Scripting Recipes for Second Life

by Jeff Heaton

Second Life is an Internet-based virtual world where residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize and participate in individual and group activities. Another major activity is the ability to create and trade/sell items and services to other residents. However, to create advanced items you must program in the Linden Scripting Language. This book presents many common objects in Second Life, with complete Linden Scripting Language examples. For each example, you are provided with copy/modifyable objects for all examples in the Second Life world. These examples are presented as a series of recipes, which are useful by themselves, or as a starting point for more complex objects. The recipes span a wide array of uses. Useful recipes for buildings provide elevators, teleport pads, and locking doors. Vehicles are covered with example cars, boats and helicopters. The video game side of Second Life is demonstrated with an assortment of gun and bullet recipes. Recipes for wearable items such as glittering jewelry, jet packs, parachutes, and anti-push orbs are also presented. Recipes for slide shows, cannons, weather stations, and other miscellaneous items are also covered. Commerce is a huge part of Second Life. Two chapters are dedicated to commerce objects, such as tip jars, rental scripts and vendor kiosks.

364 pages, Paperback

First published July 8, 2007

Reviews

[Michael Thome]

Scripting Recipes is mainly a representative selection of annotated LSL scripts. I'd say it would be most useful for an experienced programmer looking to pick up LSL. It suffers somewhat from being self-published, as there are some significant editing and layout issues in my edition.

Disclaimer: I am an author of the semi-competing book Scripting Your World. In some ways, Jeff's book helped to provoke the writing of SYW as a way to cover similar ground using a very different pedagogical style.