Supernoob question. :)

Hello,

Not only am I new to LSL, but also fairly new to SL in general. So if this is just a stupid question please break it to me gently. lol

I'm interested in learning LSL, and not really looking for someone to write the scripts for me. I just need to know if something is possible and if you can give me an idea where I should start to try to get it accomplished, I would appreciate it.

In various stores and other locations, there are large numbers of boxes and such laying around. Each box has some text floating over it that you can only see if you get close enough.

Is there a way with LSL to capture that text from every item within a certain range (beyond your abilty to see that text) and to list it, either in a whisper or in a HUD of some sort, so that you can see what's listed as being in the boxes and such around you and decide if this place has something that you would be interested in looking for?

If going for the HUD option, and assuming that you can capture that information in the first place, could you then sort or search that information so that you could display only items that you are interested in?

Thanks in advance,

Maeryn

I dont' know if you can get the floating text off an object (there seem to be only functions to SET it), but you could get the object's name which may (or may not) be informative. A box containing something may or may not have a name that means anything.

Aside from that possible hiccup, everything you said is completely doable.

Thanks, Shadow, for the reply.

Would getting the objest's name also work for those vendor displays that are able to display multiple items for sale? The ones where you have to click a left or right arrow to scroll through the items for sale? I've seen this mostly with Animation or Texture vendors where they display the name of the currently viewed texture (which I assume would be different than the object name).

The only way to obtain this, Is if the object on the ground itself has it added into the script to send the string code used to set the text that floats above it.

Say you hud on click sends a request llSay(channel,"get floats";
The other scripts will have to have a llListen on that channel and pick up on the text "get floats". Then send that info llSay(channel,"ftext" +(string)ftext";

Then you hud has to be looking for the substring ftext and use the following substring to set one of your parameters.

Sorry if I confused you, I tried as easy as i could think of

Thanks Zypher.

Not confused. But to do it that way would require a whole lot of people to update a ton of scripts for this idea to work in a wide variety of places. Good idea, though. I was just hoping that there would be a way to query that floating text and compile a list.

Thanks again,

Maeryn

Nope, not with LSL. Floating text is a property of a prim, same as particles, texture anims, and sit targets. There is no way to 'get' this data via LSL functions.

However, the SL client is open source, and it gets the floating text from 'somewhere'. So, you could hack the client software to create a version of SL that does whatever you like with floating text.

Nope, you can almost guaranete those vendors names will stay a consistend 'johnny's vendor-o-matic'. You may get lucky with boxed goods from individual sellers, but yeah I don't think that would work for ya