User’s Guide: Picture Display - Hinged Top - Walnut Fleur
Scope of this Guide
This User’s Guide is for the “Picture Display - Hinged Top - Walnut Fleur” (all five Control Types). For simplicity, I’ll often call it the “Display” in the rest of this guide.
Unpacking the Display
You should have an object named “Container: Picture Display - Hinged Top - Walnut Fleur”. It should be in your Inventory in the “Objects” folder. Click and drag it onto land where you have permission to build and run scripts.
It should give you a folder named “Picture Display - Hinged Top - Walnut Fleur”. That folder should contain five displays, each with a different Control Type (CT):
CT1 - Only the owner can open or close the cover by clicking on it.
CT2 - Anyone can open or close the cover by clicking on it.
CT3 - Anyone can open or close the cover by clicking on it. If left open, the cover will automatically close after 2 minutes.
CT4 - Automatic slideshow. The cover closes and opens for each new picture. The length of time that each picture gets shown can be configured.
CT5 - Anyone (or any scripted object) can open the cover by saying “/5 open”. Anyone can close the cover by saying “/5 close”. The control channel number (the 5) can be configured.
Setup Instructions
1. Rez the Display
Pick the Control Type (CT) you want to use. Find it in your Inventory (in the new folder named “Picture Display - Hinged Top - Walnut Fleur”) and drag it from there into the world. It should appear inworld (assuming you are on land where you have the ability to build).
2. Move and rotate it into position
Right-click the display inworld and then select “Edit” from the pie menu. The Edit window should appear. Click and drag the colored arrows to move it into position. To adjust the rotation, click the word “Rotate” near the top left corner of the edit window, then click and drag the colored circles to rotate the display to the desired rotation.
You can set the position and rotation exactly by clicking on the “Object” tab in the Edit window and entering numerical values for the position and rotaiton.
3. Put your pictures in the display’s inventory
Your pictures (textures or photos) will be shown in the alphanumeric order of their names (looping back to the first one when it reaches the end). For this reason, you may want to rename your pictures something like:
01 Sally’s birthday
02 At the zoo
03 At the zoo 2
04 Jack the dog
To rename a picture, find it in your inventory, right-click on it, then select “Rename” from the popup menu. Then enter the new name and press Enter.
Before putting your pictures in the Display’s contents, you should remove the demo pictures in the contents already. To do that, edit the Display, click on the “Content” tab in the Edit window, right-click on a demo picture in the list of contents, and select “Delete” from the popup menu. Repeat that for all demo pictures.
To put your pictures in the Display’s contents, open your inventory and find the pictures you want to display. Click and drag them from your inventory to the contents of the display (to the Content section of the Edit window).
4. Click the display twice to rez the cover
To rez the cover, click the display twice within 5 seconds. (I made it so you have to click the display twice because it’s easy to accidentally click it once before you’re ready. If you do click the display accidentally, then just wait 6 seconds and it will forget.)
5. Opening and closing the cover
The way you open and close the cover depends on the Control Type (CT) — see the beginning of this User’s Guide for the list of control types.
Configuring Your Display
CT1, CT2, and CT3 don’t have any configuration options.
CT4 and CT5 can be configured by saying something on channel 1 (e.g. “/1 something”). Please note that all Displays within 20 meters of your avatar will hear your command. That can be good if you want to send the same command to multiple displays, but it can be bad if you only want to configure one display among several. To configure just one display, move it somewhere that’s more than 20 meters from all other displays (e.g. up in the sky), say your command there, then move the display back into position. (You really only need to move the cover. Note its (x,y,z) position before moving it, then return it to that position when you’re done.)
CT4 - Automatic slideshow. The cover closes and opens for each new picture. The owner can change how long each picture gets shown by saying something like “/1 12” (to change the open duration to 12 seconds) or “/1 23” (to change the open duration to 23 seconds).
CT5 - Anyone (or any scripted object) can open the cover by saying “/5 open”. Anyone can close the cover by saying “/5 close”. The 5 is the control channel. The owner can change the control channel from 5 to a different number newchannel by saying “/1 newchannel”. For example, to change the control channel to 16, the owner would say “/1 16”. Then anyone would be able to open the cover by saying “/16 open”.
If you’re using control type 5 (CT5), then you probably don’t want to tell others what the control channel is, because they could use it to open or close the picture cover when you don’t want them to do so. For this reason, it’s a good idea to change the control channel from the default value of 5 to some other (secret) value. If you have several picture displays in the same area, you may want them to have separate channels (unless you want them to open and close at the same time).
If you’re scripter or programmer, you can open and close the Display using an external script. To open the display via an external script, use:
llSay(control_channel, “open”);
and to close the display via an external script, use:
llSay(control_channel, “close”);
where control_channel has a default value of 5 but can be changed using “/1 new_control_channel” as described above.
Technical Specs
- The display object has 3 prims (including the hinge bracket) and the cover has 5 prims (including the hinge), for a grand total of 8 prims.
- Permissions: The display and cover objects are modify/copy/no-trans and the scripts are no-modify/copy/no-trans.
- When the cover opens, it swings smoothly through an angle of 135 degrees.
- The part of the display that shows the pictures is 2.5 meters by 1.876 meters so the Display works best for showing pictures with a 4:3 aspect ratio, a very common aspect ratio.
Notes
You can add or remove pictures from the Display’s contents at any time, even after the cover has been rezzed, even during an automatic slideshow. When you do, the pictures will reset to first picture. Be careful not to put the pictures in the cover’s contents by mistake. The cover won’t know what to do with them.
You can resize the Display to be bigger or smaller. To do that, edit the cover object, then hold down the SHIFT key and click on the display object so that both the display object and the cover object are selected. Then in the Edit window, click “Stretch” in the top left corner. Now you can click and drag the little gray cubes at the corners to make it larger or smaller.
You can also edit the textures and colors on the Display. Just edit them like usual; you have modify permissions.
If you want to move or rotate your picture display after you’ve rezzed the cover, just delete the cover, take the picture display into your inventory, rez it inworld again, move and rotate the display to your liking, then click it twice within 5 seconds to rez a new cover.
You should not change the Description of the cover because if you do, the scripts may stop working properly. (The scripts use the cover’s Description as a way to store information so that it doesn’t get lost if the scripts get reset or if the sim crashes.)
Even when the cover is closed, the pictures will be pre-loaded into visitors’ texture cache, so they’ll rarely see grey or blurry pictures.
If the sim crashes or the scripts get reset, the picture cover remembers its state (open or closed) because it’s stored in the cover’s Description, which isn’t affected by sim crashes or script resets.
If you have multiple Displays rezzed in the same area, there will never be any problems with one display affecting another. There’s no cross-talk between Displays.