Demystifying the scripterati

I can script.

I live, breathe, eat, and shed blood just like you. I enjoy books, go to movies on occassion, love cycling, extreme sports, and euchre. My favorite colour is red. Most of my career endeavours involve computers to some degree and I've been using them since I was a kid.

I still ask questions about scripting that I don't have the answers to, and quite often I get a satisfactory reply that helps me out. If you ask me a question, I'll do my best to answer you.

I've never considered myself privelaged or above anyone just because I know what an if statement is for or know what bitwise operators are. I don't make jokes about people who don't know what classes or functions are. And I most certainly don't assume I know everything.

In fact, I like to encourage people to do their own thing without limits. I believe in creativity and the potential of the human mind to achieve anything. I believe that scripting is a tool that can challenge and expand our problem solving, logic, mathematic, and abstraction skills. And I don't think it should be something we are taxed for.

I encourage you all to share your thoughts about scripting and why you do it. Tell us who you are. And give us your reasons for opposing any scheme to charge for or tax scripting.

Much love,

Icon Serpentine -- ex-scripterati.

OK. I got real clever about scripting.

Bear in mind, I'm not talking about actuallly writing scripts. I have immense trouble just putting someone else's script in anything. Well, I got smart about my bed Barney made, which I wanted to be able to sleep in.

So I took a sleep pillow, took off Barney's pillows, colored the sleep pillow the same color, and put two of them on the bed.

Not bad, huh!

coco

Hey, what the heck.

I'm not a computer person. My thing's always been behavioral psychology. I managed an IT department for ten years, however, so I'm not without experience, though the real technical work was always done by my crew.

I'm an Aspie (I've got Asperger's syndeome) and a list of social dysphorias as long as my arm, but I can fucntion fairly well through digital media like SL and these forums. Which is a large part of what attracted me to SL in the first place.

I wanted to make cool stuff in SL, so I taught myself (well, am still teaching myself) LSL, becasue building alone wasn't getting me the things I wanted.

I never developed the idea everyone had to learn scripting. Or even building or texturing. I do encourage everyone to give it a try though, becasue you never really know if you're talking to an undiscovered Mozart of DaVinci.

I'm opposed to taxing scripting resources because it stifles one of the primary methods of adding content. We're talking near everything anymore, ouseide of texture clothing. Seats with sit targets, animation running couches, opening doors, animated drinks, steaming prim "food"... people - and I mean Jane Average here - have gobs of scripts in thier inventory. No one liked having to pay to rez up prims to the point it started a revolt! Charging for script resources effectively brings that back. How revolting.
Then there are the learing newbies. Do we make them keep their experimentation with LSL limited to the two or three days following thier stipend? I vote heck no.

Oh... Coco? Yes, that was clever. And since you have an interest, you'll eventually figure out how to do that witout using the extra prim, saving it for something else for yourself.

I'm pretty cool

Lies!! All LIES!!

*stands up, takes a drink of water, and speaks hesitantly*

Hi... I'm Rei... and I can script.

I'm not a techie by trade. I'm a writer (For all my hasty, error-filled nonsense on the forums may convince you otherwise), although I have just enough techie in my from a misspent youth to keep my computer functioning, build new ones, repair it, and finally to know when I'm over my head and call in the REAL techies. I'm socialy defective, to be blunt, IRL. Second life is a good way for me to interact with a 'world'... Without assorted fun things like paranoia and depression getting in the way as much. Scripting has added so much to that experience.

I'm no Xylor or Adam Zaius, despite both of them having tutored me to one amount or another, but I'm decent. I can already do some extremely complex projects, from scratch, with no or very little outside help. Multi-threading, email message handlers, lists, whatever. As long as it doesn't involve higher math (Never my strong point), I can manage as a general rule on my own. And I'm getting better all the time.

I'd never touched programming before I came to SL. Like many people, I dismissed it as something 'impossible'. For 'other people'. Oh, I'd puttered with batch files back in the DOS era, and even played with my highschool's copy of Visual Basic 3. Never got anywhere, so I lost interest.

When I came to SL, I never intended to script. I figured I would be able to buy or beg what I needed, and for a while that was true. About a month, maybe. A frustrating month, I might add. Particularly when I decided that vehicles were what interested me in Second Life... Making vehicles without scripting is an exercise in futility, I found.

So, brave and determined, I got a copy of Andrew's flight script, tweaked and modified by this "Cubey Terra" fellow, who at the time owned Zoe Airfield. I sat down and read it, blanched, and decided I was in over my head after the first few lines. It was about that time that Cubey held a plane building contest. I entered, figuring I could just use the script as provided. And that was good enough; I won, surprisingly. So, once again, I was convinced that I didn't need to 'learn' to script.

