AjaxLife Blog

I am aware that Linden Lab have released the new search officially. As such, I will be looking into what I can do about integrating it nicely onto AjaxLife over the weekend.

I suspect my solution will involve PHP, regular expressions, and JavaScript. Although I may make this part of the executable, in order to assist those who would be trying to run AjaxLife themselves (if any are).

Edited to fix myriad typos caused by my posting this from my phone while lying in bed.

The rolling restart appears to have broken AjaxLife’s teleports. Judging by the debug log, it’s also mutilated libsecondlife in some awkward CAPS-related way. (WARNING: System.ArgumentException: Object type System.Int32 cannot be converted to target type: System.Int16)

On another note, I’d just fixed AjaxLife to work with libsecondlife version 0.3 (instead of some semi-outdated svn revision). I’m postponing pushing this out until teleports are fixed.

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.

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.

The three, in my opinion, most annoying bugs in AjaxLife have been fixed:

• AjaxLife would stop receiving messages, although you could still send them - FIXED (well, at least one cause of the bug is)
• Incoming IMs would not be shown in the IM window, but instead in a short-lived “Lost Instant Message” noticed - FIXED
• Accidentally leaving the page would cause you to leave the page without confirmation - FIXED (actually a new feature, but still really annoying)

So yay!

Lots of these recently.

Anyway, new features:

• Your balance is displayed in the upper-right corner
• You can accept/decline friendship requests
• You can offer friendship from profiles
• You can pay people through their profiles (although the dialog for entering the amount is ugly. I’m lazy :P)
• You can log onto the Beta (aditi) and OSGrid grids successfully
• You can use Dalien Talbot’s Ruth/Zion standalone sims
• It throws up a load warning when you log into non-LL grids
• Changed the login display slightly (modelled after the WindLight FirstLook login display). It also no longer displays HTTP errors on the frequent occasions on which LL’s webservers fail

Read on for screenshots…

You can now pick a grid to log into. Yay. Note that the two marked as “UNOFFICIAL” should not be used unless you know why you’re using them and what you’re doing. Also, those two still use the SL map. Also note that I couldn’t get the DeepGrid login server to respond (what URI should I be using?), and OSGrid didn’t work - login worked, but the UI didn’t load, instead throwing an odd exception.

I’m reluctant to allow arbitrary login servers, because I can imagine all sorts of ways to abuse this.

We still default to “Main Grid (Linden Lab)” - i.e. Agni.