Security - CUBE ?

Whilst not exactly a scripting question, the possibilty of it being done I guess is down to scripting, so felt woul dbe best suited to here.

You know when you buy one of the many in-world security devices (often Orbs) with give a "so many seconds" warning about leaving their detection zone.

Well, all the ones I've seen have been based upon a RADIUS away from the Orb itself.

However, when you actually think about it, this is not great at all.
How many houses and land plots are round?

what we need is a Cube/Rectangle detection zone, so (if wished) you can place the orb in the middle of your house and the detection zone a fraction larger than your outside walls.
Stopping the "run of the mill" avatar from staying there, but not making flying past, or just a little overhead a pain.

I'm assuming there is a scripting reason why this has not been done (has it?)

Messing with prims the other day, I did wonder. Can you detect when someone crosses a prim boundary, or is within the boundarys of say a phantom prim?

If this is possible, how about Using a Transparent, Phantom prim as the detection device, so that any avatar than comes within this Phantom Prim gets the normal security stuff.

this would be so cool id you could pick a prim (normally a mega) that just encompassed your house, and drag a security script into the prim.

Possible?
Been done?
Not Possible?
Great Idea?

Anyone?

Hi there,

the non-spheric approach to securing a parcel/home/house/room has been done.
Actually any shape can be secured... or the SL equivalent of secure with a bit of
scripting.

Not sure where I saw an example script here.. but I am pretty sure I got one
from the Tips or the Library here.

Oh wow great.

Perhaps someone remembers and can link to the talk about it.

Oh yeah, well of course I know Secure is not secure at all really. but just my locked front door stopped a day old Noob from going into my house last weekend, and when I asked if there was anyhting I could do for them, they replied they loved me and can I please have sex.....

LOL

Not a scripting answer but Hippo Secure allows rectangular boxes for scanning...

using volume detect you can detect when they are within a phantom prim. and when using sensors and a correct layout you can "shape" them into squares and rectangles

http://www.lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=llVolumeDetect llVolumeDetect

http://www.lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=llSensor

the sensor article should have pictures to help visualize the sensor's field. but maybe it's not showing up in FireFox?

Well heck. If you only care whether they are over your parcel you can just use llOverMyLand() and forget all about geometry. But it isn't always the full parcel people are interested in securing.

you can also section your land and just ban everyone

Thanks to everyone who answered my posting and your info.

No, I'd imagine using security on a whole parcel would be the fastest way to annoy any neighbours. Hence the problem with the Radius on most of these devices.

And going back to my original question. Ideally (for most) I guess the general requirement would be something quite tight all around your house, so it affects no-one unless they are right up to you house, and get a polite notice to move away.

Ah. Okay. Well, the answer is just that the sensor API and functions like llVecDist() make a radius easy. It's about the simplest 3D geometry you can deal with in any case. Once you start dealing with cubes, you have to also ask how they are oriented and such.

Anyway, here's an idea for a box-like shape. It uses a scale of 100 times the box's dimensions (in other words, the number of cm on the prim's side is equal to the number of meters on the corresponding side of the controlled space) and is aligned with the prim's local axes. The prim must be at the center for this logic to operate correctly.

float SCALE = 100.0;

float getScanRadius()
{
   vector cs = 0.5*SCALE*llGetScale();
   return llSqrt(cs.x*cs.x+cs.y*cs.y+cs.z*cs.z);
}

integer isPointInsideControlSpace(vector p)
{
   vector cs = 0.5*SCALE*llGetScale();
   vector relPos = (p-llGetPos())/llGetRot();
   return (relPos.x > -cs.x && relPos.x < cs.x &&
           relPos.y > -cs.y && relPos.y < cs.y &&
           relPos.z > -cs.z && relPos.z < cs.z);
}

Well that was fun..............

Folloiwng comment on this topic I started, I looked around "in world" and bought a home security device. I won't tell you from who yet, only that all their adverts have blue as the background to their range of device!

Yes, it said it did what I wanted. create a bounding box for security.

Bought it, ran the wizard and gave it a very quick check (just to see if it worked on my rented group parcel) with a normal radius mode.

yup, worked fine. Following day, decided to get all the coords for the box I wanted to protect, got all the number put them in and the detection zone was the wrong shape/size.

Used the inbuilt tool and did it again, yet again not right, tweaked and messed about for a LONG time, putting numbers in over double the size needed to cover as it was not covering the area I was putting in.

About 5 hours later, and geting help from a fellow sufferer of the device who said he had problems also and tried to tweak things (albeit he owns his land) but he also told me don't expect any support either.

Not tried that yet as no-one was online from the compnay to help but I just got so fed up.

Went and bought the Hippo Security device (which is not so fancy) but also does a box, put the numbers in (simpler numbers also) and would you believe it, the correct zone worked for me 1st time.

Still feel pissed about blowing L$500 (ish) on something that basically is screwed it seems (almost as if the X,Y,X coords you gibe it are mixed up or something. So will try and get support from them to see if their customer service is as good as their adverts

Or you could accept that there's no need for "security" in SL because nobody can damage your stuff anyway, and they don't provide any "privacy" either, and quit blowing up people's cars and planes and boats when lag sends them a meter inside your precious property.

When I was married and we lived in Youngstown, OH for a while. My ex got mad when he found out I never locked the doors when I left the house. It never did sink in that it was useless to lock the doors. The back door had a protected alcove that acted as an outside snow room and the back door had a large window in it. All anyone had to do was step into the alcove, break the glass and make themselves at home.

