A Magic Barrier

While I'm getting my little vendor stall ready for its grand opening, I put up a "Coming Soon" barrier across the entrance — I guess I'm a little shy about letting people see my works in progress before I'm happy with the way they look. (Though I got a great compliment on it from someone yesterday, which totally made my day.)

Anyway, since the parcel's "landing zone" overrides the landmark I tried to set in my store, if I wanted to get through the barrier to work on it, I had to edit the barrier, set it to phantom, walk through it, and then set it to non-phantom again. And I'm way too impatient for that (in fact, just about all the programming I do at work is to make my life easier by automating the tedious tasks I have to do). So I wrote a little script for the door to set it to phantom when I merely touch it, and then turn itself back to non-phantom after five seconds.

But I was still too impatient, so I made it do its phantom thing when I walk or fly into it too. As it demonstrates the use of states, timers, and setting prim parameters, I figured it would make a good post for part 3 of my scripting tutorials.

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.

Oops!

Day 35

I tortured a torus into a spindly, curvy shape and made a simple rotation script in it — really nothing more than llTargetOmega( <0,0,1>, 10, 0.1 ) — and just for the heck of it, turned on the "Physical" checkbox to see what it would do.

It hit the ground, fell over, and started rolling away — and it was so spindly, I couldn't select it to turn off the script! I chased after it, madly right-clicking all the way, and it hit the edge of the sim and disappeared. A few minutes later, I was notified that it had been returned to my Lost and Found folder because it had dropped off the world, two sims away. (I wonder if there are any Wild West sims that could use some tumbleweeds?)

Next time I decide to play around with physical objects, I'm building a corral for them first — and minimizing the script window after I save instead of closing it, so I can uncheck the "running" box if something goes horribly, horribly wrong.

On a side note, I see that I've used exclamation points in just about every post title so far. I'm going to have to watch that, or I'll run out of them.

Here Goes Nothing

I never thought I would write a blog, but then again I never thought I'd get addicted to an MMORPG, so it just goes to show.

I used to make fun of my boyfriend for spending hours playing World of Warcrack (instead of paying attention to me, like he should have been). Well, now I guess I've shown him how it feels, because now he's the one complaining about being a computer widow. Turnabout is fair play, bucko!

Anyway, I was motivated to start this blog when I came across Natalia Zelmanov's Second Life blog. It was interesting seeing all the things she's made, and how she made them. She has the Mad Costuming Skillz™, and I've found her writings really helpful. Me, I'm probably strongest as a scripter, but I'm diving into all aspects of SL — building, dressmaking, animating, and so on.

So here's a journal of my progress through Second Life, starting 28 days after I first logged on.