Monthly Archive for July, 2007

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Schome Park again – a somewhat belated note

This page on Schome’s forums appeared in my referrers log yesterday. The thread is a couple of months old, but people are apparently looking at it anyway. So…

If you’re going to tell me that I’m a “stupid person” who is “so desperate for attention that they love to criticise,” in response to my “scathing attack on your work,” at least have the decency to do so where I can see it without it happening to pop up in WordPress’ stats page. You probably feel the comment is hypocritical – but the difference is, I have a space for you to leave comments. You do not. At least, not an obvious one.

If you care, the comment that annoyed me was that of being “the first” to work things out – people have worked out said things before. Without just checking the code, because the physics code remains hidden. That is all.

Also, I made a new category solely for this post.

AjaxLife

Due to some combination of boredom, wanting to talk to people in SL, and inspiration from a vague memory of something Interfect Sonic did, I decided to start work on an AJAX based SL client.

It’s still under heavy development, but the result so far is an application/page/site called AjaxLife.

Post updated for r13

Post not updated past r13. See the AjaxLife category for up-to-date information.

Features

  • Basic map
  • Teleports
  • Accepting/declining teleport offers
  • Local chat, instant messages (now fully supported)
  • Inventory received notifications
  • Friend on/offline notifications
  • Balance change notifications, etc.
  • Person search
  • Partial profile viewing

It also correctly logs you in and out, and notifies you if you were disconnected for any reason.

Known issues

  • If you’re on the TG and you zoom out too far, the top half gets chopped off.
  • Both grids can see each-other on the map. (Is that an issue?)
  • Sometimes SL sends the teleport messages in the wrong order, resulting in the modal teleport wait dialog never leaving.
  • Teleports sometimes complete without notification that they ever started.
  • IE tends to screw up with dragging the map

Obligitary snapshots
AjaxLife Snapshot 1
AjaxLife Snapshot 2

Known supported browsers

  • Firefox 1.5+
  • Safari 3 (and the latest WebKit nightly as well)

Browsers with minor issues

  • Internet Explorer 6/7 (background image tends to flicker, odd script error)
  • Opera 9 (annoying keyboard focus issues)
  • Wii Browser (works fine, but the layout is slightly off)
  • Safari 2 (Buttons are positioned all over the place)

If you want to use it, and trust that I won’t look at your password (which I can’t, and nothing that this does is logged, but you should always be careful and stuff), you can test it at https://ajaxlife.net/.

If there’s enough interest I’ll make a version that you can run on your own machine to connect to, once it’s further developed (e.g. starting IMs, profile viewing, possibly inventory management, etc.)

Please leave any comments you may have. :)