Well, it just might turn out that you’re absolutely correct.  I admit that I haven’t spent a great deal of time fighting with or against the naginata, and that may be a part of why I was unaware of the long range of the naginata’s kick.  With all of the comment’s I’ve read lately on both sides, I decided to see for myself and headed to Meiji to nab the nearest volunteer (I forget who it was now though, because Second Life has the most annoying habit of forgetting my chat log preferences and it didn’t get recorded as I expected it to).

In order to test this, I took one of the non-phys vehicles that I recently coded up, and changed the code so that I could sit on it and specify a distance and it would move precisely the distance specified from a given avatar.  This allowed me to very precisely control the distance in order to find out what was or was not in effective range, and I felt that it was more reliable than measurements taken using prim rulers or other similar methods.

So here’s what I found : I was able to be kicked at distances up to 3.8 meters by the Naginata.  Yup, more than a meter more than the Taketori and Wave.

And that brings up another interesting point, actually : I have now checked and double-checked the code on the Taketori and the Wave, and they are specifically coded to have a range of 2.5 meters, but today’s testing showed that they worked up to 2.7 meters.  Not much of a difference, perhaps, but it does indicate yet another way that Second Life doesn’t typically do what you tell it to do

I don’t feel that this was a really robust test, since it’s possible that other factors came into play.  For instance, sitting on an object changes your bounding box size to include the object being sat upon, but it shouldn’t change the center of mass that is supposedly what is actually tested for using this method, but I wouldn’t bet too much money on that since Second Life has any number of quirks that don’t exactly follow the documentation.

Also, I only performed the test on a single region and on a single day, so it’s also possible that it’s an issue with that region’s server-side simulator code that may or may not exist in previous or subsequent versions.  Again, I wouldn’t bet any significant money on that, it’s just an idea that occurred to me.

Still, at least I’ve been able to independently verify that reports of the naginata having a longer kick range are true.  Now maybe it’s supposed to be that way, I’ve never been curious enough to ask Archanox before now, but Esprite’s comment on the CombatSI forums leads me to think that it’s not supposed to be that long.

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