results are in....

I flew up to 1000m. Using my MystiTool I attempted to rezz a platform (40m x 40m) under my feet. I was amazed that this worked fine.

Encouraged by this, I then rezzed a large house of 120 prims, again, no problem.

The ecstacy soon faded when I tried to move the build, it vanished!

I then Created a simple cube. Any attempt to move it made it disappear, and it didn't return to my inventory (worrysome).

I also noticed that creating a landmark did not work. If I tried to use the created landmark I fell immediately (because I was at 768m, not 1000m: so the lesson here is that landmarks do not work over 768m, and any value over this is simply read as 768m). However, sending or receiving a tp from another avi DID work.

Fortunately, I did not tp down to the ground, I flew straight down, and on my way down I spotted some prims that were where they shouldn't have been. On investigation I found that they were the missing prims from 1000m, now at 768m (so that's where they go, right down to the 'legal' height).

So this solution is a non-starter. I don't know if scripts work ok or not over 768m, certainly my MystiTool did, but maybe there are other constraints, anyone know?

One promising test was using a Megaprim on the beach. I giant 100m x 100m x 100m cube was rezzed, plywood texture. The prim was phantom, and walking into it I found that inside was as if it was not there, total alpha. So this would work to hide my build inside of (especially if I could turn the phantom on and off by voice command, as this would provide some level of security too. But retexturing a megaprim cube, to look like a part of the landscape will take some real imagination LOL.

What else can I try......mmmm.....

Rock

At the risk of drifting into the territory of the Builders forum... non-phantom megaprims have some oddities, not least of which is a habit of reportedly lagging Havoc when confronted by physical objects in the vicinity. But also, hollow mega-prims aren't as hollow as they appear, so when non-phantom, they're effectively solid where they appear to be void, or at least that's my experience.

(Now I'm wondering how MystiTool managed to directly rez something above 768. I can devise a really kludgey way to do something vaguely similar with physics, but it would be pretty obvious what was going on, so... it's "Mystical" to me, anyway.)

You can rez objects at any height, you just can't move what you rezzed, so it has to be rezzed in-place.

Yes, when you attempt to move something that is above 768m, it immediately clamps down to 768m, which is why it seems to disappear and reappear "down" there.

It is possible to move and place objects above 768m with a script using physical movement, but there is still a ceiling on that of 4096m. Above that, you have to rez the build in-place.

That thread is a good reference on the subject : Maximum Altitude for building

I found an invisibility script.


(code)
// Invisibility Prim Refresh v1.1a
// by Beatfox Xevious
// last updated Oct. 21, 2004

refresh()
{
llSetTexture("38b86f85-2575-52a9-a531-23108d8da837", ALL_SIDES);
llSleep(30);
llSetTexture("e97cf410-8e61-7005-ec06-629eba4cd1fb", ALL_SIDES);
}

default
{
state_entry()
{
llSetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_BUMP_SHINY, ALL_SIDES, PRIM_SHINY_NONE, PRIM_BUMP_BRIGHT]);
llOffsetTexture(0.468, 0.0, ALL_SIDES);
llScaleTexture(0.0, 0.0, ALL_SIDES);
llSetAlpha(1.0, ALL_SIDES);
llSetTimerEvent(5);
}

timer()
{
if ((integer)llGetWallclock() % 60 < 10)
{
refresh();
}
}
}
(code)

This script work perfectly to hide your self behind a wall. Your name
are hide and your avartar to.