Is llSetText borked?

I don't understand it, but I can't get a hover text to vanish by feeding llSetText an empty string. llSetText in every script I've tried for the past couple of weeks works fine unless I'm trying to remove text. Then, nothing happens. Try this simple test and tell me if it works for you...

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llListen(33,"","","");
    }

    listen(integer channel, string name, key id, string msg)
    {
        llSetText(msg, <1,1,1>,1.0);
    }
}

/me is not in-world and can't test this.

Which viewer are you using? Have you tried this on any others or asked people in-world if they also don't see it disappear?

I'm on Emerald right now, but I started seeing this last week, before I finally downloaded the Emerald viewer. It's only been a small annoyance so far and I've just put it out of my mind rather than asking around, until just now. I don't use llSetText much, but someone asked me for a little device for putting a floating tag over her head this morning and I was embarrassed that I couldn't make it cancel.

Ooooo! I take it back.... I just logged on with the standard viewer (1.23.5) and it works fine. So it IS an Emerald bug. Thanks for the thought, Meade. Sorry to have bothered people.

so i'm guessin you were just saying "/33" to try to send an empty message on channel 33 and it wasn't doing anything?

No bother at all!

/me wonders if the Emerald folks know about this already..

Right, Ruthven. That always works, normally, but apparently the Emerald viewer has a bug, so it doesn't. I doubt that they know it. I'll try to post them a note now.

One more until you're officially old!!

I've felt old for years, but it's nice to have a milestone to prove it. (Is this a good thing?)

I wonder. I've just tested this with

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
       llSetText("something",<1.0,1.0,1.0>,1.0);
    }

    touch_start(integer total_number)
    {
       llSetText("",<1.0,1.0,1.0>,1.0);
    }
}

in Emerald 1.23.5.950 and it works as I would have expected -- clears it.

Then I tried Rolig's example, with the listen event, and it didn't clear it. Then I tried adding llOwnerSay((string)llStringLength(msg)); to the listen event, and if there's nothing in the string, the event doesn't trigger.

This makes me wonder if it's not some change server-side.

Weird.. If it was a server-side bug or feature , it should happen for all viewers..

I know Emerald does some sorta sideband stuff via chat. I wonder if this issue is related to that.

This is a bit of a grey area; I find it surprising that the SL viewer actually passes on empty messages - hitting enter in an empty chat bar doesn't scroll up chat history. So to my mind the Emerald viewer exhibits correct behaviour.

I agree. It is odd that the SL viewer has ever passed empty messages. It has, though, so the question really is why Emerald does anything different. I did a version of Innula's test myself ......

listen(integer channel, string name, key id, string msg)
{
     llOwnerSay("The message is " +msg);
}

It works just fine in both viewers if msg is not empty, but the listen event doesn't even trigger in Emerald if msg == "". So it's clear that Emerald is handling chat in a different way, and it's not llSetText that's borked.

I don't see why empty strings should be filtered out of non-open chat.. Maybe not the most useful thing around but it's valid - scripts can use whatever protocol they want, including empty messages.

Truely weird that the viewer causes that sorta behavior, though. Seems to me like it should be all server-side..

Whether empty strings should or shouldn't get filtered out, in an ideal world, is one question.

However, given that they don't normally, it seems to me that a particular viewer shouldn't unilaterally start doing it, since this breaks scripts.

I'm filing this as a bug report over at the Emerald site, if no one has reported it already.

Go ahead, Innula. I sent them an e-mail this morning, but another voice can't hurt. Besides, at that point it wasn't clear that the problem was with passing empty chat lines rather than with llSetText.