Monday, December 18, 2006

Scripting Tutorials

Natalia inadvertently reminds me that I've been very remiss! Since the way Second Life does building is very different from the 3D modeling I'm used to, I've been posting neat little tricks that I find while playing around with prims. But the scripting language is so similar to other programming that I don't even think about it!

So I'm starting a series of scripting tutorials, in hopes that I can make Linden Scripting Language make sense to someone who's never written a computer program before.

Now, I don't know how well I'll be able to put things in layman's terms — it can be hard, when you've been doing something for a long time, to break the concepts down clearly and concisely — so I hope (if you read them) that you'll be kind enough to give me some feedback on what I could make clearer, whether I should cover less information per post, or more information, or try to phrase things in a different way, or if I'm even coherent...

I've put links to the tutorial posts up on the sidebar (I'm back-dating them to before when I started this blog, so that they'll all appear together and they won't clutter up my regular posts, and also putting them in reverse chronological order so that part 1 will appear before part 2 when you read through the archives). So far I've written two parts; part 1 is just a tour through the default script which gets created when you click on the "New Script..." button, and part 2 talks about functions and data types.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Johanna,

I'm new to SL and scripting. The last class I had on computer programming was learning Basic programming on a dumb terminal of the main frame at college. As you might imagine, that was quite some time ago.

I'm looking forward to reading your tutorials on scripting in LSL. I would like to encourage you to continue writing tutorials.

I think that scipting will become more and more important to builders as time goes on. A really kick-ass set of tutorials about scripting would be a very useful tool in the long-run.

Thanks for your efforts so far and I look forward to additional lessons in the future.