Write a notecard.

Although I may have missed it, I did not see a function to write a notecard, but I have seen scripts that do. How do they do it?

You cannot write to a notecard with scripting. It's not currently possible to do so.

You can store small bits of information in the description field of a prim using the llSetObjectDesc() and llGetObjectDesc() functions, however.

Does that mean it's also not possible to dynamically create a landmark?

I'd love to let people touch one of our ATMs and get a landmark to it without having to put the position into the ATM inventory by hand.

Generically, scripts cannot "create" anything. They can rez copies of objects or can move copies of items from the inventory of one object to another. Other than that, that's all scripts can do with regards to dataserver operations that create "new" things.

People in SL have lobbied LL for well over a year to have persistent storage capabilities for LSL scripts, but it has fallen on deaf ears. Maybe, someday, in the future we will be able to modify notecards (not currently possible because you have to create a new one to replace the old one) or be able to store persistent data in some kind of database.

For now, you can only store data inside of the description fields of objects. That requires you to use prims to do this. You can also store data in the active memory of objects, but that's dangerous since you could lose the data possibly if something went wrong.

The bottom line is that LL is trying to prevent someone from having free reign to create and use up large amounts of dataserver space. I understand that fear, and that's why we are limited at this time.

There is another approach to a type of persistant storage. You can have an object email itself. In effect, the email que become a form of storage. The problem here is that llGetNextEmail seems to be truncating a message at 282 characters. But that's more that packing parameters.

You could also handle your data remotely, right? I haven't gotten into the rpc stuff yet... but that was the point of it? Was it not?

Yes, you can. But my problem with that (though many people do it) is it's another point of failure. If the XML-RPC, Email, or your external server go out of commission, you have a problem. Plus, you have to maintain a separate system, after paying all of this money in SL to host your creations. It's kinda silly that we have to jump through so many hoops to just simply and permanantly store a relatively small amount of data.

I mean, why should I have to buy web space, run an external program, parse emails or XML-RPC communications, construct databases, when SL should be providing persistent storage for our scripts to use? It's a whole lot of extra effort, programming, and money wasted.

In some ways it's upset me to have this drag on so long, that we can't get persistent storage in SL. I mean come on! Get with it LL!

I'll make another rant/push for persistant storage in other forums, because we've all been waiting so long, have gone through all kinds of other feature implementations involving other things other than scripting. Scripting has kinda stagnated in SL. I'lll push mainly because I've put off and put off projects for so long because we don't have some kind of persistent storage in SL.

They were supposed to be working on a llCreateNotecard() script. Hell, someone even mentioned it in a development blog.

I wonder what happened.