AjaxLife Blog

New AjaxLife features and fixes. Yay.

New features:

• Minimap display – shows a heightmap of your surroundings, plus marks positions of everyone in the sim in the same way as LL’s minimap.
• Your position in the top-left corner – because it’s helpful to know where you are. Also, this one is better about updating if you’re involuntarily moved.

Bugfixes:

• Teleporting to a position no longer consistently fails.

Known issues

• The minimap displays you twice – once as a yellow indicator and once as a green dot.
• You rotate on the spot.
• Logging into the Havok4 beta fails unless you have recently done so using an official LL client.
• The minimap doesn’t work in Internet Explorer – and it never will, given IE doesn’t support the canvas tag.
• The minimap is completely useless at higher altitudes.
• The minimap doesn’t display the whole sim unless you teleport around it. It should display everywhere in your vicinity, however.

Also, if the minimap is causing problems for anyone, please let me know! In testing it didn’t have any performance impact, but…

UPDATE: Fixed some potential issues in IE. Also, attached a screenshot I intended to attach but forgot.

UPDATE 2: Fixed a bug causing the map to be offset by 16 pixels metres.

AjaxLife teleports appear to be failing, and have probably been doing so for weeks – sorry!

I found the bug, and it will be fixed in the next update, which should be today.

Here’s a second attempt at rendering a minimap using the <canvas> tag:

However, rendering this takes my computer a good 1.5 seconds, during which the browser hangs – too long to be practical in an interactive web app with impatient users. :p

This one takes under a second, and is thus more likely to make it into AjaxLife:

Both of those are, however, a significant improvement over the last attempt:

Note that this one was erroneously rotated and flipped.

Of course, the minimap built into SL is significantly better than all of the above. But hey! :p

Playing with the HTML <canvas> tag:

This is a test of rendering a sim map inside AjaxLife using JavaScript. The green markers are people – it does the same same above/below/level thing as the client. The whole thing takes a split second to render on my MacBook. I imagine it’d take longer if I included the missing points (that’s being done at a 64×64 resolution).

Not exactly great, is it? Better than nothing though – still working on it. Anyone happen to know how the client puts the sim images together?

On an unrelated note, I’ll be returning from abroad tomorrow.

I have made a couple of improvements to AjaxLife:

• It now runs in Internet Explorer – mostly. Due to speed issues some of the fancy UI stuff was disabled. The same effects are disabled on the Wii. Additionally the stats window refused to render in IE, so I was lazy and disabled it in IE.
• Scripts now have syntax highlighting. Woo!

Hooray for updates. Please note that loading inventory is not recommended in IE – it will tend to make it hang for a length of time proportional to the number of items in your inventory – but a folder with more than about five items will have a noticeable delay. I gave up waiting and forcibly terminated it when I opened my textures folder.

UPDATE:

Screenshot:
[Screenshot lost due to WordPress failing]

Also, note that if you click a function, event or type, a new window will open containing the relevant SL Wiki page. (note the status bar in the screenshot. Also note that it capitalises the first letter, as it should for the wiki).

Oh, and I gave the post a title. “Post #124″ just wasn’t doing it.

AjaxLife has had a slew of new features added today:

• Inventory browsing
• Viewing of notecards, scripts and textures
• Teleporting to landmarks in your inventory
• Doesn’t Ruth any more, generally speaking.
• Region stats window
• Nearby avatars window
• Offering teleports via profiles
• MobileSafari (iPhone/iPod touch) gets a different login screen. Unfortunately, the login button on said screen isn’t implemented yet, so it doesn’t do much.

Here’s a nice, very crowded screenshot showing many of these things at once:

NOTE: It is highly unlikely this will work in IE6, and it may not work in IE7 either. However, I’m too tired to chase down browsers that don’t deserve to exist.

UPDATE: Fixed as of 15/10/2007.

AjaxLife is currently not functioning correctly in Internet Explorer 6 – it may throw assorted bits of debug spam when loading, and won’t open profiles.

I’ll look into this when I get the chance.