The Rifle Drill HUD (instructions)

The Rifle Drill HUD

First off my usual disclaimer, I’m completely in love with the “sound of my own voice” so I tend to be wordy and ramble when I’m writing these things. Of course I find it charming and witty, but on the slim chance that you’re just interested I how to make this thing work, simply scroll on down to the section labeled “Using the Rifle Drill HUD”.

Next let me deal with credits and legal stuff.

The Rifle Drill HUD, associated LSL scripts and animations are all the work of Ilsa Munro who can frequently be found at Madgirl Munro.

The original idea for the Rifle Drill HUD, as well as the built in Long Musket came from Comrade Lednev.

The drawings and information on rifle drills came from the “British Army’s Drill for the Long Rifle” which to the best of my ability to determine is in the public domain.

The rifle sound effect came from the free sound library at freesound.iua.upf.edu

Special thanks to Carricre Wind whose open source attachment script in addition to being brilliant was the inspiration for the scripts which move the rifle. You can find her script at her shop Caveat Emporium.

All copyrights are the property of the listed owners.

Okay, enough of that, on with the show.

I should start by explaining exactly what the RDH is. Do you remember the movie “Stripes” with Bill Murray and John Candy? In it there’s a scene where they’re putting on a display for a visiting general. What they’re doing in that scene is a rifle drill, also known as a manual of arms. The drills date back in one form or another to the 1760s when it became necessary to develop a way to teach large groups of heavily armed men how to work together to bayonet, trample, or shoot the enemy without bayoneting, trampling or shooting each other.

These drills were collected together into books which were called “Manuals of Arms” and have been in use in one form or another since then. In fact “Manual of Arms” is another term for the rifle drill itself – the act of doing the drill I mean, not just reading the book.

Pretty cool that I know all this huh? This is easily my most researched SL project, which of course leads to the obvious question, just how the heck did I go from animated witches broomsticks to this?

Please, I’m the queen of “oh look, shiny!” (I’ve even appended that to my signature on the Caledon forums – Ilsa Munro, QoOL,S) so getting distracted is easy. This time it started when I posted on the SL Exchange forums asking what things to look for when opening a shop in world. One of the kind folks who responded was Comrade Lednev who generously offered me a couple of walls in his IDF Shop to set up my stuff. In the process I was showing off my broomstick which has several custom animations in it. He asked if I could do poses and I was off to the races .

Except it wasn’t quite as easy as I’d thought it would be. If everyone had the good sense to be the same size and shape as me it would have been simplicity itself. Unfortunately most of SL lacks my level of style and refinement and are taller or shorter or broader or narrower. Then I added other sizes of rifles into the mix and it got even more complex. I had all the poses done and ready to test, but “scriptually” there were a bunch of false starts.

Until I was getting ready for a Mardi Gras ball to celebrate the Exotic Women of Caledon gallery opening (yes, I was one of them). I’d picked up a new gown and was in the process of adding Carricre Wind’s amazing and free Open Source Attachment script to it when the light came on. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the attachment script is placed in flexi-prim skirts and adjusts the position and rotation of the skirt based on what the avatar is doing at the moment. This means that when you sit down the skirt moves to a more appropriate position for sitting. It’s insanely cool and I put it in every gown I own – and living in Caledon I own a TON .

As I was making the adjustments it dawned on me that this was exactly what I wanted to do with the rifle using the HUD. Carricre’s code was easy to understand and in a few days I had the basics in place. To test it I went out and found a 50MM Seam Powered Sniper Cannon which is nearly three meters long – half again my height. In 10 minutes I was slinging it around like it was a wooden model (err, as opposed to an animated and textured cloud of pixels).

Color me pleased as punch

Using the Rifle Drill HUD

We’re going to do things a little out of order. Normally I’d explain how to set up the HUD and then how to use it, but it’s easier if you use it for a few minutes and then start making adjustments. So, make certain that you’re somewhere that you can run scripts (cause this has one or two) and wear the HUD.

