integer "type casting" in "lists" for ll functions | Voters

integer "type casting" in "lists" for ll functions

in progress

WolfGang Senizen

Secondlife functions like

ll.GetObjectDetails

ll.SetLinkPrimitiveParams

ll.ParticleSystem

that take lists as arguments require integer and booleans inside them to be converted to a userdata integer object.

This is extremely cumbersome for basic use.

An example

ll.ParticleSystem({
    integer(0),
    integer(bit32.bor(0x100,0x400,0x008)),
    integer(9),
    integer(0x01),
    integer(17),
    1.0,
    integer(1),
    vector(0.8,0.0,0.0)
})

It would be great if luau could be setup to allow for the use of normal number types and booleans.

Like this

ll.ParticleSystem({
    0,
    bit32.bor(0x100,0x400,0x008),
    9,
    0x01,
    17,
    1.0,
    1,
    vector(0.8,0.0,0.0)
})

Correctly "cast" constants would improve this somewhat, but still leaves allot to be desired.

For now I have made myself a function to "auto cast" these for me, but that is sub optimal at best...

function table2FuncList(tab)
    for k,v in pairs(tab) do 
        if type(v) == "number" and math.round(v) == v then
            tab[k] = integer(v) 
        elseif type(v) == "boolean" then
            tab[k] = integer(v and 1 or 0)
        end 
    end
    return tab
end

3 days ago

Thornotter Resident

Appreciate the hard work on the fixes so far from the Lindens!
Hopefully some sort of "type casting wrapper" can be used internally for the remaining integer requirements.
Using the Lua numeric natively for all the ll* functions would make coding a lot simpler and avoid technical debt carrying into the future. Having an integer type is going to confuse every new Second Life Lua developer for years and years to come - they'll think it's a native part of Lua. Better to try to get rid of it now, if possible. 😊

Kristy Aurelia

While in the area, it might be worth considering adding support for

nil

keep current value

especially for

ll.SetLinkPrimitiveParams

that take texture UUIDs as parameters. As you know -

keep existing/do not change

and similar has been much requested feature for LSL so this might be a great opportunity to introduce it.

Signal Linden

marked this post as

in progress

Thanks for the report, WolfGang Senizen. We will be partially solving this in a release later today.
From our engineers:
> bit32 operations now return an integer if all arguments were integers, but the core issue of list typing for particle and prim param functions still needs to be dealt with.

Maestro Linden

The integer casts in your example are _mostly_ unnecessary; this works for example:

ll.ParticleSystem({
    PSYS_PART_FLAGS,
    integer(bit32.bor(PSYS_PART_EMISSIVE_MASK, PSYS_PART_RIBBON_MASK, PSYS_PART_WIND_MASK)),
    PSYS_SRC_PATTERN,
    PSYS_SRC_PATTERN_DROP,
    PSYS_SRC_BURST_SPEED_MIN,
    1.0,
    PSYS_PART_START_COLOR,
    vector(0.8,0.0,0.0)
})

It does seem like

bit32

requires an explicit cast to integer for the interpreter to be happy. The bitwise operators from Lua 5.3 would be a lot cleaner to use if they were working, and should return an integer already: https://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html#3.4.2

WolfGang Senizen

Maestro Linden
Yeh this was before the constants were added
We still need to ternary or "cast" bools/numbers if we want properties to be decided by logic or math which is going to keep leading to gotcha's forever
Lua is a "clean slate" it'd be nice if it could start as clean as possible.