So, Neal Stephenson appears to be fascinated with #VirtualReality. When I’ve read “Snowcrash” and now “Fall or Dodge in Hell,” I also get fascinated with it as well and install my own instance of #opensimulator. I’ve been playing with writing a script that when touching an object will prompt me to write a message that will get posted to a mastodon feed. There was some head scratching but I now have @SamuelLoire posting to my #osgrid instance. Text for now. I’ll work on pictures next.
There are a number of steps to get this to work.
First you need to have an Access Token associated with your #Mastodon account. You can create one by editing your profile and toward the bottom of the menu click on Development and add a new Application. Make sure this application has the right scope. I have Read, Write, Write: Statuses and Follow, although I don’t think I need follow for this task.
For my testing I just created a small ball sitting in the field with the “touch_start() function defined. This venture is not yet a general use function, it was crafted as a prototype to see if I could get it to work.
It is a bit of a dark art to get the thing to work since the function documentation is written for wizards which I am not, so there was quite a bit of trial and error. Eventually I got it to work, and now like a good hacker I will endlessly tweak it and break it and tweak it again and break it again, rinse and repeat.
If you would like to look at my solution, you are welcome to. It can be found at GitHub at: https://github.com/jfillian/opensimulator-mastodon-post. I fully intend to tweak, break, tweak, break, rinse, repeat. But for now this has been fun.
Like I’ve said above I’d also like to automate taking a snapshot and automagically uploading it as a Mastodon post as well.
I’ll let you know.
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