Building A Second Life Checkers Game #9

I've finished the tic-tac-toe game. It works and I've played it a couple of times with people. Probably a few more bugs and I could make it look a little nicer as well, but overall the goal is complete, I built a two player table top game. I'm trying to figure out if I'm going to go back and finish the checkers game. I don't think I will because there doesn't seem to be a lot of value in it. I would like to be more innovative than that and make a new game that is only available virtually. Something completely new. I started on and I'll have a screen shot of that tomorrow, but it doesn't have any mechanics besides something in my head. When making video games I typically just get a mechanic working then tweak it until some sort of game forms. So, after 9 posts I feel like I may have mislead you into thinking we would have a checkers game and here we end up with a lot less, except for the knowledge that it is possible and I have most of the functional code required to do it. Anyway, I'll keep digging until I have something more. If you want a copy of the tic-tac-toe game, send me and e-mail or find me in SL: Wood Wheels.


One thing I don't think that shows here is that the green triangles point in the direction of the player who's move it is. When the player makes a move I change the rotation of all the green triangles like this.

    RotateBtns(integer xoro)
    {
        integer itmp;
        integer btnnum=0;
        integer btnlinknum;
        integer pos = 0;
        rotation rot;
        if (xoro==1)
        {
            rot = rot0;
        }
        else
        {
            rot = rot180;
        }
        
        for (;pos<9;pos++)
        {
            itmp = llList2Integer(btnpositions,pos);
            if (itmp>=0)
            {
                llSetLinkPrimitiveParams(itmp,[PRIM_ROTATION,rot]);   
            }
        }

    } 

This may look pretty simple, but it has a trick. I originally tried to just rotate 180 around the z axis, but as I should have known before I started this would not work as rotations are cumulative and coming up with a rotation axis is not trivial piece of math. Quaternians are simply a vector associated with a rotation angle around that vector. They can be hard to calculate programatically.

The solution? Find the two rotation angles at build time and use them as static values.

            vector eul = <0,77,0>; //0 degrees around the z-axis, in Euler form
            eul *= DEG_TO_RAD; //convert to radians
            rot0 = llEuler2Rot(eul); //convert to quaternion
            eul = <3.9,283.0,184.45>; //180 degrees around the z-axis, in Euler form
            eul *= DEG_TO_RAD; //convert to radians
            rot180 = llEuler2Rot(eul); //convert to quaternion

Cheating I know, but most programming is about getting something to work, even though it might not be the most elegant solution. At least that is how I work. Why not the elegant solution you ask? One takes hours and hours and one just a few minutes and schedule is usually the most important element of all. Also, if it really needs to be elegant, it is better to get it working and come back in later if it really needs it.