Thursday, April 23, 2015

Introducing the Artiste "Action"


The Artiste "action" feature is an extension of the Palette "move" which  now boasts in excess of over 80 Palette features (probably a dozen more than its initial release-candidate).



 With a move you can of course move an object or avatar or both. You can animate a seated avatar, moving or not (think Palette-based dance-sequencing). You can specify a pause at the end of the move and/or animation. Well now you can also trigger an inter-palette action or intra-palette action that occurs after the pause. This means that a Palette can issue further commands to itself as well as to other Palettes.

Why is this of importance?

Because it adds infinite extensions to the Performance HUD that is now relieved from the limitations of 255 characters per autofx event to control Palettes for a given event. The HUD can trigger a Palette to do stuff including telling other Palettes what to do and they can in turn tell even more Palettes what to do, and so on, and so on ad infinitum. And with the Palettes built-in abilities to rez other Palettes themselves as well as the ability to kill themselves, you can manage prim and script resources with just-in-time Palette spawning and retirement.

Also another advantage is that the timing of when things happen can be closely married to moves and palette-based animation-sequences and this reduces the effort of having to time everything from the HUD perspective. 

There is also the advantage of creating "dependant" activity such that activity B does not begin until activity A has completed. Sort of akin to addressing SL anomalies like chat-lag.

 Simply turn control over to a Palette and let IT take control of itself and/or other Palettes via the newly vetted Palette "action". And you can even have multiple actions for a given move. You also have an optional delay time for each action allowing even more granular control of when an action triggers. And don't forget that a move has the option to 'not move' and to 'not animate' so it could be used solely to govern actions.

And if you are not aware, the Artiste move-system has the ability to perform any single move or any range-of moves from the HUD or a Palette "action", along with the common standard "do all moves", so you can easily segment and alternate a performance between dance-animations, partial-moves, and actions or combinations of the above.

A little known fact is that a Palette can issue emotes (chatas well as strip, and adorn and even manage a homemade costume change (adorns & negative adorns) as just a few of a Palettes underrated feature set.


And lest we not forget the ability to extend a logical set of activities via Sit-2-Sit.

So those who have found the need to use 2 HUDS for more involved performances can now rethink their design.  Twenty HUD events nor 255 characters per line are no longer hindrances.

The Artiste Action sets the stage as the cornerstone of the road-map towards  elongated performances akin to 1 hr+ productions.

P.S.

And I discovered that inter-palette (Palette-To-Palette) actioning are not confined the the restricted inner-list of actions since you can simply use a "move" as your primary action and use the target-palette's full set of action-availability. One extra but insignificant script-hop.

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