I have always lived in decent neighborhoods, not fancy, just decent and it is rare that I even lock my car. From what I have seen in the news over the years, locking the doors isn't really a deterrent and you have the added expense of fixing the door if it is stolen.

In SL, unless you own a private island and keep everyone out then anyone can see and listen and touch anything in your house. But like my ex, most will never "get it".

Clearly this is not a problem in SL, but, were you to suffer a burglary or a car theft, wouldn't the fact you'd left the property unlocked invalidate your theft insurance? It almost certainly would in the UK.

Yup. So long as your camera works, you can see anywhere --- and in SL, seeing is very close to being there. It took me about a month to realize that after I arrived in SL. If someone wants to go to the trouble to watch me in my "private" space, I'm not going to waste my time in futile efforts to stop him.

There's not much point to vehicles in SL either. You can fly everywhere as quickly and easily as any vehicle will carry you.

Anyway, sorry for the bad experience with your purchase. I think we can all sympathise with the experience of running into other residents' badly implemented scripting. We can't help you much with that, but we're still here to help you plunk your own out if you want.

Oh, I can play the "stupid debating points" game here and point out that there's no reason to own land at all, since you can build in a sandbox and sell your stuff in XSTreet.

Not to mention that even if you're flying you can still lag out and find yourself teleported home before you can react.

If you're not in your house, and I crash into it or ride my bike across the corner of your plot or sail across the edge of your parcel, it doesn't destroy your roof, leave ruts on your lawn, or tear your fishing nets. The only time that it can even potentially matter if I'm on your property is if someone's there... and even then you're only getting the illusion of privacy.

Not only for protecting, but also usefull for visitor scannen....

float Xmin = 221.0; float Xmax = 230.0;
float Ymin = 196.0; float Ymax = 205.0;
float Zmin = 346.0; float Zmax = 356.0;
 
integer InMyArea(vector p)
{
	if (Xmin < p.x && Ymin < p.y && Zmin < p.z && Xmax > p.x && Ymax > p.y && Zmax > p.z)
		return TRUE;
	else return FALSE;
}

In the sensor event:

if (InMyArea(llDelectedPos(i)) // do stuff

Well yeah. Certainly. The only true privacy feature in SL is the ability to own a private-access region. Otherwise any real expectation of privacy is unrealistic. Some solutions are "good enough" for people though, and there might also be reasons they want to keep people out of their dwellings other than utter privacy.

While there IS damage that can be done, such as object clutter causing persistent builds to be returned, this kind of security system isn't likely to protect against it. Only the parcel options (turning build and object entry off, or at least using auto-return) and diligent backups that will preserve as much of your work as possible are likely to do that.

Of course, we're not really here to tell people what they should or shouldn't want. We're here to help them accomplish what they DO want, within the bounds of reason. We can speculate about why they want to eject or ban other residents, but unless they want to delve into their motivation and ask for advice, we might as well just stick to the technical end of things.

Speak for yourself. I'm here to solve problems. Just like in real life, as a contractor. If the best solution to the problem is "do nothing", then that's what I'll recommend to the customer.

A good, simple solution. The downside being that it can be difficult to configure and maintain. If you move to another parcel or change the dimensions of your building, it can be a PITA to go in and change compile-time constants. But if that is acceptable to the owner, good deal.

That's very true, and a good reminder. Still, I think it's useful to have brief discussions like this every once in a while so that people can think about the technical issues in a broader context. There are certainly people who want security systems, for example, but I'm not sure how many of them really understand how little security they get from one. This forum can provide a public service by at least getting them to think about it.

>A good, simple solution

I use a more advanced script. I place 2 probes, scan the area and fill the variables with llDetectedPos(i)

I'd have to say that mentioning why a scheme may be inadequate or possible problems that can be caused by it, as well as alternatives and their drawbacks should definitely be part of the discussion... that said, if that's what they really want, it should get covered too.

note: this doesn't include methods to purposely grief others or subvert the grid, as both are against TOS

So does this mean I should not post my few lines of code here, where you chat a name and it looks up their key and tells you if they are online or not

Seriously though. Most residents naturally evolve as the months/years go by in SL. First you are worried silly that some one may actually see your pixel naughty bits. Some go to ludicrous lengths to try to stop this including someone posting in RA the other day that he was going to offer a way for people to tp to a million meters to change clothes in private. (which actually you can do easily by adding more zeros to a slurl:
secondlife:///app/teleport/Sesia/83.0/20.0/2147483647.0
)
Then as people add friends to their list they go through a strange phase of wanting to know if their friends are REALLY online or are hiding their online status from them. Strangely it is usually these same people that then want to know how to truly hide their own presence from everyone else. Which is all silly anyway, you can see online status so many ways such as being in the same group etc or you can just do this:

EDIT point was demonstrated. No use in making it too easy


Next is being able to scan all around them to find out who may be nearby. They buy a 96 meters scanner and progress to buying a full sim scanner, hopefully with the ability to add in remote sims also, all of which lags the hell out of the sim.
Then finally a subset start throwing up banlines or using security devices, all of which are left on 24 hours a day even if the owner is only in world maybe an hour a week.

Fortunately most of us outgrow all of this and at some point just decide to relax and actually enjoy SL.

OP: Don't take this the wrong way. This is not meant as a personal attack against you. I am glad you have your security device working the way you want and hopefully you learned a bit more about scripting at the same time. The subject came up and this is just what I see everyday.