Modifying the AO

Written 20 July, 2010

Modifying the AO

I have a pogo stick, a stunt bike, a little Hopa ball I like to bounce around on, and of course my horse that won't work unless I turn off my AO and detach my supplementary sexy walk.

That supplementary walk is necessary, for who wants to do the newbie waddle every time they turn off their animation overrider? Linden Lab would do us all a favor if they would give us a reasonable default walk. Of course, then how could we identify the noobs?

Speaking of noobs, here's an interchange from me and Sweetie. It occurred while we were in a store in Caledon and I chanced upon an AFK zero-day-old avatar.

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Chey: Look, hon. Someone has abandoned a perfectly good newbie!

Chey: Can I keep him?

Sweetie: Sad when that happens...

Sweetie: He's practically in mint condition,

Sweetie: If he were only still in the box we could sell him for a fortune ;)

Chey: He would be a collector's item!

Sweetie: We could turn him over and see if his foot still has the bar code on it.

Chey: I guess we should pin a note to him for whoever finds him.

Chey: Lost and without a home. Please adopt me.

Chey: Maybe best we leave him for the authorities.

Sweetie: Welcome to SL, Mikey :) Don't mind our fun role playing with you. In fact, I have to say you did a fabulous job :)

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But back to the AO.

Somewhere I found a free hugger (one full perm hug anim and two full perm scripts) and a sexy walk (one full perm script and one full perm animation. I dropped them in my AO and had a handy hugger and a handy supplementary sexy walk while freeing up two attachment points. But when I turned my AO off the supplementary walk peristed, messing up my horse and other wearable vehicles.

So yesterday I pulled my AO to the ground and added a third prim to it. I shaped and rotated it and applied to its face a texture I made in the free photo manipulation program GIMP (a W in a suitable font). I dropped the hugger script and anim in it and also the sexy walk and its script.

Then I opened the walk script. It was a bit complicated, so I made a new script that, upon touch of the prim, turned the walk script on and off, disabling and reenabling the supplementary walk. I added lines to make it change colors (green on, gray off; I found the exact colors in the AO script.

So now I had a third button on my AO that turned my supplentary walk on and off.

I keep the supplementary walk on so I won't waddle when I turn off the AO, but when I want to wear a vehicle I need only click the walk button to disable it.

I was congratulating myself all over the place until I relogged and found the HUD prims out of alignment.

Grrrr! I hate when that happens.

I realized the script in the AO positioned the prims based on their size, and the reason for the alignment problem was I had halved the sizes of the buttons (I made them partially transparent in the process). I poked around the AO and changed the offset for the prim that was in the wrong location, experimenting until I found the correct axis and then concentrating on getting the offset just right. I moved the prim completely off my screen a couple of times, but finally got it right.

And now I'm congratulating myself all over the place again.