A dialog allows you to change the size of the Ichthyosaur and switch between different modes. This dinosaur can be set to ignore, avoid, chase, harass or attack avatars. After an attack, your avatar will bleed in the water!
The Ichthyosaur has several modes to control where it is allowed to swim. It will stay inside your parcel, turning away from the edges. (This is useful for corralling an ichthyosaur in a small area). If you allow, it can cross over into any parcel on your sim that has “friendly” permissions. You can give it permission to go anywhere in a region (even a var region), cross SIM boundaries, only with a rider, or into a list of safe SIMs you provide.
If you have a water-themed environment set up around your skybox, you can release an Ichthyosaur up there. It will assume the prim it was rezzed on is the water level, or you can set the water level precisely with an Ocean Engineering “SkyWater” prim.
The Ichthyosaur is made from 5 custom designed sculpts that connect and rotate at the joints to create realistic looking swimming motion. This allows an incredibly low prim count of only 6! (The 6th prim is a special “blood” prim that makes the struck avatar bleed even as the ichthyosaur swims away.
I have Ichthyosaurs swimming around my Ocean Engineering regions. To find links to several of my demo locations go to my blog.
First set your Point Of View (POV) until you are looking where you want:
Alt-Right-Arrow will rotate your POV right (counter clockwise) around your avatar.
Alt-Left-Arrow will rotate the POV left around your avatar.
Rolling the mouse-wheel will zoom closer or farther from your avatar.
Then for controlling the direction:
Turn-left or left-arrow-key turns the Ichthyosaur to the left.
Turn-right or right-arrow-key turns the Ichthyosaur to the right.
Move-forward or up-arrow-key causes the Ichthyosaur to pitch down.
Move-backward or down-arrow-key causes the Ichthyosaur to pitch up.
(This sounds backwards, but it is intended to feel like pushing the stick forward/backward on an airplane joystick).
The Ichthyosaur is normally a phantom object and can swim through obstacles in its path. When you are riding it, the same thing is true for you and you can swim through other objects. This is a fundamental limit of Open Simulator so you should use good RP skills, try to avoid destroying the illusion and try to avoid swimming through solid objects.
HELP | Pressing this button brings up the "go to link" dialog that brings you back to this WEB page to help you use your critter. |
DONE | Every time you change anything in the dialog, it pops back up to show you the new mode. When all the modes are set the way you want, press DONE to dismiss the menu the last time. |
MORE/MAIN | The ichthyosaur has so many commands that they didn't all fit into one dialog! To get to some of these buttons, you must hit the MORE button to see more of them, then the MAIN button to return to the main dialog. |
IGNORE/AVOID CHASE/HARASS ATTACK |
One button cycles through 5 different avatar behaviors. Pressing on the button cycles the Ichthyosaur to the next mode then the dialog re-draws. If you want to get from IGNORE mode to ATTACK mode, for example, you will have to press the button 4 times, waiting for the dialog to come back each time. Here is what each avatar mode means: |
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IGNORE | The Ichthyosaur will ignore avatars as if they were not there. |
AVOID | The Ichthyosaur will turn away from avatars. |
CHASE | The Ichthyosaur will turn towards nearby avatars, follow and swim circles around them. |
HARASS | the Ichthyosaur turns towards avatars, follows them and if it gets close enough, it bumps avatars and pushes them around. |
ATTACK | In this mode the Ichthyosaur will turn towards avatars, follow them and if close enough the ichthyosaur will bite the avatar and swim away, leaving you in a spreading cloud of blood in the water. |
UN/LOCKED | Normally only the owner of the ichthyosaur can stop it, bring up the menu and change these parameters. When unlocked, anyone can bring up the menu and control it. This will allow your friends to play with the parameters of the ichthyosaur. For example, most people prefer to turn CURVED mode off while riding. Note, only the owner can lock or unlock it. |
PARCEL/REGION SAFE SIMS/GRID |
One button in the dialog cycles between FOUR modes. The current mode is displayed on the button, click it to change to the next one in sequence. Here is what each mode means: |
