Adding Custom Animations

It's very easy to add a custom animation to the Mesmerizer - simply dragging it into the Mesmerizer's inventory will make it available to the play and anims commands.  There are a few constraints on the types of animations that are suitable though.

Animations should be looped - that is, they should not stop by themselves.  This is always true of static poses (which in SL are simply looped single-frame animations), but some non-static animations may stop by themselves when they've finished.  The play command assumes that it is playing a looped animation, and will restart it if it stops, which will likely look strange with a non-looped animation that has played to completion.  I may add a playonce command that doesn't automatically restart, but as of 0.98l you should only used looped animations.

Secondly, animations whose names start with a tilde ("~") will not be displayed in the list of animations returned by the anims command.  This is to avoid cluttering the list with animations that are intended to be only used with a mode or bind (such as walks).  So the names of animations intended for use with the play command should not begin with a tilde.

Finally, the animation should ideally be full-permission.  The Mesmerizer needs to determine the key of an animation in order to properly manage it, and it currently cannot do this for animations that have restricted permissions.  You may add animations that aren't full-permission, but if you do, you will need to carry out an extra step to tell the Mesmerizer the key of your animation.  This can be determined with a device that's included with the Mesmerizer - the "Animation Tester".  To use this, rez the Animation Tester - it will ask for permission to animate you the first time you use it - and simply drag your animation into its inventory.  It will tell you the key of the animation in local chat.   Once you have the key of the animation, you can drag the animation into the Mesmerizer's inventory and edit the AnimFixup notecard to tell the Mesmerizer the key of the animation.  To supply the key for an animation, add a line of the form animation-name|key, for example:

Jump Up|ea54436b-7625-b93f-05dc-2e0a2ba1aa29

In general, you should try to avoid spaces in animation names, and keep them in lower case.   This will let you avoid having to enclose the name in double-quotes in a play command: play "Jump Up".

The AnimFixup notecard also allows you to specify a height offset to be used with the animation, and an optional delay before applying the offset.   See the notecard for more details.

I expect to build the Animation Tester functionality into the Mesmerizer before the final release, so that installing an animation, regardless of permissions, will be drag and drop.