Throwing Stones II

Written 15 July, 2008

Throwing Stones II

For nearly a month now Pele has been tossing boulders about. She fires them whenever she erupts. They arc through the air in every direction, smoking. Some fall back into the lava pool, some roll down the sides of the mountain, and some fly high and splash into the lagoon. Even when she’s idle, Pele will toss boulders every fifteen minutes on the average, just to keep everybody on their toes.

/me has learned how to work the LSL’s random function!

I have six emitters scripts hidden in the lava pool. Each emitter contains four different hot rocks. When the Pele eruption script wants rocks, it talks to the emitters, telling them which rock to fire. The emitters then fire the selected rocks at random (within limits) velocities. Each emitter faces a different direction, so the rocks fly pretty much everywhere.

I could have randomized the direction of the emitters, but pointing the emitting prims in the directions I wanted seemed to work better.

It’s awesome to watch Pele throw her rocks. They leave smoke trails, and if one happens to fly or bounce by you, you can hear it hiss. Occasionally, a flying rock will hit somebody. My neighbor Leaf Shermer was peacefully paddling by the base of the mountain and a boulder landed in the canoe with her, sinking it. She loved it. Or so she says. Probably, it’s more fun to think back on it than it was when it actually happened.

What’s most fun, though, is to put on the rock thrower HUD I made. It has six rows of four-lava-textured buttons; touching a button tells a specific emitter to toss a specific rock. The intensity of the launch is up to the emitter.

With the HUD I can launch rocks from anywhere in the sim, and I can make a veritable deluge of boulders by pressing a button I marked with an exclamation point. It’s especially fun to toss rocks in the direction of visiting avatars.

I’ve not put the HUD out as a freebie, but anyone who IMs me is welcome to one. The HUDS operate within 96 meters of the lava pool.