The spidergram grew from a specific need of mine. I was working in SL with a student who has many of the symptoms of dyslexia and who wanted to work on planning for a large essay she had to submit for assessment. However it has now been updated in response to requests: read on below for more details.
In real life, when working on this sort of thing I use a two part planning process, spidergrams to start to get ideas down and linked, then we go through the spidergram and put the material into an order so there is a plan of the sections and how to move between them.
Of course, IRL, this is easy... pen and paper and off you go. In SL, it took about an hour to generate and test the code, but actually, after that it worked very smoothly and the addition of the third dimension and the ease of making hundreds of colours definitely adds something to the tool.
Usage is simple - the idea is to make it easy to use as always, but especially for this tool where the users should be focussed on their planning activities rather than how to use to tool! The instructions are hopefully easy to read and understand.
Despite the fact the tool was clearly, in my mind, NOT designed as a detailed display and storage tool, it was a minimalist planing tool, the number of users and casual observers that assumed it would also give them notecards and link to webpages was insane. So - now it does. Still keeping the simple interface of course, but with added functionality, and a new "lock" function that I added after seeing how often spidergrams got accidentally edited into meaningless messes after they were built. It also offers a verbal rez mode: you simply say the colour of a ball with this admin option turned on and the ball will rez for you.
Read on for the instructions
This tool is a hybrid. It arose from user's comments about the spidergram - only a small number of people wanted to use the spidergram as a planning tool, most insisted, despite being told several times in some cases, that it was also a 3D database. It wasn't, but now it meets some of those requirements too.
Before you dive in expecting MySQL queries and the like, let me make it clear, it is more a data presentation tool than a fully featured database, whilst maintaining all the functionality of the spidergram, and ease of use. It will, absolutely allow you to display data as notecards and/or link out to website. It will let you make connections between "nodes" whether for planning purposes, demonstration purposes, or whatever else you choose to use it for. It will NOT link to your external database and display it in a 3D fashion directly. Whilst this is possible it is a bespoke solution for each database - I am willing to undertake this work but it is likely to run to several hundred US$ or more depending on the precise requirements.
Touching the controller will offer you a menu:
- Admin, which will let you choose who can access the controller (it defaults to all can use, you can set it to group or owner only) and toggles a "general listen" on and off based on the access level; and a list of colours. These colours are the colours of the ball that will rez (and their hovertext label).
- The "General Listen" will listen on channel 9 for any of the words in the menu, those are "Admin", "Black", "Blue", "Green", "Cyan", "Red", "Purple", "Yellow", "White", "Owner", "Group", "All", "No Listen" (without the quotes). This will have the same effect as touching the box and choosing the button from the menu or submenu
If you unpack the controller by mistake, don't panic. Simply put the script and the object "Node" into another prim and it should work just fine.
The balls will all rez about 2m above the controller - they will actually snap to a grid corner. You can then move them around etc. at will.
If you touch the ball you get, at first eight menu options. "Cancel", "Lock", "Item", "P emit", "P target", "Update", "Store URL", "Say Name". As you do things such as lock the ball, store a URL, add a notecard or cause the ball to emit particles you will either get new menu options (Lock becomes Unlock, P emit becomes P off), or extra items (Notecard, Open URL).
- Item will ask you to name the ball - this will become the label on it's hovertext as well.
- P off will turn off a particle chain, P emit will start one - and tell you to choose another ball and choose P target. P target will make the current node the target of the particle chain you have just initiated with a P emit call. Please note the system is stupid... you must do P emit THEN P target.
- Update will make the ball update, if you change it's name in edit mode for example.
- Lock will lock the ball - this offers a reduced menu of P target, Store URL, Unlock, Say Name plus Open URL and Notecard if appropriate.
- Store URL will prompt you to enter a URL, e.g. http://www.google.com - please note this MUST begin with http:// or https:// for SL to recognise it. The script will check for this and reject false names. You can, however, enter an underscore _ instead - to delete the stored URL.
- Open URL will open the stored URL in your browser (this functionality may change when html on a prim arrives in SL)
- Notecard will give you the stored notecard. A notecard can be dropped into the inventory by the owner of the node. Whilst more than 1 can be added, the system will only hand out the first of them in alpha-numeric order. This is limited to the owner only (or those that the owner grants modify rights to) in order to reduce spam.
- Unlock will let you go back to change colours, names, etc. more readily. This is limited to the owner and members of the same group as the node - again to reduce spam.
If you change the colour of the ball the text will automatically change colours too. You can choose any colour you like, the initial rezzing with colours is simply to start the process.
You can, of course, edit to any colour you choose. Editing the name of the ball and choosing update (or editing the colour) will change the hovertext.
If you want to link your prims to "save" your map you can. Linking mostly saves information about particle targets that is retained when you rerez the set. Your links *should* be maintained, but in testing it failed about 10% of the time, probably due to lag in the region.
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