Linden Labs has been working hard at creating a new technology over the past few months known as Pathfinding, which will allow residents to create smoothly moving objects in SL that can flee, pursue, patrol, wander or go to a specified point on a sim. Staff members Lorca Linden and Stinson Linden provide a sneak peek at pathfinding in the video above. The modifications will be included in a new future upgrade to Linden Scripting Language.
Imagine the potential of using pathfinding to bring dynamic life to your own creations in Second Life!
- Avacar
This is very interesting technology but exactly where will it be used in Second Life? Much of Second Life’s mainland is extremely ugly, being comprised of haphazard construction and vacant parcels — most private estates and skyboxes are simply too small to utilize a technology like this. And why is this that interesting? I am reminded of those vacuum cleaners that you buy to sweep your house when you are not home, and scare your pet cat or dog in the process.
How much more lag is going to be introduced in viewers to make this cool technology work? How much stress will it put on servers?
I would much rather see Linden Lab figure out ways to cut the price of land, or put more prims on a parcel, or make Second Life more graphically rich without resorting to the extreme complexities of mesh than spend time on technology such as this so we can have rats and snakes in our skyboxes that run around and do not run into walls.
When I first read this on the SL site, I thought to myself – “OK now what are they doing?” Once I took a look at the video, I also wondered how useful this is to the SL experience. I hope there is more to this than what is presented in the video, but I am guessing that it’s a waste of code time. Maybe it has other gaming applications that we have yet to see. LL always seems to have scattered ideas and always fail at offering anything concrete and more focused. I still think there are already plenty of things that they could be doing to improve the user experience without spending time creating new “pet projects”
Bravo! I can hardly wait! Snakes under my bed???
How about:
1. Lag-less sim crossings?
2. Honest to goodness zoning rules on the mainland to kill the rampant blight?
3. The ability to purchase a homestead sim without first purchasing a $$$ full sim $$$?
My computers are already straining under the ever increasingly heavy code.
Look out for the rats! They may indeed be worse than computer bugs.
im impressed they can now script an object to climb spiral staircase, coz i as an avatar cant