Like this:

This week’s post is a little early, since I am taking a much needed break from trying to decipher the absolutely atrocious iPhone programming documentation that Apple defrauds their development community with, and needed to get to some software which makes some modicum of sense for a while.  And I thought Microsoft put out some bad documentation!

OpenSim has a problem which I hope will soon be fixed.  When an avatar tries to sit on somthing, it ends up sitting in the middle of it.  Take a look at Ingemar as he tries to sit on this park bench.

Turns out that there is a workaround for this, which amounts to putting a transparent box on a chair, or in this case a park bench, and letting the avatar sit on that.  Below you can see how this park bench has been modified by the addition of three such boxes set next to each other.  They are made partially visible so you can see their placement, although in practice the transparency of each would be set at 100% in the edit dialog.

The boxes are made this big so that when they are completely invisible, and you try to sit your avatar on the park bench seat, you can’t help right clicking on an invisible box instead.  Ingemar is sitting inside the box, but once the box is made invisible, it looks as though he is actually sitting normally on the park bench.  Now there will be three seating positions on the bench and three avatars can sit side by side.

One other thing, though.  If you use this approach, you will have to rotate the boxes to make the avatar sit properly.  In edit, rotate a box so that the red position arrow points in the direction you want the avatar to face when sitting.  If you were to edit one of these boxes, and select Position in the edit dialog, you would see the red position arror facing out, the direction Ingemar is facing.

This fix is not without its problems however.  When you select “Stand Up”, the avatar will leap high into the air and come down somewhere in the vecinity of the park bench.  That will have to do until our friends at the OpenSim Project get around to this little problem.  You will be able to tell when they do, because all of a sudden avatars will all be hovering over the chairs instead of sitting in them, because they will then be sitting properly on the invisible boxes.  When that happens, just delete the boxes.

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