Amasan – Common sense 2.0

I had to create a simple script to turn a neon sign on and off. I decided to have both versions of the sign in a single texture and changing the offset with a script. Instead of using a timer and using llSetTimeout() instead I opted to pause the script for a small amount of time. The script does not respond when it’s sleeping which should be less laggy then the timeout. All i do then at the start of a state is offsetting the texture to show the on/off alternatively.

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llOffsetTexture(0.0,0.25,ALL_SIDES);
        llSleep(1.37);
        state off;
    }
}

state off
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llOffsetTexture(0.0,0.75,ALL_SIDES);
        llSleep(.723);
        state default;
    }
}

Hope this is of use to you. See the result in our Higher / Lower game at Badmoon.

Brian Wood presents an excellent Dreamweaver tips video on Youtube. Many people just use DW as a text-editor but it’s capable of a lot more even in code view. The following video might open your eyes:

Very nice.

I’d like to start recommending webservices  and software that I use frequently. Any product recommended has been evaluated for at least several weeks. In today’s recommended we feature Instapaper. (Recommendation articles are personal opinions with no benefit for the author)

What does Instapaper do? Instapaper facilitates easy reading of long text content.

We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we don’t have time to read long articles right when we find them.

Instapaper allows you to easily save them for later, when you do have time, so you don’t just forget about them or skim through them.

http://www.instapaper.com/

Interesting article regarding piracy and pc gaming:

Recently there has been a lot of talk about how piracy affects PC gaming. And if you listen to game developers, it apparently is a foregone conclusion – if a high quality PC game doesn’t sell as many copies as it should, it must be because of piracy.

Now, I don’t like piracy at all. It really bugs me when I see my game up on some torrent site just on the principle of the matter. And piracy certainly does cost sales.  But arguing that piracy is the primary factor in lower sales of well made games? I don’t think so. People who never buy software aren’t lost sales.

Is it about business or glory: http://draginol.joeuser.com/article/303512/Piracy_PC_Gaming

Should simple software be free:

During the chat, the entire MacBreak Weekly crew discussed the danger to the music industry that comes from younger listeners having a built-in expectation that music should be free.

On this episode I believe [Leo Laporte] has inadvertently helped to perpetuate the same kind of thinking about software that the panel had just finished expressing concern about with regard to music: the idea that the hard-earned fruits of somebody’s creative labor should be free.

http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/481/it-should-be-free

PowerShell is a complete replacement for any of Microsoft’s DOS or Windows command line interpreters. It is a full fledged object oriented system administration scripting language. With PowerShell knowledge you would run circles around any sysadmin that works predominantly from through the GUI, as well as be able to get Windows to do things that you just can’t do through a GUI alone.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/msh/cmdlets/index.mspx

From Eurogamer: Unangst said Microsoft would "continue to invest" in Games for Windows, which apart from giving its games an Xbox Live-style service layer with friends lists, Achievements and the like, also insists that games be easy to install, support widescreen displays and include parental controls.

It all sounds promising. The one thing I was most impressed with on Xbox 360 is the whole integration and lack of configuration for games, if they can bring that to Windows Vista then a lot of people will be very happy.

Some ideas:
You can see how they could potentially take the experience index benchmarking framework and develop that into something that can adjust games visual quality, automatic updating and applying of patching without user intervention, matchmaking and the community features could all be very useful and add value to PC gaming. Even some sort of integrated anti piracy tool developed for Microsoft that doesn’t rootkit your machine which would be less painful to consumers would also be an improvement over the current situation.