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Scripting WikiI started Second Life over a year ago when they were offering free basic accounts. It took me a while to get into the game, because I was distracted with There and City of Heroes. But, in a fit of boredom, I decided to try and get into the game again, and found it has a lot to offer.
What I want to do with this page is offer free advice for the beginner, and show you that a lot of what long timers do is not all that difficult.
Basic account's are free, try it out. Say Ariane Brodie referred you :)
Creating a Decent Avatar - cheap
I believe that one of the reasons why people are initially turned off from this game, is that the default avatars are butt ugly. If you saw my screenshots of There, you see that the world is filled with lots of cute skinny people, but it often looks like Second Life is filled with ugly monkey people. Well if you spend enough time in the game you will see that it is possible for your avatar to look good.
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Step 1: Adjust Appearance
First step is adjusting your appearance. This can be very intimidating because there are lots and lots of sliders, and to make matters worse they show you what your avatar looks like at the extreme slider sections. Obvious pointer #1: don't use extreme settings. Less obvious pointer #2: Start with the chest. Everyone goes with the head first because it is the first set of sliders you see. What I found is that every part of the dimensions of the body can be any size and shape except for the chest. You can adjust boob size and shape of course, but the actual chest cannot be adjusted length wise width wise or height wise unless you adjust the whole body. So starting with the chest start adjusting everything attached to the chest to match the chest. Adjust the abdomen so it looks good with the chest, then adjust the hips so it looks good with the abdomen, etc, then work up from the chest, adjusting shoulders and arms. Step 2: Skin Once you got the shape you want so you don't look so monkey like, you may notice that the fact that your skin is all the same color is also a heavy contributor to unattractiveness. It is fine for There for skin to look the same, because the world is designed to look like a cartoon. In Second Life you need a more attractive skin. Second Life actually provides templates for making custom skin and clothing. You can download them here. But I am going to provide you with one step better: Actual nude skin for your female avatar. Upper Body and Lower Body. I have decided not to provide a head skin as it disables your ability to customize your face. But under skin if you set pigment to 40 and ruddiness to 100, the face skin will nearly perfectly match the body skin. Now because I am providing you with uploadable jpg files, you of course can change them to your liking as you see fit. I should warn you that the seams do not match perfectly. (I have since created a second skin set that is much better, but I am keeping it for myself.) |
Step 3: Clothing
The number one thing most venders in the game sell is clothing. There is tons of stuff, and it is not hard to find decent stuff cheap or even free. One place to start is Yadni's Junkyard (Leda 230,19). The outfit in the picture above was made entirely out of free stuff (including the free skin).
Step 4: Animation
Part of the whole "my avatar looks like a monkey" thing is that the default animations included in the game look horrible. There is, however, a technique for changing your walking to look more natural. It is called "Animation Overriding" or AO for short. The biggest problem is that AO comes at a cost. It samples every fraction of a second to find out what animation you are using and changes it. This results in "lag" if there are too many people on the same server using AO at the same time. Eventually it is hoped by many players that the "Lindens" will one day make it so you can change your animations to anything you want, but until then it is all we have. There are free walking bracelets you can find. Or you can make your own fairly easy. Among the free animations you can pick up at Yadni's, or lots of other places are "Walk: Sexy" and "Walk: Power". The first makes an excellent female walk, the latter an excellent male walk. Then all you need is an attachment to your body (bracelet, jewelry, hair extensions, or whatever) and edit it. Add the animation and this simple AO script to the "contents" of the attachment, and you can walk around a lot nicer.
Scripting Fun Part 1: The Dynamic Flying House
I like to program occasionally, so I decided to try to learn the LSL scripting language. Two best resources for this are the LSL Wiki, and the Second Life Forums. If it is not in Wiki, it is probably in forums.
So I upgraded my free basic account to a premium account, which entitled me to a really small and really narrow snippet of land that is surrounded by other peoples snippets of land and really gaudy looking houses. While it is expensive to build "out" in SL, you can build "up" as high as you want.
I find that building about 90 meters above gives me less obstructed views without being isolated from the ground. it is in "shouting" distance from the land, but flying up there is annoying. First thing I needed was a way to get up to my house. So I found this script to teleport me up.
All you have to do is know the coordinate of where you want to teleport to and put it in the script. You can do this by creating a prim at the target location and jotting down the x y and z values under position. Then dump the script into any prim on the ground, and it becomes a teleporter.
Now I noticed, a lot of my friends had a cool script that allows them to scan for other avatars in the area. I found a free script on the forums to do exactly that and report it. The problem is that if you are on a sky pad house 90 meters up, these scanners only have a range of 96 meters, so unless there is someone standing directly below you, you will only see the occasional fly-by.
Ah but what if the scanner is on the ground, and it can transmit the data up to the house via shout? That's doable, and I could even add it as a function of my teleporter thus saving on "prims". So I created a transmitter and receiver pair that work on their own channel, and added one more sneaky feature: the teleporter/scanner also monitors channel 0 (the normal chat channel) and echoes that as well, so I can see any conversations at ground level.
Teleport - Scanner - Microphone Transmitter Script
The cool part is you can have multiple transmitters scattered around your land, as long as they are no more than 100 meters from the receiver.
Making this multifunction script inspired me to make another one. I found a routine in Wiki to make a digital clock, so I turned it into a clock-radio-motion detector device. It is a simple script that left alone displays the time in any time zone you want, or you can click it to toggle on and off your radio. Or the third function is that of a motion detector that IMs you if someone is near the detector. Update: script now cycles through 4 different channels, and also displays your server time and how long till the next sunrise/sunset.