It was a few days after this that I met Hawk Statosky, one of the other main aircraft builders at the time. Hawk probably did more than any other one person to mold me into a scripter. He explained the terminology, the basic logic and syntax, and coached me through simple modifications to the Andrew Linden flight script to get my plane models to behave more like I wanted. For many months, Hawk would be my crutch in scripting, and bless him, he never got fed up and told me to go bug someone else.

Fast forward a few weeks, to the start of the Airgh Pirates. Wholey unsatisfied with the script we were using for our airships, I tried to figure out a way to fix it. Initial puttering broke the script more than it fixed it. But slowly I actually started to understand what the script was trying to do. I mean, I actually understood the script. The logic the original creator used when writing it, what everything was for. I was still screwing things up, but it was getting late one night and I went to bed, figuring I would work on it more in the morning. In the morning, I woke up early... With the absolute certainty that I knew what I needed to do. I sat down and before breakfast had gutted the script and re-wrote over half of it from scratch. And it worked. Exactly like I wanted it to.

From then on, there was no stopping me. I realized that this wasn't something that was impossible for me, just something I needed to learn more of. And learn I would. I'd like to thank, briefly, all those who have helped me since I came here... In no particular order, Cubey Terra, Adam Zaius, Xylor Basclef, Apotheus Silverman, Hawk Statosky, Trimda Hedges, Eddie Esher, Ananda Sandgrain, Rickard Roentgen, Taigh Murray, Francis Chung, Cornellius Bach, and anyone else I've forgotten that has put up with me.

The reasons I oppose a script tax have been covered alread; it would cripple the world.

There is no 'scripterati'. There is only the illiterati who, refusing to learn, would rather tax your success as punishment than broaden their horizons and reach the realisation that content creators are the reason anyone stays in the virtual world.

I started programming in elementary school! Really. I was in a very fancy, pricey school.
We had BASIC classes... since a "computer" back then was something you plugged into a tape recorder and typed BASIC commands in... no Windows, no DOS. No way to use a computer other than programming it
Lucky for me, my super-duper elementary school also taught me english and french, so it was easy to understand what those BASIC commands meant...
I started typing programs in... games very often came in books, lol. Then I figured out that if I changed "LET LIVES = 3" to "LET LIVES = 30" the game would be a lot easier... and so I spent my childhood hacking around, reading manuals... when I finally got a PC it came with QBasic!
I was the self-appointed "God of QBasic" by the time I was 14 and then started learning Pascal... some minor assembly language... I went to college, then I took some time out, made a nice bit of money in the dot-com days, squandered it all, went back to college, and now I'm 25 and desperately trying to mop up the last classes so I can move on with my life
Kinda burned out on the whole coding thing, actually... but LSL is fun. You can move mountains in 5 lines of code, and it's very rewarding to actually see stuff happen and people using it.

Hi, my name is Prokofy, and I use scripts *a lot* for fun and profit!

The script I probably use the most every day is Hank Ramos' rent-a-space script that can accept payment of rent, tell the tenant when his rent is due, and even give him a refund (great improvement over that *other* script that won't do this!). To be sure, Hank the Scripter collects 1 percent off every single use of his script every single time in every transaction, but hey, that's not taxing *me* for the use of the script that's just...that's just...um........I think it's just Hank making a buck, which is an honest and important thing to do in a free and liberal capitalist economy, which I wish we had more of. To be sure, I wish Hank would have made sure that when he sold me a box for $200/piece with the script inside it that was supposed to be non-commission, that it wouldn't have turned out to immediately ask me if it could "accept money" from me lol. I was busy and never followed up on trying to get him to undo that and just soldiered on. I wish he'd answer his e-mails now about whether he has any non-commission scripts, even for that whopping $5000 that those *other people* charge for the pleasure of using their script! Hey, don't make scripters pay for the use of scripts, I say, sure, make script-user like me pay per use of script, that's not hobbling the economy! I'm happy to keep paying this commission because it's a great service!

Hey, scripts are great! I love script! My other favorite is "notecard giver". I use that A LOT. And I am *so glad* that CrystalShard now, after two years of virtual life with push media, has created *notecard TAKER*. Geez, nice that somebody can finally *take a suggestion* now instead of constantly *pushing documentation cards on newbies and everybody else who flies by*. To be sure, she didn't grasp its significance. Somebody ont he boards asked her to make one. She shrugged, she made one. Next. When I asked her why, and did she grasp its revolutionary consequences for empowering players in SL (even more than this soi-disant virtual voting dreck) she said something like "Jello" or was it "Cream Pie". It was like "I just make this stuff because I can, I don't look at the larger context"...well, good thing Sakharov didn't have that idea about the Bomb and Beria, is all I can say...

