Anyone know Setforce well?

Actually I have 2 questions.

Is their another place to learn lsl besides the wiki at www.badgeometry.com. Where did they authors of BG get their knowledge?

And second and most prudent at the moment is How does llSetForce work? I understand how to use it. But why does it work the way it does? What are the limitations? Does it work on vehicles at all? If not why?

I'm trying to make a vehicle that goes up and down very quickly on command, but physically. It's important that it's physical because it carries people and cargo. The setforce command doesn't seem to have any effect at all, and I'm getting very sad now.

Any help??

llSetForce() applies a constant force (ie. acceleration) to a physical object of any sort (vehicles included). Perhaps you aren't setting the force high enough to counter gravity? How large is the object? llSetForce may have trouble with large objects. Are you compensating for the mass of the object?

The only other real resource is the official Linden 'lsl_guide.html' in your SL installation directory. The reason we created the wiki was because we felt it was grossly inadequate, and in many cases, incorrect.

I learned from 'lsl_guide.html', and from questioning virtually every entry in it. Trial-and-error revealed many of them to be wrong.

SetForce is brilliant for accelerating vehicles up to high speed, so good choice there.

That said, there's a secret concept called "Energy" which was implimented waaayyy back to prevent the hypothetical possibility of a large object coming along and smashing some smaller objects half-way across the sim.

You can see the energy with llGetEnergy(). It's an arbitrary number that replenishes itself at a constant rate, and gets used up proportionally (or square, or exponentially) with the mass and the velocity of the object.

Put simply, if you make your object really tiny (like thin piece of plywood), it will fly really fast. If you make the object much bigger than about the height of your avatar, it will become more and more sluggish.

Azelda

P.S. Just thought, you're not setting HoverEfficiency to something other than 0.0 by any chance in your vehicle? Just asking because if you are it'll be impossible for you to move your vehicle along the verticle axis

There's also Jake Cellardoor's excellent CHM file. I learned everything I know from it. And, of course, from being a RL coder who has been on SL for over a year

In beta, there was a feature to turn on a hypnogogic sky texture that would sleep-teach you LSL. It was discontinued because a few people snowcrashed.

At least I assume that's the case. I mean, I spent many hours a night playing... I'm pretty sure it was against my will, and now I know LSL, so it just logically follows.

LOL @ Wednesday.

As for the llsetforce. Well since my starship is about 30 X 18, with two decks, it's pretty heavy. I guess it simply doesn't have enough "energy" to overcome it's gravity.

THe ship will budge a bit (about 1 meter) and slow down quickly at certain amounts of force, but if I use to little or to much it wil not move at all.

I'll search for another way.
Thanks

If you make the starship out of very thin laminers rather than filled cubes, spheres and so on, you can probably cut the weight down by at least 95%.

Azelda

Try turning it into a vehicle with the vehicle code. You'll find it in Wiki too. (Don't listen to the people who're going to tell you I should call it "the Wiki" rather than just "Wiki". They're telling the truth.)

Just out of curiousity...

F = m*a... are you remembering to multiply by llGetMass()?

And energy is a pain in the butt. Stoopid energy. *grump*