Union Micro

I’ve started a non-SL sister site where I’ll be writing about different technology-related things (mostly video games).

Click here to check it out!

I’ve been on a bit of a Second Life break lately… all current projects are on hold probably until the new year. The good news is that the latest elevators that were released a couple months ago have proven very stable – I haven’t reset the one in my shop since I upgraded it, so that has lightened the workload a little bit. I still have the 2.0 elevator on the drawing board, but haven’t been working on it lately as I’m holding off to see what sort of destruction Havok 4 will do on the current elevators.

I’m still able to answer technical support requests, I’m doing my best to respond to your requests. If you send me a notecard in-world your response will likely be delayed as I don’t login often. Your best course of technical support is via IM or the contact form linked at the top of this page.

And on that technical support note, I feel a rant coming on…
Continue reading “Things are slow…”

I’ve released a Guard House today.

The Guard House from Union Micro is currently the only scripted guard house / toll booth in Second Life. It is fully operational, allowing the user to open and close both gates individually. Other features include a status indicator for each gate, an opening door and windows and three levels of access – owner, same group, and public – which are selected via a yellow button in the booth that brings up the owner menu.

Use it to dress up a parking lot, employ a security guard to operate the gates at a secure facility, place it at the entrance to your private mansion, modify the chair and put your own camping script (not included) in it, create a toll road and have someone collect payment for passing… or anything else you can think of!

Yesterday Linden Lab announced that Havok 4 is now up on the beta grid for testing. It has many good things listed in the changes, but currently the content-compatibility is rather poor. This means that there is a lot of physics-based content that is rendered unusable in the current Havok beta.

Unfortunately, Union Micro elevators are not working properly in Havok 4. Andrew Linden reports that a lot of vehicles are currently broken and their goal is to have Havok 4 work exactly like the current Havok 1. So, if this is true, the elevators should eventually work in Havok 4.

I’ve experimented a little bit with the elevators on the beta grid but have had only a small amount of success. The problem seems to be that the new physical effects on the elevator car are severely underpowered, making the car slowly fall to the ground instead of ascending.

I suspect that Havok 4 is a long time off from going live on the main grid, so I’m not too worried about anything. I will give Linden Lab time to tweak the physics and get it right before I start trying to “fix” the elevators. If anyone has been testing physics in the beta and has some possible suggestions, I’m more than willing to hear them!

I’ve released two new automated lights a couple of days ago – Box Light and Disc Light. They automatically come on when the sun sets and go off when the sun comes up. I have them installed at the shop in Ruwart for you to check out.

The website is also undergoing some minor updates such as some layout tweaks, a couple fixes in the code, and a new documentation section under the “Pages” menu at the top. To start with, the documentation will only contain the more advanced Union Micro products such as elevators and maybe RentTrack.

For any new folks stumbling onto this website for the first time, you can get to us in-world by clicking the “Visit Us” link under the “Navigation” menu. You can also view our catalog on SL Exchange by clicking the “Catalog” link under “Navigation”.

For real this time, honest! I know, I’ve said that before and yet the updates still keep coming. Shame on me for supporting my product! Anyway, I really hope to feature freeze the elevators this time. Note that this is a feature freeze and not a bug-fixing freeze. Should any bugs arise, they will be fixed and updated.

I think I’ve really got the elevators where I want them at the moment – they’re easy to install, have many nice features, and have gotten to be very reliable in the last few updates. There are still a lot of things I would like the elevators to be able to do, but the current code-base won’t support it without a COMPLETE rewrite. So for the time being, all of the things I think of adding will be put into a notecard for future use.

I need to broaden my product line a little bit so I am trying to create some non-elevator products in the near future. There are a couple of big markets I want to get in on, and I also want to find another niche market.

Believe it or not, when I first started making the Union Micro elevators, there was not ONE other “realistic” elevator on the market. Now, there still aren’t very many, but I do have some competition now. I use the term “realistic” loosely as I don’t believe there are any other elevators in Second Life that have as complex logic as my elevators – then again I haven’t really tried the competition, so who knows.

When I get back into the swing of elevators in the coming weeks (hopefully) you will be seeing the next step in elevators.

Elevator doors and controllers have been updated! Elevator doors coupled with the newest controller can now learn their floor heights, will auto-align all doors to the bottom floor doors, and will also auto-load their settings when they are rezzed or updated. This makes both installations and updates very painless! I just updated my 9 floor elevator at Union Micro in under a minute!

Here’s an excerpt from the release notes:

This update is focused on making Union Micro elevators much more user-friendly while maintaining the large set of features. I’ve been noticing that the competition has been focusing on being easy to install and Union Micro elevators have become known as the hard ones to install. With the release of the builders kit, auto-downloading floor coordinates, auto-configuration of floor numbers, auto-alignment, and the reincarnation of the update disk, Union Micro elevators are striving to become as user-friendly as the competition and yet remain unsurpassed in the feature department.

Update September 15th: I’ve successfully moved the original update server without losing its key. I will no longer be taking the update server in question out of service (thanks goes out to Exrems Brock for the info needed to accomplish this).

This is a notice to let everyone know that Union Micro is moving to land on a private island and will be decomissioning our original elevator update server. So, you need to get your updates while you still can! Luckily, our newest update server will work after the switch so once you update everything, you should be good to go. We’re still setup in Pigra but are in the process of creating a new build. Feel free to drop by and check it out in-progress in the NW part of the ‘Ruwart’ region.

If you’ve updated your elevators since August 30th you should be fine. Otherwise, your parts will be checking for updates from a server that no longer exists. If you run into this issue, just send me a message detailing which parts you need updated and I will send you an update manually after verifying your purchase.

So far the 1.7.2 elevators have proven to be quite reliable so far. I’ve been using 6 of them ( 1 x 8 floors, 5 x 2 floors) without any hiccups for about a week now. Other than after the grid attack today, I haven’t had to reset any of them – and even then, 2 elevators managed to keep on ticking after the attack.

I believe this release addressed one of the predominant logic bugs that were causing elevators to get stuck (excluding physics issues). I’ve been trying to find a bug for the LONGEST time, and hopefully this was the culprit. Intermittent issues are the hardest to track down as you can imagine.

I’ve also released a poseball for the elevators that you can link into any of the cars. This will animate your avatar when you sit on it and will also eliminate the bumpy ride caused by the car colliding with your avatar.

I’ve released some new elevator parts over the last few days including two elevator cars – Luna and Cyclone and round doors to go with the Cyclone. I’ve also updated the builders kit to support the new parts and fixed the placeholders for current cars that were modified rescently.

I’ve also added a “Compatibility Wheel” to all elevator pieces to help you figure out which parts you need.
NOTE: Not all items on SLX have been updated to display the compatibility wheel. However, all items in-world are up-to-date.