Now...do I not value the time of a scripter or something? *Of course I do*. I've had hours of fun cutting and pasting scripts off the Script Library here on the forums. I've probably tested dozens of those things. 9/10 times they don't work LOL. It's usually some line parsing wrong. Sometimes, my desire for something like a picture viewer or an inventory giver is so great, that I grab that script, and knowing sweet-dick-all about its contents, I rummage around, and just using, I dunno, commense sense and the rules of Russian grammar, I fix the thing up. So I totally appreciate what Reitsuku says, you don't have to be a tekkie, you can just sit down and sequence this crap and master it like you learn how to work Windows or ride a bike or cook Spaghetti Carbonera -- it's all in the moment at which you toss that raw egg in with the bacon at the right temperature.

So trust me, I do value a scripter's time! That's why I paid $1500 for it to this one kid...he beavered around and fooled around after I explained my idea like five hundred times (attention spans in youth have not improved with the introduction of the half-sentence, the electronic page, the multimedia attack from YMs, IMs, etc.). Then he made something kinda like what it was, but not really...I fooled around with it. Finally I hired another guy more experienced and paid him...was it $500? And he did the thing in like 45 minutes, and actually did it *wrong* (after telling me he would only take 5 minutes). It's still not ideal. I await *the next* scripter at even a higher level of quests and boss-beating and stuff to finally fix this invention of mine up because the thing about me is that I have great ideas for inventions but I don't have the time and patience to sit and learn some arcane scripting thing, and I'm willing to pay scripters, but I just want them to show up for work, focus, not be assholes, and not be arrogant dicks, and just get the job done. Is that so hard?

OK! Did I say I didn't like scripter? NEVER IN YOUR LIFE. Scripting is the substrate of our world! Scripts are...gosh...*orders*. *Orders that execute*. What's not to like? Well...ok...rotation scripts. Ugly! BAD IDEA putting those in the library, yessirree. Ugh. Get them out. A rotation script in the hands of a noob is a dangerous thing! And then...well, bounce scripts. You've all heard me talk about these pernicious evil weapons and Destroyers of the Fabric of Society. My idea was to ban their use and have LL become more consistent in responding to AR's about those that do not notifiy and that push avs home or too far a distance. That was my compromise position. Seemed reasonable. LL only had to make a few arrests, a few police blotters and motivate a few $1500-per-script guys to write less nasty and aggressive scripts. But my ideas were rebuffed by somebody with some slider complex who got so angry at my refusal to be intimidated that she started a mass shunning movement of me and my posts LOL. Never, ever touch a scripterati or FIC script hegemony! Never!

Oh, are you thinking that I'm like all wanky about making scripters pay-per-use because *I have to pay for scripts too?* I pay a LOT for scripts, don't you? *I pay for use of scripts even if scripters don't*. I mean scripted thingies that are free are available, but the hottest, kewlest, videos, radios, cars, gadgets, cell phones etc. *do not come cheap*. Yeah, I can sure see how impoverished those who script are, how they would find it *such* a hobble on their creativity to be paying even a smidgeon for going over a big line (like using 300 on a 204, and how that could really harm their income stream! I'm not anti-business! I wouldn't want to do that! *I want to pay for scripts!*

BUT...I'm for figuring out how to create some kind of incentive to those who write scripts and use them (mainly as weapons and security), and some incentive for Linden Labs, to get these things off the servers where I live and work, and where hundreds of others live and work. Most people taking a peek at the FPS in their laggy sim and seeing over 250 scripted objects, and often 600 scripted objects, just groan in annoyance. They know they don't have many scripts, just the usual bunch. So why does somebody somewhere get to hog them all and ruin everyone's enjoyment, not just on that sim, but on 4 others?

I once paid an extortionist mafia goon with scripts out the wazoo US $320 for his super-inflated Linden-dollar lot price to get his club off a server where he and his griefing alts and buddies had terrorized everyone on 4 sims. It was a huge expense, one I've never made back. It was the worst kind of investment in this game -- giving into terrorist extortion to buy the peace. I did this after I found how helpless 3 Lindens in a row were to stop this (a ban of the guy only led to him coming back on alts). I did this only after I saw that even dozens of neighbours trying to AR and neg and express disapproval were helpless. I did this despite knowing that you never give into blackmail like this because it only encourages it (this same guy went on to commit serious fraud of a friend and stay in the game for weeks, and while he and his alt are banned, he still comes back yet again through other accounts).

