Second Life Combat User Group: June 13th, 2024 summary

The following notes were taken from the Thursday, June 13th, 2024 Combat User Group meeting. They form a summary of the core items discussed and responded to by Lindens, and are not intended to be a full transcript.

Meeting Overview

• The Combat User Group exists as a forum to discuss improvements to the Linden Lab Combat System or LLCS to better support combat in Second Life.
  • The core idea is to provide additional events and capabilities which sit on top of LLCS to provide combat creators with better tools with which to create better combat systems for their specific scenarios.
  • It is not intended to be a complete combat system in and of itself.
• The meetings are the result of a proposal document on improving the native damage system in SL, written by Rider Linden, and which is the focus for both the meeting and any work arising from them.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • By Rider Linden, with the support of Kyle Linden.
  • On alternating Thursdays (rotating with the Content Creation User Group) at 13:00 SLT. Meeting dates are recorded in the Second Life Public Calendar and at this location.
  • In local chat.
• Discussion topics, requests, etc., can be found on the SL Feedback Portal Combat Board.
• Additional details are available via the SL wiki Combat2 page.

Work In Progress

• The current iteration of Combat 2.0 support on the server-side is due to be included in the Summer Fun simulator update, which is looking to be deployed some time after SL21B.
  • Those wishing to test the system can do so on Aditi on regions Gallipoli and Thermopylae.
  • Issues / feedback should be reported via the Support Portal Combat Board.
  • As noted in my previous update, this will very much be a release to find out exactly what works and what doesn’t for the Combat community/ies in Second Life and will be iterated upon going forward.
• Rider is looking at avatar rotation / aiming and improving llRotateAvatar, but as the former are controller viewer-side and the later in simulator-side, is making this is proving to be an issue.
• Rider has also been looking at improving hit boxes / hit box adjustments. However, this work is liable to be in follow-on updates to the initial release.

Comments and Requests

• There was further request for Linden Lab to adopt the first-person shooter improvements found in the Black Dragon viewer. However:
  • As noted in my previous summary, this can only be done if Black Dragon’s develop provides the code to Linden Lab as a code contribution / code pull request, indication LL can consider / adopt the code.
  • The developer has indicated he can do this, but he might require time to do so for various reasons, including the fact it will probably need a lot more fine tuning and bug fixes.
• The the above led to a discussion of using some form of IK update or scripted attachment added to hand-held weapons which could act as an animation targets for moving avatar hands to grips, magazines, etc. Some sample weapons have been put out on the combat regions on Aditi, and some sample scripts will be added to the SL wiki Combat Page to allow people to play with this idea.
• As noted in my last summary, there has been a request made to add a “fast” parameter to llRezObjectWithParams to allow objects to rez at a reduced delay to allow things like higher rates of fire for some weapons without the need for additional rez nodes.
  • There is a potential griefing vector with this idea, so it was suggested that the parameter could be managed at region owner / estate level (e.g. so only enabled where specifically required).
  • At this meeting, Rider noted that implementing it would be a non-trivial task, because script delays are built into the function definition in the virtual machine, and so would require considerable update.
  • He also noted that even with an estate level control to counter issues of griefing on region that do not need it, such a parameter could result in the simulator’s rez queue being swamped by requests. However, it was suggested that this would be avoided because rezzers with too high a request rate would hit the grey goo fence.
• There was a general discussion on llSensor and searching damageable types, with Rider noting the DAMAGE parameter searches for objects that either process on_damage, final_damage or have a health value, and when used, should combine both ACTIVE and PASSIVE, as it filters results.
• In terms of damage, Rider noted that negative damage should be unthrottled and not trigger the region damage cap or contribute to the individual call throttle.
• It was suggested that as a well as damage controls, there should be healing controls as well (e.g. a healing toggle and healing throttle) so as to prevent people making themselves “immortal”. However, it was noted:
  • It would be easier just to reduce all damage to 0, not matter what hits the avatar.
  • Either way, people abusing the system like this would show up clearly in the combat log, with combat region owners to potentially write a monitoring relay that will teleport anyone cheating in such a manner to be teleported home with a warning.
• During the previous meeting it was asked if the former combat-enabled regions on the old Teen Grid – Lexington, Concord and No Man’s Land – could be brought back.
  • During that meeting, Madori Linden was able to bring back Lexington and Concord, but scripts on both were turned off – as of this meeting, scripts on both regions should be enabled.
  • It is proving difficult to recover No Mans Land, due to the lack of a good archived simstate.
  • A further request has been made to relocate Concord and Lexington to the Combat Sandbox red team and blue team regions, and make both combat sandboxes.