Clock - Radio - Motion Detector Script
So what can you build at 90 meters up? You can build a 30 meter by 10 meter landing strip, that's about it. You could build a nice small house on it if you want. but I just decided to save on prims and create a 30x10x10 prism to live in.
I live high because I like the view, so I got to have windows, but I also get a lot of people flying up and peering inside to see what I am doing, so I began using my new found scripting skills to make my tiny prison, er I mean prism, more versatile.
So now with one command, I can make my box completely invisible, or I can close all the curtains, or I can make the walls, floors and ceiling instantly change any way I feel like.
Just drop a script into each floor, wall or ceiling prim, and type commands on the /10 channel. You can read the scripts to see what the commands are, note you can handle the floor walls and roof separately or together. It is easy to add your own commands and textures if you want.
Commands: Use "/10 command" to send
black, grid, glass, wood, dirt, grass, white, rock, mountain, hide
to affect just floor add "floor" to the end with no spaces, i.e. blackfloor, gridfloor...
to affect just walls add "walls" to the end
to affect just roof add "roof" to the endCeiling script (bonus command "phantom" will cause anyone on the roof to fall into the house, "solid" reverses it.)
Wall script (bonus command "light" makes all your walls glow, "dark" reverses it.)
Floor Script (bonus command "miston" covers your floor with fog, "mistoff" turns the fog machines off)
Door Script - Behaves like normal wall most of the time, but command "open" moves the wall like a garage door which automatically closes 10 seconds later.
Attachment Scripts
There is a popular freebie out there called "Personal Titler" which when you type title anything the word anything appears above your head in green letters. Its a meter long invisible rod that attaches to either eyeball. (or you can take this script and dump it in any head attachment)
I rewrote the script to add 4 more functions: time displays the current time in your time zone (edit script to pick your own zone), the current server time (servers have a four hour day, 3 light, and 1 dark), and the minutes till sunrise or sunset. pos displays your current server, position on that server, elevation, and speed in kph. scan shows if there are any other avatars in a 96 meter radius and who they are. lag displays the frame rate and delay stats for the server you are on. ani displays what animation you are using (useful in Animation Overriding). to makes whatever you have displaying instantly disappear.
Here is a much requested script that enhances fly. Drop this script in any attachment that does not have a script in it (maybe your prim hair or something).
It enhances fly in two ways 1. you can fly as high as you like and you should not drift down (much, it is not perfect). 2. say the word "fly" and it changes into a much faster flying mode. In this mode you can also say "speed 30" to double your speed (or any number, default is 15). say "fly" again, or just stop flying to get out of this mode.
One annoying bug, when in fast fly mode you will see "release keys" button. If you push it, your attachment comes off.
Animation Vending
I have been making a fair number of animations and uploading them, and I have been trying to find an animation vendor that I could purchase, as there are a lot of stores that have such a thing. Well after an exhaustive search, I could not find one animation vender available for purchase. So I had to make my own. So here is the script I used. Create 3 prims: a pedestal and two arrows. Name the arrows "prev" and "next" then link these together with the pedestal as the root. Then dump this script, and any animations you want to sell into the root contents.
Make Your Own Fine Jewelry
I bought a necklace from that guy who has a store on every teleport pad practically. These thing have a huge number of prims and they are perfectly aligned, and figured there is no way you can align 60 prims that perfectly without some computer help.
So I figured out how he probably did it, and did it myself, so if anyone wants to start their own jewelry business here is how:
DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! A sandbox is so much better!
First, you need this script: Necklace GeneratorGenerate a prim, any prim and put this script in it.
Second you need a bead, a simple white sphere all shiny and full bright size 0.2 x 0.2 x 0.2 works great for a 30 pearl necklace. Name it "test bead" and put it in the same prim as the script. Then touch the prim and you will see a necklace magically appear in front of you.
Use edit to select all the prims (this is why you need a sandbox, so you dont accidentally also select unwanted prims) and then link them. (or delete them, play with the parameters some more and try again).
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Then it is just a matter of resizing (this makes
really big necklaces), attaching to your chest, and positioning and rotating it
to fit around your neck. Put this Link
Script in the prim before loading it in the necklace generator If you put the link script in, then linked all the chain links together then edit, replace the link script with this chain script. Now you can make your chain turn gold, silver, glow or not with some simple commands. |
Fun With Dynamic Cameras
They recently added a better way to control cameras via scripts. The Dynamic Camera is not the most reliable way to control the camera, but it is an improvement over having the camera locked down.
The most important use of dynamic cameras is to make vehicles feel more natural. Before dynamic cameras, most vehicles out there would lock the camera in a position usually behind and above the vehicle. If you came from the game There like I did or if you just play driving of flying video games, you probably find these locked cameras annoying.
While vehicle scripts are being rewritten to take advantage of dynamic cameras, here is a script that you wear as a HUD that gives you the same effect while driving or flying a vehicle. Just create a prim, put this script in it, and attach it as a HUD. Click blue to enable the camera, click red to return to default camera.
A popular use for these cameras is to detach the camera from yourself, and see through nearby walls. The first scripts for these dynamic cameras allow you to steer your camera around, using arrow keys (forward, back, turn left, turn right) and page up/page down (up and down). I rewrote parts of the script to work like a HUD. Click blue to enable the camera, click red to return to default camera.
Now one of the things I like to do in SL is hang out in clubs and go to parties, and I like to see who is all there and put faces with names. So here is a script to "scan the room" at parties and point the camera directly at the closest 16 people in the room. Just create a prim, put this script in it, and attach it as a HUD. Click to start the room scan, click again to pause. Once it is done scanning, it will return to default.