This is why when the scripterati tell me that the solution to bad scripting is "education" or "understanding" or "getting Lindens to ban abusers" I roll my eyes about 720 degrees in their sockets. I've had a $320 US lesson and 3 Linden visits to learn that "education" and "Lindens" do not work on this stuff -- unless you mean Linden DOLLARS lol.

It's like trying to understand how terrorists had bad childhoods and lack of education access when the real issue was not giving them flight school education. What, I'm poor, I get to blow up a building?!

I took great pleasure in right-clicking and paying the extortionist price of that mofo and blowing a whopping 1,137 objects objects off the server, many of them scripted, from that land. He and his badass buddies were in shock in the middle of a huge party -- they never expected anybody to pay their silly mafia extortion price (you see that a lot). They screamed at me to give them their land back. I was unmoved. They called Lindens. Too bad.

The sad thing is that server performance didn't improve THAT much even aftter getting rid of them (although at least we were spared the nightly lag to 37 FPS when they had parties), and even when I took the 8192 I possessed, and wiped it as clean as the dunes of the Karakum of any object or script, it *still didn't* go up that much due to *one store* on 2048 that had turntables, animations, a bounce script, particles, blah blah.

I'm rambling. You get the idea. Somehow, a way must be found. I'm just the kind of eccentric who pushes these things way beyond their limits, pays $320 US to some fucktard, tries to improve life on 4 sims with no thanks from anyone just because I want to see if it is possible.

So I want the Lindens to meet me even one quarter way. I want them not to tell me they are speeding up scripts, which only speeds up the expectations from loads of heedless hedonistic fucktards to come in and whirl and twirl and crash and bang with all their vehicles and weapons and crap EVEN MORE and make residential life MORE miserable -- and even club life, as we heard from the Blake Rockwell crowd.

I want them and their scripterati buddies to think about how to charge for scripts to induce greater responsibility. Education doesn't cut it. That's bullshit. Calls to decency don't cut. ARs don't cut. Only paying money concentrates the mind wonderfully. So find a way to charge.

You paid someone minimum wage, and you got the script you deserve. If you truly respected coders, you would pay a fair wage.

Meanwhile, you continue to charge extortionist prices on your land sales. Don't you see the problem? You sit on your ass, and feel justified in charging ludicrious amounts of money for what should be a cheap resource. Meanwhile you stiff skilled coders, while sucking the corpse of FREE SCRIPTS dry. You constantly rail against scripts, and you've previously declared how malevolent freebies are. So why the ridiculous hypocrisy?

Prokofy, scripts WILL be restricted in the future. It is planned. It's something they've been wanting to do since the dawn of time.
Just as you need more land to build more prims, you will need more land to run more scripts.
There's no point in arguing about it, it's an inevitability.

And - pewf. Prokofy goes back on ignore.
FYI: The sarcastic, belittling comments. You're skilled at making indirect attacks. But your needless rancor is still obvious.

Ha! Same thing when I was a kid- except in my case it was my dad's Radio Shack TRS 80 (which, for those too young to remember, became something of a joke as the years went on- the Ford Pinto of the PC world)

I love playing with LSL.
I'm no expert. Getting the script to do what I want is like rolling rocks uphill, but it makes it more satisfying in the end when I get it to work.

Taxing scripts? This sounds like a bad idea. Scripted, interactive objects are more fun than stuff that just sits there. If anything, I think SL is stifled because too many people shy away from scripting because they think it's over their head.

If the issue is that a running script "costs" the sim the same way supporting prims do, perhaps each parcel of land should have a limited running script quota (similar to prim limits). If this is a terrible idea, go easy on me...

Also, is there a general thread about the proposed script tax and how it would work? If so, I'd appreciate a link. Thanks in advance.

~Olympia

So you paid $320 USD to someone you don't know because you were annoyed and this idea of yours is compensation?

For shame.

It's your own fault you gave in -- and you've admitted that.

Charging a person $$ to write/run a script is not the answer. It's not going to "induce greater responsibility." Money doesn't make people responsible. If I have to spend money some day to drink water (like those people in Peru had to for a long while -- not even rainwater was free) or talk to people, I'm not suddenly going to be a nice responsible citizen. I'm going to rebel and take my rights forcefully if they're not provided for.

Someone mentioned the old "rez cost" problem. Believe it or not, it used to cost L$10 to rez a prim and a weekly "tax" to keep it rez'd in-world (including a bunch of factors such as height tax to compound the cost). Quickly, people who could afford it hoarded the prims in a sim as fast as they could so that they'd always have prims to rez (as sim resources were becoming scarce).

