Just a Click Away

The most basic way of interacting with the SL world is by clicking on stuff, but this basic interaction can be surprisingly subtle. The fundamental way an object responds to a click can be changed without any scripting, by simply adjusting the "Click to:" setting in the object editor (about midway down the "General" tab).

Most of the "Click to:" options are the popular choices from the right-click menu (control-click on Mac), and it's worth trying some out to see when they may come in handy. For example, there's a "Zoom" option that might be just right for some TV screen, or for focusing to take a photo.

One setting that's underutilized is "Sit on object", perhaps because scripted furniture usually also includes touch interaction -- but once seated on a click-to-sit item, an avatar's interaction with the object defaults to Touch anyway. So if the touch menu can wait until you're seated, click-to-sit is perfect -- and of course "Touch" is always available from the right-click option menu even if the object is set click-to-sit.

The most surprising (and most recent) "Click to:" option is "None." One simple use for this might be to mask the interactivity of an object so the mouse pointer doesn't reveal that it's touchable (or sit-able, etc), instead only offering those from the right-click menu.

The feature is really intended, however, to apply to individual links in a linkset, and this is a step in addressing an age-old problem in scripting linked objects: Making just child-prim portions of an object visibly touch-interactive. In the old days, this was done by keeping the touch-interactive bit a child prim and scripting it locally instead of in the root, so only that part had an active touch-related event handler. This led to some awkward linkset designs and extra scripts. (Scripters: There's also llPassTouches() -- which is almost never what you actually want, and won't help keep the root prim from advertising its touchability.)

Even with "None" selected, you can always use that right-click menu to direct a Touch to any link (although that behaviour can be viewer-specific for fully alpha-masked surfaces).

What this setting does NOT do, however, is provide a "click-transparent" click-through surface because "None"-clickable prims still occlude clicks from prims behind them. (All this seems to be counter to reports when the feature first appeared in Firestorm -- hat tip to Juliana Lethdetter. In short, the feature addresses jira BUG-216339 but NOT the related BUG-216375.) Also, there's no way to change this link-specific setting from a script in another link, for now limiting it to stuff you can set once in the object editor.

Reporter Qie Niangao

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