Oh, if you’re at all like me you probably use an Animation Overrider (AO). Since these are fairly specialized poses I went ahead and set them at the highest priority which means that they SHOULD take precedence over most SL animations and poses, but at least one of the poses in my AO interferes so it’s probably best to disable or take off any AO you might be using. Check the docs your the AO for instructions on how to disable it.

The HUD should appear in the lower right hand corner. For some reason when I build a HUD that’s where I always put it. Feel free to relocate it as you like. The HUD is a little on the large side, but since you’ll be standing in one location when doing the drill I opted for an easy to read display over screen economy.

Once the HUD has rezzed you’ll see something like this:

There are eleven different drill positions, marked by the large images.

On the right hand edge of the HUD there are also four smaller icons:

• Clicking on the X will stop whichever drill pose you’re currently using, and make the rifle turn transparent.
• Clicking on the hand will give you a rifle (you can add your own rifles to the HUD which I’ll cover further down).
• Clicking on the hammer and wrench will turn on the configuration mode (which I’ll go into WAY more detail on shortly).
• And clicking the question mark gives you a notecard with the instructions.

Once you’re wearing the HUD, click the hand icon to get a rifle. Depending on what’s in the HUD you’ll either get a “Rifle Drill HUD wants to give you…” message or a pop up menu box with buttons for all of the rifles contained in the HUD. Since I’m only aware of the Long Musket that comes with the HUD that’s the one I’ll be referring to so if you’ve been given a choice, pick that. Then click on the Accept button to take the long musket into your inventory.

Locate the long musket – it will probably be in your Objects folder, and right click on it and select wear. It’s initially set to appear on your pelvis (which sounds weird I know), but stomach or spine will work just as well if you’re already got something attached to the pelvis (and how often does that phrase come up outside of SL).

The script that controls the rifle will also make it vanish as soon as you put it on. You can press the Control, Alt, and T keys to view transparent if you want to make certain that it’s really there.

Don’t worry about the position or rotation of it at the moment. It’s going to get moved by the HUD so the initial position is unimportant.

If necessary press Control, Alt, and T again to return to the normal view.

Next click on one of the drill positions. Let’s start out with Order which is the leftmost icon. Ideally when you click on it your avatar will snap to attention, the rifle will appear in more or less the same position shown on the icon, and you’ll hear the sound of the rifle butt striking the ground sharply.

You my friend, are rifle drilling

Run through the entire drill to see how it looks. When you’re done press the X to stop the pose and make the rifle disappear. It’s still there, it’s just been set to transparent. If you’re done with the drill you can detach the rifle and if you want to you can delete it. The HUD will happily provide you with an endless supply of no transfer long muskets

Configuring the Rifle Drill HUD

If you read my eloquent, pithy, and moving introduction you’ll know that the big secret to how the Rifle Drill HUD works is a script which is based upon Carricre Wind’s script for controlling the position of flexible prim-skirts (not to worry, I completely masculinized it by throwing in some dual carbs, stripping out the frilly parts and I even left the toilet seat up while I was working on it – just to make sure it wasn’t no girly Rifle Drill). Both scripts work sort of as follows. You get the avatar into the desired position, move and rotate the skirt or rifle to the desired position, and record that position. Then the next time the script sees that the avatar has assumed the position it moves the skirt or rifle to the corresponding position.

I’ll run through the process using the Order drill position.

1. First off – if you’re not already, go ahead and wear the HUD and the Long Musket.

2. Click on the hammer and wrench icon. It will turn green and you’ll also see green buttons appear below each of the drill icons (apologies for the way the picture skews off to the side. I THINK it’s because this is included in a numbered list but for the life of me I have no idea how to fix it):

   

3. Click on the Order icon (not the green button) to assume that pose, then right click on the musket and select Edit.

4. Use the familiar SL rings and arrows to rotate and move the musket to the desired position. Once it’s exactly where you want it to be, close the Edit window.