PARCEL | In this mode the critter will stay inside the boundaries of the parcel that it is currently in. This is a great way to create an aquarium to keep your Ichthyosaur in check. |
REGION | The critter swims anywhere in the current region, even a var region. It will avoid parcels that have NO OBJECT ENTRY or NO SCRIPTS set in them. |
SAFE SIMs | The critter swims across borders into a list of regions known to be safe. See the section below about setting this up. |
GRID | Only while you are riding, the critter is allowed to cross any border. It is up to you, the pilot to know where it is safe to cross. |
SIZE -5/-1/+1/+5 | Pressing these buttons changes the size of the Ichthyosaur by the amount shown. You can change the size up to 60 meters long thanks to the new prim linking and size limits. However a creature that large requires a lot of room to move, and moves slowly. The Ichthyosaur was designed to work best at a size of around 10 meters long. |
RADIUS -1/+1 | In skybox mode, the Ichthyosaur does not have the edges of the water to tell it where to swim. Instead, it will swim in a circle around the place where it was rezzed. You can set the size of that circle with these radius buttons. |
DEPTH -1/+1 | In skybox mode, the Ichthyosaur does not have the ground on the bottom of the water to tell it where to swim. Instead it uses this depth parameter to tell it when to turn back up. This is the depth below the water, so if you have several SkyWater levels, the depth will be a different region height under each skywater. |
STOPPED/SWIMMING | This single button can stop the ichthyosaur in her tracks then start her back up again. On some grids, you cannot edit a moving object, so this button allows you to stop the ichthyosaur, move her and use the dialog without having her swim off and escape from you. |
TRANS ON/OFF | One button cycles between TRANS ON and TRANS OFF. This is a transponder that allows you to find the ichthyosaur when she wanders off and gets lost. When you put the ichthyosaur in SAFE SIMS mode and let her swim in the Discovery Grid Oceans, she can wander kilometers away. The transponder reports her position to the WEB site http://magic.kayaker.net/locator/. To see your private transponder reports or mark transponders as public so your friends can track them, you will need to log on with a password. The ichthyosaur tells you your password the first time you turn the transponder on. But if you don't notice or forget your password, come see me to get a test version of the “Hotspot Reporter” prim which can reset your password. |
In “SAFE SIMS” mode, the critter will autonomously cross into a SIM that is on the list. You can replace this list using the “Safe SIMs Remote” that came with your critter. Wear the remote on your right hand when you want to change the safe SIMs list. Inside the remote is a NC named “SafeSIMs”. You edit this NC to contain a list of safe places to go, then click on the remote to send them to the critter.
The SafeSIMs NC has a specific format with the following requirements:
If the first line in the note-card says 'reset', (highly recommended) the board will forget the previous list and start a new one. You will probably always want to do this.
The rest of the lines contain the co-ordintes of SIMs you want added to the safe SIMs list. Each sim is listed on a separate line in the NC in 'vector format' with the value you would get from calling llGetRegionCorner() and dividing the result by 256. For example the InWorldz Desert Island is at <1000,1000,0>.
How do you find out what the co-ordinates are for each SIM you want to list? The remote can tell you! Just wear the remote on your hand and fly into each region. It will IM you the numbers in local chat. You can cut the numbers out of there and paste them into the SafeSIMs NC. The NC comes with a sample list of SIMs. You should use that as an example but delete those and replace them with your own. Once you have edited your list, make sure you save the note-card, hold the remote near the critter, and left-click the remote. The center of the critter must be within 10 meters of the remote for this to work, and you will know it is working because the critter will report the co-ordinates to chat as it receives them. You can save that critter back into inventory with this list and it will remember it the next time it is rezzed. Caution: if you rez several critters, and they are within 10 meters of the remote when you click it, they will all get the same list. Below is an example that resets (removes all the default safe SIMs) and adds just 6 SIMs back in.reset <976, 999, 0> <976, 1000, 0> <977, 999, 0> <977, 998, 0> <976, 998, 0> <976, 997, 0>