Dynamic Charts/Diagrams in SL

Hey Guys,

I am new to the SL environment and am currently conducting a project in SL and need help on many tasks I have to complete. My teacher has asked me to implement many tasks within an island he has purchased for the project but I have no idea of how to do them. I will post the tasks up one-by-one as posting all of them at once will only confuse me lol.

The task he wants me to begin with is:-

1. To create a chart/diagram that other avatars on my island are able to view and draw/write on. For example, the chart could be a table that avatars are able to insert text into where necessary.

Is this possible? Can someone help me get started or tell me where I can get this information from PLEASE??????????????

Possible? Yes. Complex? Yes. Practical? Probably not.

SL is very weak in its support for displaying text on a prim. People have come up with various ingenious ways to do it, but none are really general purpose.

I suggest you go ahead and post some of the other things you would like to do and get some feedback on which ones are easy enough to serve as good starting projects.

The easiest way to do this is with a webpage backend. You'd use a URL for the media and update with a llHttpRequest. You'd be very limited in the editing available though as the avatar input would need to be a listen event to allow free form text.

http://lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=communications

If you need anything more than simple text then a full web editing solution launched with llLoadUrl is about the sanest option.

If a webpage backend is not possible, then do a quick feasibility study showing the limits of LSL and textures in SL to show why you should be given an alternative assignment

a few ways you can consider for drawing:
1- detectedgrab, there is a function in LSL (poorly documented, and I didn't get it to do much that I liked) that lets you detect click/drag on an object. I used it to click on a pen and drag it, notifying a drawingboard/grid of its position and toggling pixel color. It worked.. but hardly. With a little more effort I'm sure it would be plausible as a very basic paint utility.

2- mouslook + mouse controls. Much like a gun functions you can detect where the avatar's crosshairs are pointing in mouselook and project from there onto a known plane in front of them. You can then use a similar approach to above to notify a grid of calculated position to toggle pixels or whatever. I considered doing this instead of detectedgrab in the little script I was fooling with because the detected grab stuff seemed unreliably implemented and poorly documented.

For text you can use XYtext or one of the newer variants to tell a prim grid to display a message using a preloaded set of character textures. If you create a spreadsheet of severals instances of a script like this as text fields, you could let them touch the individual linkset of a field, and be queried to say some text, and display the text. With some communications built in you could probably extend that to do something with the spreadsheet as a whole.

You'd be surprised what you can pull off if in the SL environment you're in a nice clean lagless sim (sounds like you have one to play with) and bang your head against it long enough.

One possible solution, although not elegant by any means and not completely within SL, is to use the parcel media command to display a shared document. For example, create a google doc and share it, then use that url for the parcel media.

Each user who has access to the shared doc can edit it (outside of SL) and the edits will show up in world on the prim that has the parcel media texture (after hitting the play button again).

Like I said, not elegant but one small step closer to collaborative editing in SL.

Doug