Charging for it never made anyone "responsible." Charging to rez a prim just made people more nasty and clever and was the device by which they amassed and kept resources all for themselves.

Quite frankly, I do not want that happening with scripting. However you intend to penalize and tax people for using or writing scripts -- it won't ever make anyone more responsible. People are responsible because they have things to be responsible for -- a moral or ethical compass or duties to perform that are important to them. Money is never a good guide.

Here's some clarification for you regarding the script "tax".
Today we have a proportional object allocation system:
1 sim = 15000 prims
1/2 sim = 15000 / 2 = 7500 prims
1/4 sim = 15000 / 4 = 3750 prims
And so on and so forth.
In the future, scripts will work like this:
1 sim = 100% CPU cycles at your disposal
1/2 sim = 50%
1/4 sim = 25%
(...)
You will not have to pay more money for anything. However, if you don't own a lot of land, you may find that your scripts will run slower or intermittently - this will not, however, cause you to feel "lag".

Ignoring the drama happily:

Apparently this must be an informal meeting of Scripters Anonymous. Hm. I'll bite.

I'm not exactly anyone special, really. I started my work largely with a few basic Java and C++ classes, two languages which I've let my mind atrophy over for years upon years.

Then I met the Torque Engine, which many will remember as the same engine that powered the early entries of the Tribes series. Strangely enough, "Torquescript" is very, VERY similar to LSL - probably because it's a C-derivative scripting language like LSL.


That was roughly... um... four years ago now, I think.

Other things of minor note are I do a lot of actual 3D artwork - not so much with my schedule this semester at the college, but in general. I've posted a few samples before, but here are two I'm particularly proud of. Both still need a lot of work in modelling alone.

And that pretty much brings things to the present. I became a scripter in the first place because I'd like to see Second Life become a freeform place for (real) 3D art, among other things, and that was the basis of my 3D Model Importer and BVH-to-Prim Importer. I was also largely inspired by Xylor's success with LSL.

Of course, a few now have me pegged as "that guy that they were upset with" from a couple weeks ago. Ah well.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

But yeah... I guess I wanted this thread to be a proving ground that scripters aren't any sort of elitist.

Reiterating your own words to get other people to start using them when talking with you is a very effective method of promoting a specific agenda. However, it's equally effective at promoting the use of silly words like, "techno scripterati" and "FIC."

And not just by the creators of such words either; but the community as a whole.

There is no "scripterati;" it's a fabrication. I just want to share that.

I write too many scripts in real life. I damn well will not do the same here.

So no, I am not techno-illitero-scripterati. I am techno-litero-refusnik-scripterati.

but scripterati sounds cool. and i like techiwikinista. it sounds cool, too. makes me think of communist munchkins or such. and there is no small perverse pleasure being in a fictitious group especially when it excludes particularly obnoxious people.

i know um... let see... basic, forth, mpi, perl, javascript, java, c, c++, lisp, scheme, pascal, lsl, tcl/tk, shell scripting, logo, cobol, html, xml/dtd, authorware, mips, vax, spss, excel, and i'm sure i'm forgetting some stuff.

and i hate to script and program. i only do it because i can't alway trick my s.o. into doing it for me. ok so i lie. i script because it's fun in sl.

I call this meeting of the SL Scripterati to Order!

We have two items on the agenda today and will follow them up with concerns from members afterwards.

First --

We must lag the sims DeHaro, Da Bomb, and Chartreuse. They haven't been paying into our extortion schemes for quite some time. We need someone to organize this effort -- open a club or two or something.

Second --

Donuts.

Someone has been stealing all the cherry jellies. We need these ones to power the doomsday script -- they're not for snacking. Any of the other donuts are for snacking. So whoever is taking them -- stop it. Or you will be tried for treason and banned from SL.

BANNED!

Ok, so questions anyone?

point of order! we need munchkin avatars first.

done.

We represent the Scripterati Guild, The TechnoWiki Guild, and The Feted Guild
And in the name of these various Guilds,
We wish to welcome you to Munchkin2 land.
We welcome you to Munchkin2 land, Tra la la la la la la
From now on you'll be history.
You'll be history, you'll be history, you'll be history.
And we will glorify your name.
You will be a bust, be a bust, be a bust
In the Hall of Fetid Fame!

Toto, we're not in Kan....

ok... who deleted the yellow brick road?

I hear the Wicked Crow of the West coming. Somebody script a tornado and a falling house, preferably designed by one of SL's "best builders"....