Maze / Obstacle Course

I am a builder for the Hocking College region. On our RL campus, we have a simulation "burn tower" for our firefighting students to practice. In RL it's a tower with several floors where they burn pallates, etc. Well, for this location in SL, I'm attempting to make a maze/obstacle course type of thing. The basic idea is that avatars will be teleported to the top floor of the tower and have to make thier way down. Right now, it's more just maze-y with everything being black and such, and we'll have some small lights here and there to help guide people through. (I also plan to have the outer walls of the tower as TPs out if anyone gets too frustrated and just wants out).
Anyway, being not much of a scripter myself, I wondered if anyone has any suggestions of things I could do that would be a bit more interactive than just finding your way through a maze. Someone suggested a type of "hose" that they could use and "put out a fire" before being able to move through a doorway or something, but I have NO CLUE how I'd go about doing that. Like I said, I'm NO scripter, so I'm not even sure how much of this sort of thing is possible, but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Well, you might seriously want to dig in and learn some serious scripting to do this kind of thing, but I might suggest a HUD with various options. It could interact with the building and things in it to see if the user is making the right choices, offer feedback, etc. For example, you could offer a "feel door" choice to test whether a door within a meter or so is hot, so participants can make intelligent choices about which doors to go through. For instruction instead of testing, you could even have the HUD (or a different one) walk the resident through the situation, giving tips, hints, and more advice for wrong choices.

I'd recommend the scripting tutorials at http://www.lslwiki.net/ to get you started. This kind of project would involve some pretty diverse aspects of scripting, so I don't think it would be helpful to start talking about specific LSL functions and such.

Hmm... Ya know, I'd seen somewhere else where they use a HUD for a puzzle-type region, but I've found those can be somewhat complicated at times. We're trying to make this as simple as possible, for the kind of people who are just wanting to "pass through" it - if that made any sense. But I might look into it... Thanks for the suggestion, Hewee!

Also, this maybe could've been made clearer in my previous post- it isn't going to be instructional; it's just for fun. (i.e. People from ALL majors are going to be playing it, so we just want it to be a fun little maze thing for them, rather than a guide for the fire students...)

Any more suggestions, you beautiful, wise people?

dunno, you could make "keys" that correspond with certain teleporters to gain access to the next area (think doom "the purple key goes to the purple door"

you wouldnt actually have to give keys to avatars, just make them touch it and record their uuid, that way theres no fumbling when you get to the "purple teleporter"

You can make almost any obstacle u can think of in sl. The thing about taking out the fire to go through is very simple. You could hire some scripter to do the job for u or u can u reverse engineering on known scripts that do similar thing.

I like that idea a lot.

Rather than "keys" I'm thinking they "put out" the fire (an on_touch on/off emitter) - is there a way to make it so that something would be "recorded," in essance, that would then give them permission to go through a door? (I was sort of thinking of modifying the "bouncer doors" - i.e. somehow giving permissions to that specific user after completing that task to go through a door that would otherwise be "locked".)

Anyone have any suggestions for scripting this? Is it possible to "write to" a script like that, via another object? (accessing the door script via touching the fire)? If not, are there ways around this?

It is possible. U can make the script with touch event tell the doors who wouched them and who put out the fire. The the script in door will make a list of the ones who did and would let through only the ones on the list. That is not nard to script. Almost any scripter could do that.

OK, well, avoiding the whole "make a list" scripting thing - seeing as I'm attempting to do this with my own [meager] knowledge of scripting, I found the following script incredibly useful:
/54/c7/137951/1.html

So, basically I'm thinking - they'll put out the fire and click on the "Switch" object which will open the door for 15 seconds before reclosing.

Which brings me to another question - Does anyone know of a more creative way of "putting out the fire" than just an on/off on_touch emitter? I mean, I like the idea of just turning the emitter off, but is there a way to do it using a "hose" of some sort or something? (I can't make this thing TOO easy )

But is there a way to reset this after so many seconds or something, so that the same person can do the course over and over and not be able to just "cheat" through it, because of being through it previously?

Certainly. http://www.lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=llSetTimerEvent

Thank you! I'm starting to get a handle on scripting, so I think I can do this...

The burn tower is probably in its final stages:

Level 1 - Find your way down a winding staircase where vision is clouded by smoke particles.
Level 2 - Extinguish the flames to open the "secret" door.
Level 3 - ***
Level 4 - Make your way through the maze to the exit.

***As you can see, my problem lies on level 3. I sort of wanted to make a giant ball pit (because when you go through the "secret door" of Level 2, you fall through a tunnel-like thing into Level 3. But then I realized that the balls are just going to continue to fall down to the next level, every time you open the door (even though I did put up a short barrier, hoping to cut down the number falling.) Well, after a lot of frustration (involving an unknown-to-me phantom wall) I've decided to nix the ball pit idea.

So now, I turn it back over to the geniuses here - Any suggestions? Try to think maybe along the lines of something firefighters might actually do... Like, axe through a wall? I dunno... You kids are way more creative than I am. Let me know what you come up with!

If you'd like to visit the progress made on the building thus far in-world, type "Hocking" into the search, and then travel over to the big burned-brick building near the SE corner. (It's the one with smoke billowing from the top.)