Second Life - Creating Objects & Scripting

For this week's lecture, we first logged in appropriately on Second Life and added each other in-game. Following this, we were all instructed to meet up in a sandbox called "Fermi". A sandbox is a piece of in-game land were one is allowed to built their objects and can put them in their inventory for later use.

Meeting there, we all started to get to grips with building basic objects and the general controls as regards it's shape/size/rotation etc. I managed to create a wearable glowing halo by creating a torus shaped object, re-sizing it, rotation it, adding the glowing and transparency effects and finally wielding it.

Next, we started dabbling with scripting objects. This is done through the game's own scripting language called the Linden Scripting Language (LSL). LSL is runs on the server side and is loosely based on Java and C. It is made up of "states","events" and functions, and crucially, every script must have at least one state: the default state, and one event handler. "Events" and pre-defined and the user can define the respective handlers for these events when associated to a particular object.

In-game we created objects that say text when clicked or change their colours when switching states.

All-in-all again, the concept is quite neat but the delivery is hindered by massive issues of lag and glitches. Sometimes it took a fair minute for a particular script to run and up till now we are still dealing with fairly basic scripts.