THE TIMELINE - Creating a Routine

Most seasoned SL dancers know the meaning of the word "sequence" when it comes to SL dance, just a list of animations strung together with the time in seconds to perform each animation in the string.  This all creates a macro which tells our dance HUDS to play those animations one after the other.  Any actual movement around the stage had to be done using another system, with it's own separate commands. 

Now, using the Performance Director HUD, you can do the animations, movement, emotes and chat commands for props, etc., all in one so we feel the dance term ROUTINE is a better descriptor.  When we refer to a "Routine Notecard," it's anything but ordinary! 

A ROUTINE notecard contains - group designations according to the Mover number, the dance/animation sequence for each group, emotes and chat commands as it's own group.

Key Points

We use a simple timeline method in which you specify the time you want a certain animation to begin starting from 0 seconds (when PLAY is clicked) to the end of the sequence.  

KEY POINTS:
  • Group timelines are independent of one another.  This means that groups can change animations at different times without affecting other groups. 
  • Dancers can be in more than one group as long as two different animations are not given to the same dancer at the same time. (See Assigning Dancers to More than One Group below)
  • Every dancer needs a group assignment, even if it is just one dancer in that group.  
  • Emotes / chat command groups do not need a dancer assignment number. 
Watch Out for Sneaky Characters!
If you prefer to create your notecard outside of SL to save on your hard drive, only use a "raw" notecard editor such as Microsoft's Notepad.  This ensures your document is clean, without background coding, and fonts that may not be interpreted correctly inside SL.  Never use Word!  
IMPORTANT: 
  • In order to load and make active the ROUTINE in the HUD and the correct Movement Card in the MOVER, rename BOTH notecards to the exact same name.  This is very important if you have multiple movement cards in your movers.
  • You must first open and save any newly created notecard in your inventory before dragging it into your HUD.  (SL scripting will not read it otherwise.) 
  • The animations you are assigning must be inside the HUD.  The HUD must be rezzed to add animations.
SEE COMMANDS AND HOTKEYS FOR THE SPECIFIC COMMAND LINE FORMAT

Assigning Dancers to More than One Group

Often during a typical sequence, dancers will do the same animations at the same time at some point.  You could of course write the sequences for the groups as in the example above, - (At 56 seconds, both groups are doing "dance_name4" and it is written in both groups.)  For two groups, this is easy enough but can get complicated when you have many animations and many people. 

A simplified method is to assign dancers to more than one group.  This works great as long as the dancers are not assigned a different animation at the same time from more than one group. 

Layering Animations

To see how to write the timing for animation layering which gives the appearance of starting a dance somewhere other than the actual beginning of the dance, please see the Layering Animations page.