Color Picker

This small project fills a gap in the large area of color picker tools. Indeed, there are a lot of them, but none met my needs, or not all in one tool:

• Using a separate hue bar instead of the brightness bar, making color choosing easier in my opinion
• Giving user feedback about the current selection with cursor on the central picker and the side bar
• Only one prim object with included cursors and preview color (needing mesh)
• Easy to integrate and use (plug and play)
• Talk with RGB or HSV in both direction

Those needs correspond to the features I developped in this tool. Of course I got ideas and some code from others in the opensource community. From the header of the script:

Made with love, wanting the optimal color picker, one mesh object, optimized script, self contained.

• Thanks to Cheetos Brat for the face params work on the mesh object
• Slider texture offset idea borrowed Chimera Firecaster (and by her Nova Convair)
• HSV/RGB conversion functions adapted from Sally LaSalle (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Color_conversion_scripts)

How it looks like?

The contour is not part of the object itself. I have added a background so that it does not looks like separate parts. But it's really aimed to be integrated with another object (a linkset, most probably a HUD).

The big central part is the saturation/value picker, where you fine choose on a previously selected color on the hue bottom bar. On the right of it, you have the preview pane, with a flat rectangle of the currently selected color.

For both bars, you have a cursor indicating from where your current color comes from on the panels.

Where is the mesh object?

If you can't find the object in world, this source project contains both .blend (Blender) and .dae (Collada) files. Import the .dae with your viewer (if you know how to import mesh), making the two lowest LOD to 0 and no physics (this reduces rendering cost).

You will also need the textures (to import) to put on different faces of the mesh:

• Central gradient panel on face 1
• Picker cursor on face 3
• Hue bar on face 2
• Hue Slider cursor on face 5

Note that you also have the .xcf (The Gimp) files for each texture.

Then you can drop the script (without the .lsl extension) in the object to put it alive.

How to use it?

1. link the picker to your build (hud)
2. communicate with it through link messages
3. that's all :)

What's the ColorPicker language?

The picker accepts in input only setting some options that you can group in one message if you want (separate options with a ~):

llMessageLinked(link_number_of_picker, 0, options, (key)"ColorPicker");

You always give 0 for the number part, and ColorPicker for the key part. The string part contains the options, which can be:

• rgb=<RGB vector> send a new (or initial) color by its RGB (LSL) vector
• hsv=<HSV vector> send a new (or initial) color by its HSV (Hue/Saturation/Value) vector
• sliderColor=<RGB vector> (white by default - <1, 1, 1>) set a color for the hue slider at the bottom
• public=1 or 0 (0 by default) allow anyone to manipulate the picker when rezzed on a region
• selectOnly=1 or 0 (0 by default) send a message only when a color is selected (not while dragging)
• sendHSV=1 or 0 (0 by default) ask the color sent by the picker is inthe HSV format (RGB by default)
• sendTo=linkNumber or -1 (-1 by default - all links) ask the picker to send messages to a specific link, or all links in the linkset

Examples:

llMessageLinked(pickerLink, 0, "rgb=<1,1,1>", (key)"ColorPicker");

llMessageLinked(pickerLink, 0,
  "rgb=<1,1,1>~sendHSV=1~public=1~selectOnly=1", (key)"ColorPicker");

The picker will send messages to the asked link (sendTo option) or all links.

• The key part will always be ColorPicker (as asked in input)
• The number tells the reason of the message:
  • -1 user is dragging the cursors and selectOnly=0
  • 1 user selected a color (end of drag or just touched)
  • 2 user clicked the color preview part
• The string part will be the actual color in a LSL vector format, representing the RGB values (by default) or HSV values (if sendHSV=1)

The external script can also request the current color by sending a message with 3 in the number. The picker will reply with -3 in the number, and the color in the string part, in the format specified by the options (RGB by default).