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Resources: hippoVEND: Demo Giving
All hippoVEND vendors (version 1.6 or higher) have the ability to give out demos of the product they are showing. This can work in one of three ways:
- Animations can be previewed by the customer (he or she will be asked to grant animation permissions)
- Sounds can be played for the customer
- Any other object type requires a demo version to be given to the customer. It’s up to you how this might work; perhaps a texture might have a watermark, a scripted object might be time limited
Whatever the demo object type, setting up a vendor to supply demos is very simple. If you’ve played with the holovending functions in hippoVEND at all, you’ll find that setting up demos is almost identical.
- Create a demo object of whatever kind and then rename it so that it has the same name as the product it relates to, but ends in “_demo". Ensure that you name it absolutely correctly — the naming is case sensitive, so if the product is called “Dancing Hippo Animation” your demo must be called “Dancing Hippo Animation_demo” ... “dancing hippo animation_demo” would not work. Here’s an example ...
- Add the demo model it to the vendor’s inventory. (If you’d prefer a server to hold the model, see the Advanced Holovending section below).
- Edit the “_config” notecard that lives inside the vendor’s inventory and start by ensuring that LOOK FOR DEMOS mode is switched from “No” to “Yes” ...
LOOK FOR DEMOS: Yes
- Finally, close and save the notecard. Reset the vendor and turn it online. When you bring up the product with the same name (minus “_demo” of course) onto the main panel of the vendor, click the vendor and choose “Notecard” from the menu (customers would just click the main panel). You should be give a copy of the demo (or if it’s a sound, it will be played; if an animation, previewed).
| Useful Tip If your demos are animations that preview, you might want to be aware of this setting you can alter in the vendor’s “_config” notecard ..
PREVIEW ANIMATION LENGTH: <time in seconds>
PREVIEW ANIMATION LENGTH: 25
It specifies how long the animation will run before ceasing. A customer can stop it at any time by simply clicking the vendor again (they’ll be told this as the animation starts).
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Advanced Techniques
If you wish, it is possible to have demos held in a server, where they can supply several vendors. This is easy to achieve, but there is one minor limitation: servers can only preview animation or sound demos to customers in the same sim as the server. This is a Second Life limitation.
To supply demos from a server, follow step 1 above and then ...
- Add the _demo object to your server’s inventory rather than the vendor’s. It must be a server that also supplies the inventory for the product the model is associated with (hippoVEND will remember up to three servers for any given product).
- Unless you specifically want your demo object uploaded to the website inventory list, leave the server “_config” setting UPLOAD DEMOS AND MODELS set to “No”.
- Follow steps 3 and 4 above. Once the vendor is online and running, whenever it is clicked (or you use the “Notecard” menu command) it will first look for any _demo objects in its own inventory. If it fails to find them, it will ask any servers that supply the product inventory to provide the demo instead.
Generic Demo Products
If using version 2 of hippoVEND, then you can take advantage of a new feature — generic demo models — allowing you to easily have several products give the same demo item to customers who’d like a demo.
Let’s imagine you’re selling three products: Bronze Penguin, Silver Penguin and Gold Penguin. In each case, you want the customer to get the same demonstration item if they click on the vendor. That’s really easy ...
- Create your generic demo object and name it with any text found in all the matching product names, then add _gendemo to the end. So, in our penguin example above, we choose to call our demo object “penguin_gendemo”. Since the text “penguin” is found in all of our product names, hippoVEND can work out that this is their demo item.
- Add the demo item to your vendor’s contents (or to the server’s, if you’re using the method described above to hold demo items on the server. Please note that both the server and the vendor must be version 2 for this method to work).
- When somebody clicks on the vendor, it will first look for a specific demo item — so in our example, if they click on the Bronze Penguin product, the vendor (and the server, if you’re hosting demos there) will start by looking for an object called “Bronze Penguin_demo”. If it finds it, the customer will be given it. If it doesn’t, it will then look for any object whose name ends in _gendemo ... if the object name (once _gendemo has been stripped off) can be matched against any part of the product name, then that item will be given. So, for example ...
- penguin_gendemo matches products called “Penguin Toaster” and “Gold Penguin” (but not “Igloo Prefab”)
- chair_gendemo matches products called “Small Chair” and “Large Chair” but not “Medium Sofa”
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