SubscribeI mentioned a week or so ago that I’d surprised myself by writing a script for a project Kavar was working on. It worked like he wanted, but when he added it to his item, we saw that it was going to need some tweaking to work efficiently in so many linked prims. I did some digging around in the SL Forums and the LSL Wiki, and it became obvious that creating a sender script and receiver script that talked via llMessageLinked was going to be the way to go. For some reason, however, I couldn’t get things to work quite as I’d expected them to work. Everything compiled successfully, but I was missing something. Finally I just started completely from scratch again, and this time I didn’t miss whatever I’d been overlooking in the original scripts because it all just suddenly worked.
Kavar was at his rl job as I was working on the scripts, and after several IMs where I had been going on about how frustrating it was to not see the problem that was obviously there, I got to send this very excited “OMG I think it’s actually working” message. Around then it was time for me to go to bed, but Kavar promised he’d check out the scripts I’d sent him to see if they worked for him like we’d discussed. When I woke up a few hours later, my first message to him was something like “Hi! So is it working?” Of course he couldn’t just tell me. He told me I had to sign in to SL to see for myself, so I did, and it all worked! Interestingly, during all that time playing with the script, I came up with a neat lighting script that might end up being fun for some future photo ideas I have, and I still have no idea how I just happened on that.
All of this has reminded me that I have a lot more fun learning something when I have a goal already in mind. The scripting classes were a nice introduction, but it was all kind of academic until I had a problem I wanted to solve with a script. I learned more getting these scripts ready for Kavar than I learned in any of the classes because I was much more engaged when it had a purpose beyond just being information I wanted in case I ever tried scripting. Luckily, Kavar has several other things in mind, so I think I’ll continue dabbling in scripting for a while to see if I can figure out anything else useful for him. And when his project using the scripts goes live, then you’ll definitely hear more about that here because I’m so excited!
Aiming towards something really is the best way to learn new stuff. With scripting especially, it gives you direction and enthuisiasm and helps you remember what things do what. Communication between scripts is really cool stuff and linked messages are second only to communicating with a website when it comes to cool scripty goodness. Looking forward to seeing your script at work!
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Brandy, that’s so exciting! I don’t know that I could ever figure out scripting, but I did teach myself HTML once in a 12-hour all nighter and today I have my own, small web design business! I know *exactly* what you mean about learning better with a goal/purpose in mind…its so much more exciting and engaging and the end result is always much better. Pretty much everything I know, I’ve taught myself to do and nothing could be more fun or rewarding than trying something new and ending up with working, functional final results. Kudos to you – can’t wait to see what you’ve done!