Second Life Physics Scripting - Pinball #8 - Script Management

I was starting to do some more development on the walls and bumpers and started finding that managing the scripts in only four walls and three bumpers was going to be a problem, especially when I was planning on adding a bunch more of each in the next few iterations.

I went back and added a LinkNanny system described in the Tic-Tac-Toe Tutorial on the LSLWiki.

This was a bit of work and it took some tweaking to get it right. I ended up creating a different LinkNanny for the bumpers and a separate one for the walls. This allowed me to have separate sets of scripts for each. I was thinking it might be better to keep all this information in the RootNanny and do the distribution based on the prim name, but it was already setup this way so I'm going to just go with it.

My biggest problem with this is when you want to distribute out the latest scripts with "/1 update" it takes a long time. I've been editing directly on one of the objects until I get it right, then copying the script to the root object and the using "/1 update" to distribute them out. It takes too long to be useful in very small changes and my stuff is always so buggy that it takes a million small changes to get even the simpliest stuff working.

Still Learning Second Life Script

I'm still learning a lot about Second Life scripting even though I've been through a couple of rounds of what I would call significant digging. The latest learning as you might know from this blog was a Tic-Tac-Toe game I built. I've been working on another game, still in the rough draft phase trying to discern what might be possible and found a page of examples on the lsl wiki.

http://www.lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=examples

I was digging through these and found a full example of building a Tic-Tac-Toe game. Had I known this existed, I probably wouldn't have read it before hand anyways because I sometimes like to figure stuff out then compare to how others solve the same problems.

http://www.lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=ExampleTicTacToe

As I expected, we went about it in different ways, but I do think that both solutions are fairly equal. I did force people to sit at the table and after I was done thought it would be better to have people simply click to choose sides. He did the later and it is a lot easier to setup than the code I did to watch for people that sit down. Good learning experience though.

One of the best parts of this example is the discussion on Version Control. (http://www.lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=ExampleTicTacToeVersionControl) This is something I struggled with early on and he has a very elegant solution to keep all the scripts in the root prim and copy them out to the child prims when you type "/1 listen" into chat. I spent a lot of time reading this section of the example and will probably be implementing something similar for a future game. A full example isn't given and it glosses over some of the aspects that make this a general use solution so this is definitely going to be home grown.

I haven't really gotten past that page yet and I'll have to spend some time to finish it. Very worthwhile reading.