The first rule about NDA club, is that you don’t talk about NDA club. Fortunately, Pathfinding in Second Life is not in NDA club, which means I can talk about it, hurrah!
I’ve been taking a look at Pathfinding in Second Life, being able to select where my characters can walk and select whether objects can move obstacles or collide with static obstacles does not sound exciting, indeed it’s not exciting at all. However what is exciting, although it doesn’t sound it, is watching prim cubes race around your sim after you’ve engaged in a bit of setting up and scripting.
There are bugs with Pathfinding at the moment, which is no surprise as testing is only just getting extended to sim owners, we’re back into the more variables the more issues arise territory, but the support I’ve received on the issues I have had with Pathfinding, have been absolutely superb, the team behind this are extremely enthusiastic. Unfortunately I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to poke around with it, but I’m getting there.
Now, so far I’ve managed to set some paths and then with the aid of the Pathfinding LSL functions I was able to create characters and set them on patrol on my sim.
The first hurdle I ran into was getting overexcited and trying to get things working before I’d read the notes properly, yes yes Ciaran should RTFM, so I did, well a bit. The next thought was that it all looked a bit daunting, I had all objects on the sim listed, did I need to set a setting for all of these? Well the answer is no but to get my characters to patrol I needed to set some of my paths to be walkable, which is an option that you will find in the pathfinding development viewer.
The next mistake I made was not setting all the paths I wanted my characters to patrol upon as walkable, which meant that when I set my patrol points, they weren’t going on the route I expected. Once I’d corrected this, I had the sheer excitement and joy of watching a few prim cubes patrol around part of my sim and avoiding me when I stepped into their path, this may not sound exciting to you but believe you me, this was a big Eureka! moment for me with regards to some of the potential of these tools.
As it stands it’s all at an extremely early stage and it’s way too early to say how well it will work, I’ve only seen it from a sim owner point of view, it will still need to be developed to some sort of parcel level I’d imagine, but we are very early into the process, all I’ll say is that it works, I find it exciting and feel there’s a hell of a lot of potential here.
Now you may well feel that if I find prim cubes patrolling around a sim in a pre-defined path exciting, that I need to get out more, but this is how our creations excite us, when our creations, albeit with the aid of Linden Lab, work, it’s a great moment, it’s one of the things that make virtual worlds with user generate content inspiring, be it a clothing item, a script, a build, getting it to a stage where it works, or it’s ready for launch is exciting, because “I did that” is a cause for optimism, even if nobody else even sees it, it’s your creation, that’s the joy of user generated content and what makes virtual worlds so bloody marvellous.
Now it’s time to calm myself down with a beer! Hurrah!
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