Juju, my faithful snake companion and I at the Scripting Your World Headquarters in HENNEPIN! Sounds impressive, but it is actually only a model of the scritping book of the same title, which you see behind me , and, in the boxes on the stall shelves , scripts from each chapter that you can by for about 20L$ per chapter. No scripting or building allowed. Bummer.
Hello again, my dearest dears! At long last here begins my promised missives on Second Life creation. As I mentioned in a previous blog, last summer, while the rest of the holiday making world was working out the twists and turns of the latest romance or crime novel , I spent my lovely, long, lazy beach holiday afternoons with two 400 page official Second Life content creation guides. The inspiration for this post comes largely from scripting your world by Dana Moore (Master of Science degree in engineering, former chief scientist for Roku Technologies, currently a division scientist for BBN Technologies) Michael Thome(degrees in cognitive science from Rochester and Boston Universities) , and Dr. Karen Zita Haigh ( builds robot brains, and was one of the people to whom NASA showed the Challenger explosion data ) . Now, these folks, who are clearly world class math geeks, began this tome by assuring the reader ” You do not need to be a programmer, a mathematician or computer scientist-some parts of this book WILL be slow going if you haven´t any prior experience, but don´t worry, NOTHING HERE IS ROCKET SCIENCE…..” Dream on nerds. I read this book in chunks going backwards and forwards, I took notes, I skipped chapters that just didn’t seem relevant, and by the end of the summer I went from being somebody who didn’t really understand what scripting was, to….
.......this. This is Juju and I in the Oatmeal Sandbox in the Beta Grid, with a little prim I scripted to float and follow me! Okay, NASA isn't going to call me anytime soon , but I was still pretty excited.
Now- rattle and hum.
CHAPTER I: WHAT THE HELL IS A SCRIPT?
You see scripts referred to all the time in SL. Yadni´s Junkyard , the matriarch of all freebie warehouses, in LEDA, offers free scripts, but only wants you to unpack them behind the wall. A rare privilege; scripting is banned in most sandboxes.
A script is a program. EVERYTHING in our computer generated world that does something has a script, written in Linden Scripting Language(LSL). Often things that don´t seem to do anything, have a position, or texture that is determined by a script. We can access some scripts. If you have an object with permission to modify, this will include adding or changing scripts. Our avatars are obviously scripted, but we are not allowed to modify them. Ever.
Scripts can eat up computer resources like a wildfire in summer. There are limits to how much information any computer can deal with, and poorly written information is one of the the worst things around. A computer doesn’t take a time out and SMS the programmer to say ” Um, excuse me; this seems to be contradictory.” It either won´t read the program at all, or mindlessly pump more and more resources into it´s doomed attempt to decipher mathematical gibberish. And it will do this until it´s power is cut off, or time, as we understand it, ends. We have all been there-downloaded some damn thing that caused our computer to slooooooow down to the point where it is drooling too much to even crash. In Second Life, we call that LAG. Have you ever teleported to an area with tons of people? People who all have flashing, billowing clothes, enormous waving hair… Or you enter a region with a horse farm, a Meero Ranch, any breedable, highly scripted animal. Your computer commences to drool ; your avatar can´t move, nothing loads. Bad lag mojo, caused by excessive, conflicting ,or just badly written scripting.
I like this wacky freebie dress,, but the flashing red and black skirt give me bad lag even when I am alone in my own home. Juju, on the other hand, who continually moves his head, flicks his toungue and hisses, as well as being able to talk, never causes any trouble! Juju has excellent efficient scripting. Well done Zooby Pets!
Most landlords will warn you about leaving complex scripts running when you are offline, or scripting and causing bad lag for your neighbors. 75 percent of sandboxes on the main grid don´t allow scripting. A great many landowners have automatic script checks running. If you are wearing too much scripted stuff, if you are wearing one item that sucks every scrap of cyberintelligence in a three region radius into a script that gives your shoulderbag realistic sway, you must remove it before entering. Juju always passes with flying colors, by the way.
With my new found understanding of scripting, I was careful not to buy my next pet from a laggy shop . The result is Hex, my adorable 2 prim animated black cat, who lazes, swishes his tail and grooms endlessly, with no discernible lag problem.. Hex costs a mere 120L$ from Shop Seu, a Japanese clothing store with a cat section. Fab.
And so my dears, I hope this first chapter has made it clear what a script is. Now for the next step!
CHAPTER II – WHERE THE HELL ARE ALL THESE SCRIPTS ?
Here are Juju and I back in the Beta Grid, the Second Life Test Grid that is open to the public. It is easy to get here, and the Rocket Scientists who authored my summer reading all agreed that it is the best place to experiment with anything. Cornell and Stanford have projects here. Mesh was here months before it hit the main grid. Please read my Beta Grid posts, and come join the fun! Anyway, this is a freebie fountain with lovely, shimmering, swirling ,water and gurgly sounds. Let´s take a look at the script that makes all this possible. Click on Content!
Great! Almost there, now click on the yellow content file, which will open the script title just below. Click on the script title!
Huzzah! We made it! There is the script that makes the water effects, and possibly a few other features, possible. Gads, how complicated. Let´s mess with something simpler!
Let´s create a new prim ( right click BUILD then click the wand icon at the top of the Build window, then click somewhere on the ground near your avatar. A prim should appear), and go to Contents. Notice the yellow file is empty. For a new prim, you have to click the New Script button, just above the yellow folder.
Ta Da! Click on the New Script title!
My dears, allow me to introduce the New Prim Default Script. It is a bit more managable than the fountain script. Take a closer look. It ´s purpose is to make the prim say" Hello Avatar !" when initally touched. After that it simply says "Touched" when touched. Ho Hum. Let jazz things up.
Notice how in line 9 of the script, I have removed the word "Touched" and added my own sentence. Now let´s click Save in the bottom right corner of the Contents screen, and touch the prim.
Et Voila! I now own a prim that plugs my blog! Let´s take it up a notch.
Go into your Inventory Library and open the scripts file. Let´s try out the Hover Text Clock script. Time to Click and Drag! If you haven´t done it before, right click the hover text script hold it down! Move the cursor over to the yellow file, holding down all the while. When the cursor is over the yellow file, let go!
There you go! A copy of the hover clock script has been installed in our prim! Can you see the numbers at the top of the prim? That is the hover clock! Clicking and dragging is the most efficient way to install a script, and almost every freebie area has a box of free scripts for you to mess around with. This method , however, will only work on single prim objects. I will fill you in on multiple prim objects, and some LSL basics the next time. In the meantime, click and drag the library Rotate script, and see what happens!
Oh dear, look at the time! I have to go now. Thank you all so much for joining me. The sweetest of dreams and the brightest of days to all of my beloved readers! Adieu!
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what a phenomenal thing you are doing in teaching scripting! i love your teaching style because you start truly from ground zero assuming no knowledge at all, not even what a script means!
thank you for this incredible resource and for teaching in-world!
Thanks Ener! Always great to hear from you, but I am not teaching, my friend Salahzar is!And I have no choice about where I teach from, ground zero is where I live!