Official and/or Offline Documentation?

Does there exist yet any "official" documentation of LSL? I've been using lslwiki.net but it's not very complete and sounds like it contains more guesses than official information. It's also frequently down - is there a PDF or anything I can use offline?

LL hosts one...

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Portal

but I wouldn't really call it official... since it's written by users mostly...

unfortunately the person that did most of the writing on that one, seems to be a Comp. Sci. graduate... because the descriptions tend to be worded for technirati, so it can be hard for beginners to follow

actually, I consider it a plus not a minus that the documentation, such as it is, is "worded for technirati". lack of a real development environment that is properly documented is the main thing pushing me away from Second Life and towards, e.g. Wonderland. it's a shame.

Both the wikis combined are as "official" as they can be.

They form a more-than-complete reference for the entire LSL language, which includes beginner guides, tutorials, quirks, caveats, and a fairly good set of examples.

It is more than you would get if you could buy a book on LSL, mainly because it gets updated regularly by *us*. New functions are often fully documented even before they hit live.

Being a wiki, the formatting sometimes puts people off, but spend some time with it, and you'll grow to love it. I do.

It's not so much the formatting as the incompleteness and vagueness. Why should developers be left to guess at what the language might do?

For various reasons, the LSL community has never been able to settle on a fmall number (one? two?) of wikis to document whet the group mind knows about LSL.

It is scattered all over the forums and a couple three/four different wikis.

Sad, but true.

Yep but it is a wiki and it is OUR wiki. We are the ones that make it complete, not LL. After so many years around so many software programs I have become used to the fact that the more complex the program, the worse the documentation is. Ever run Autocad? It takes much longer to read the books then it does to fire up the program and start pushing buttons. The same goes for MS Office or for that matter, any MS product. Huge books.

I had zero, zilch, nada, no xp coding until SL and now there is nothing I can't script here. Between, freebies scripts, library examples, the wiki and the forum, anyone can learn just like I did. Until you start pushing buttons, or in this case typing and using some code then all of the documentation in the world would have no context or meaning. 95% of what anyone needs really is there in the wiki and the context is available here in the forum.

simple example - I needed to know what happens when an http_response fails to return. Someone, somewhere in Linden Lab who wrote the HTTP code already knows the answer to this question. The only thing I could do is run experiments. The answer is, after 60 seconds it returns a status 499. First of all, how do I know that 60 seconds isn't a fluke? It's a nice round number, so it's probably the real time, but how do I know for sure? And then there's that 499 code - that's gibberish, 499 isn't defined in the w3c spec. surely it makes sense to want official documentation of this stuff, yes? if nothing else, I shouldn't have to run experiments and attempt to discover empirically what the code does. it's just a massive waste of time.

agreed

We wouldn't have the extensive documentation compiled by fellow residents without there being a few who have taken the time to experiment and attempt to discover the unknowns. When we hit a snag like this which we cannot solve or which we don't have the time to solve then we flag it up for the community. Asking the question here and/or noting this issue on one or all of the lsl wikis will find you the answer far quicker than waiting for any "official" documentation from LL.

Case in point, we wouldn't have WarpPos without someone running experiments and discovering the simple hack. Likewise we wouldn't still have it today if it weren't for all the voices which cried out when LL optimised the associated code and inadvertently broke the hack.

I'm experimenting within SL when I get the chance, plotting the SL sun movement in a bid to greater understand it. It gives me a chance to practice some LSL and PHP/MySQL. Wouldn't have the same appeal if LL produced documentation which stated "SL sun, follows path x=sin(t), y=cos(t), z=1/2*sin(t+hippo)".

Currently many SL residents are testing Havok4 on the Beta Grid, seeing what we can and cannot do with the upgrade, testing if their products or fav. toys will work when it is released. We have a community here where a good number of SL residents help each other overcome issues, document bugs, hacks and caveats. LL could write the documentation for SL but would it be of any use? Would it be up-to-date? Would any of the bugs be found? They wouldn't have the time to run as many tests and run as much code as a whole community could.

<ramble over>

yes experimentation is good, when new stuff comes out but would it kill a linden to write some simple crap out so we dont have to waste time on things they already know?

all we get now is, new script function llPoop figure it out, if your wrong well sucks to be you

not exactly what i would expect from a company who goes anywhere and everywhere begging for users

Aye, fair point.

Waffle Projects wrote:



The most official-looking documentation of LSL I somehow managed to stumble across was an HTML file that was installed on my computer along with Second Life.

On my hard drive, it's located here:

C:/Program Files/SecondLife/lsl_guide.html

However, I almost always instead refer to a copy I downloaded of the unofficial LSL wiki, downloadable here:

http://www.cheesefactory.us/lslwm/

It's a few months out of date, but good enough for me so far. It seems more complete than the official lsl_guide.html file installed with SL. There's no mention of sculpted prims in the lsl_guide.html file, for instance.

Best wishes,
Apollia

Would that be the 2004 edition of lsl_guide.htm Apollia?

It doesn't look like it, it says Copyright © 2007 Linden Lab near the top.

Best wishes,
Apollia

*LL could write the documentation for SL but would it be of any use? Would it be up-to-date? Would any of the bugs be found?*

How could documentation written by the developer of the system be of any less use than wiki pages written by people who are making guesses or at best discovering through trial and error how the system works? Furthermore, the existence of official documentation does not cause developer forums and wikis to wink out of existence and surely wouldn't put an end to bugs. Hell, while they're at it, they could put together a real bug reporting system with assignment, accountability, status reports, etc... built in.

Linden gets a free ride on the backs of this developer community. Least they could do is make a few token gestures to support it properly. This would help their own process in the long run anyway.


And thanks for the link to the downloadable wiki image Apollia. With lslwiki.net being down yet again, that's a huge help.