5. Now click the green button below the Order icon. The button will turn red indicating that that position has been recorded, and you’ll receive a private message stating that the position has been recorded.

   

6. Now repeat the process from step three for each drill position. Pose, adjust, record.

Once all of the drill positions have been adjusted and recorded click the hammer and wrench again (it should still be green indicating that you’re in config mode). The green button will vanish and you’ll receive a fairly lengthy and incomprehensible private message which will look something like this:

This is the exact position and rotation of the musket relative to your avatar for each of the drill positions. What you’re going to do now is make a personalized copy of the Long Musket, tailored specifically to you.

1. First right click on the musket and click Edit (you might have to press the Control, Alt, and T keys to make it visible if it’s transparent).

2. Next find the Contents tab on the right hand side of the Edit Window.

3. You’ll see at a minimum a script named “Rifle” and a note card named “RifleDrill”. Open the note card and delete the contents.

4. Next, copy the cryptic IM that you received when you clicked the green Config button, and paste it into the now empty notecard.

5. Unfortunately SL adds some unnecessary text to the message so you’ll need to edit it some. Looking at the IM you received the first thing to do is eliminate everything before and after the two lines of dashes. Eliminate the lines as well. That’s the easy and obvious bit. Next you’ll need to remove the time and the “Long Musket: “ so that all that’s left are the two sets of numbers. Very important! Make sure you delete everything up to the first less than symbol (<) but don’t delete it.

   

6. Once it’s edited down click on the Save button to save the new settings to the musket.

Now that your long musket is customized we don’t want to take a chance on losing it or confusing it with one dispensed by the HUD when you click the hand icon, so let’s change the name. Locate the Long Musket in your inventory and right click on it and select Rename. Since I’ve got something very specific in mind go ahead and change the name from “Long Musket” to “My Long Musket” and press enter.

Now it’s time to add a new weapon to the HUD.

Adding a New Weapon to the HUD

The Rifle Drill HUD can be used with any rifle to which you can add a script. You can also store your Rifle Drill enabled weapons inside the HUD and have it dispense them when you click the hand icon.

NOTE: There’s no requirement that you store your rifles in the HUD, it’s simply a convenient way of keeping weapons that have the drill script installed in a separate location from actual combat weapons.

To make a weapon work with the Rifle Drill HUD simply edit the weapon, and add the Rifle script and RifleDrill notecard to the content folder of the weapon. Then either pick it up or detach it from your avatar, and then wear if. The rifle should disappear as soon as you put it on. If it does the script is installed and functioning properly.

To add a weapon to the Rifle Drill HUD so that it’s available through the menu simply do the following:

1. If necessary, wear the HUD.
2. The SL menu buttons won’t allow an item to have a name that’s more than 24 characters, and the buttons themselves only show about half that, so it’s a good idea to make certain that the name of the rifle is distinct but short.
3. Right click on the HUD and select Edit, then click on the Content tab located on the right hand side of the edit window.
4. Drag the rifle – in this case the personalized one you made and renamed to “My Long Musket” – from your inventory to the content folder of the HUD.
5. Close the edit window and detach the HUD, then wear it again. This will ensure that it resets and finds the new weapon.

Now click the Hand icon, you should see the new rifle listed along with the Long Musket and any others that you have stored in the HUD.

And that’s the Rifle Drill HUD. I know it looks complicated at first glance but from start to finish it took about ten minutes to set up the 50 mm Sniper Cannon (and that included lots of breaks to giggle at how silly I looked wielding a rifle half again as large as I am).

Comrade Lednev and I are working on a set of rules for rifle drill competitions using the HUD so keep an eye out for those.

Thanks so much for your interest – you’d have to be interested to have made it this far down – and please let me know if you have any questions, problems or especially suggestions.

Ilsa Munro, QoOL,S (see, I told you)

Please visit my shop at Madgirl Munro and buy lots and lots of stuff