I have been working on a “Magic Bullet System” that allows projectile weapons to be set up to work in regions where rezzing is not allowed. Traditional weapons in SL worked by rezzing a bullet object every time you pulled the trigger. In order to allow your visitors to use these weapons, you had to allow rezzing and this opens your land up to griefing. In my new system, weapons use the llCastRay LSL call to find targets, and send messages to “effects” prims. The effects prims can be rezzed beforehand by the landowner. There can be any number of different type of effects: A bullet effect will make noise and a puff of particles when it “hits” something. An arrow effect will appear in the location where an arrow should strike. A laser effect draws a red line in the air with an explosion at one end. A snowball effect creates a puff of snowflakes where a snowball is tossed.
My “Snowball Tosser” is actually one of these new “weapons”. I have upgraded my huntable animals, archery targets, bows and arrows to use this new system. I added a “Wooden Bow Giver” to the Marketplace that hands out demo versions of the bows. The demo version is full-featured, but only works in the world where it was given. More weapons will be available soon.
Try out the demo bows and arrows at my archery range at [url]hop://grid.kitely.com:8002/Panthalassa/489/487/31[/url]
Watch the demo video at:
http://youtu.be/00gKzgLkyNk and watch Hunting and Killing at:
http://youtu.be/-BJ2iqE9Ex8
A side effect of this system is that physics is no longer necessary to use projectile weapons. And you know how much I love working out ways to do things without physics! There is a downside however. There are several bugs in Open Simulator that make this less effective than it could be:
1. The direction of the cursor in mouse-look-mode is not reported correctly, making accurate aiming impossible.
2. Objects that are rotated create large invisible volumes around them that block projectile weapons.
3. Some phantom prims, like the leaves on trees, can also block this type of projectile weapons.
4. In Kitely Advanced Mega Regions, projectiles cannot see the terrain outside of the southwest sub-region.
I have submitted bug reports for all of these problems, but it will take a while for them to be addressed.
These bugs are so bad that I almost decided not to offer these products on OpenSim. However, in relatively clear regions it is still possible to have a great deal of fun. So I am releasing these now for casual use and hoping for bug fixes in the future.
