MiceOnABeam Version 0.3.0B Released

MiceOnABeam version 0.3.0 Beta has been released and is now available for downloading here. All users of version 0.2.0 Beta should switch to the new release as soon as possible.

This is primarily a maintenance release that fixes some important bugs, but I did take the opportunity to add in two key optimizations to the code generation.

Code Generation Improvements

The Group Transition was a prime candidate for some improvement. Recall that a Group Transition is used when the code handling a particular LSL event is common to two or more states, e.g., an on_rez event. This is a very powerful and useful feature.

In the generated code, the transition action code was shared, but the Guard Condition code together with setup code to invoke the Group Transition was not.  With this release all such code common to several states is now shared where possible.

Another feature whose code generation has been optimized is the Final State which signifies completion of the script model or portion thereof. A Completion Transition is used in conjunction with a Final State to indicate the next state to transition to when a Final State has been entered from within a Composite State.

In previous releases, if a Composite State had a Completion Transition, then it would be propagated to each substate, whether or not the completion event could have been generated from within the substate. With this release the code generator will only create a Completion Transition on those substates that contain a Final State somewhere within their nested context.

Code Generation Options

For convenience a new menu item Generate LSL (Optimized) has been added to the Script menu within the main menu bar. This temporarily adjusts the code generation options resulting in more compact and optimized LSL code generated.

If you are using an external LSL simulator for debugging your scripts the non-optimized version may be desirable so that you can read the self-commented code and can take advantage of the execution tracing options. However the optimized version should almost always be used to generate the final, tested script for the SL environment.

Support for Pre-Release LSL functions

Also of interest in v0.3.0B is support for upcoming LSL functions that will be supported in a future SL release (functions relating to getting & setting individual prim link parameters & various prim media functions & constants). These are now supported by the MiceOnABeam parser and code editor for the convenience of those users using pre-release versions of the SL server & viewer.

For full details on the release please check out Release Notes.

Antonius