Comments on: C:SI Weapons Breaking - A hint?

By: More Havok 4 Fun « From The Trenches…

More Havok 4 Fun « From The Trenches… — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:19:12 +0000

[…] been trying to help the C:SI folks over at Daikon Forge to puzzle over some issues they are having with their wonderful swords, however we’re […]

By: Havok 4 Regions updated with 11 fixes at Daikon Forge

Havok 4 Regions updated with 11 fixes at Daikon Forge — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 04:00:13 +0000

[…] was some additional speculation in the comments to that post, and at this point I am beginning to suspect that it’s related to setting alpha […]

By: Takuan

Takuan — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 03:44:16 +0000

Well Darien, I surely appreciate your input on this. When I finish the sword I’m working on, I’ll be sure to send you one! (of course, I seem to be taking forever to finish it, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be this month, haha)

By: Darien Caldwell

Darien Caldwell — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 03:02:30 +0000

That sounds like a possible scenario. I have products which also read notecards, and it’s not unusual for them to sometimes read bad data. I hope this leads to a solution. Have loved C:SI weapons since I was a wee newb.

By: Colin

Colin — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:27:04 +0000

If it can’t find the notecard, though, would it even get to the dataserver event to call llSetLinkAlpha? I suppose if it was corrupted instead of lost, it would go ahead and read bad link numbers.

By: Takuan

Takuan — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:24:37 +0000

Wow... It did just occur to me that most of the C:SI weapons use a notecard to define the links whose alpha is to be changed, and as I (and others) have recently discovered, it is not unusual for notecards to have suddenly become missing or corrupted. I would ask Aimee and anyone else who notices these errors to please take note of which swords have the problem. Specifically, I'm wondering if the Wave Katana also experiences this issue, because the Wave does not use notecards (it has hard-coded link numbers).

By: Takuan

Takuan — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:18:05 +0000

Oh, now that’s an interesting speculation!!!

We do in fact set alpha on a number of prims while performing the sheathing and unsheathing of a sword, and in order to reduce script counts we are doing that using llSetLinkAlpha() and relatives.

I can’t for the life of me imagine why there would *ever* be a case where we are trying to set color or alpha on a linked prim that doesn’t exist, since we never add or remove prims via script and the object’s prims are “set” once they are put up for sale, but perhaps related to lag or some other bizarre server-side behavior where the sim is not (yet?) aware of the prim whose alpha is being set? Okay, that’s probably the worst sort of voodoo speculation, but I am not sure where else to go at this point, haha.

Thanks for the comment Darien!!! It may prove to be an important clue.

By: Darien Caldwell

Darien Caldwell — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:00:21 +0000

Something just occurred to me, I have seen a Math Error like this before, when attempting to use llSetColor on a face that didn’t exist. Why this causes a Math Error, I don’t know.

If the issue is occurring when drawing the weapon, perhaps it has to do with the call to llSetAlpha and the face parameter? Or trying to set alpha on a linked prim that doesn’t exist? Some wild guesses.

By: Takuan

Takuan — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 04:09:40 +0000

And now it occurred to me that some of these problems are reported as occurring simply by drawing the sword. Um, I cannot find any instance of performing any math at all during sheathing/unsheathing the sword

By: Takuan

Takuan — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 04:08:44 +0000

Note that when I mention vector normalization in the previous comment, I am referring to llVecNorm(), llVecDist(), and relatives, rather than our own hand-coded routines.