Goodbye LSL, hello Mono
by Alphaville Herald on 02/08/05 at 9:50 pm
In case you weren’t paying attention (like I wasn’t), Linden poobah Jim Purdick Purbrick (aka Babage Babbage Linden) has announced (and it’s already in the Wikipedia so it must be true) that in version 2.0 of SL is going to move from the much malaigned Linden Scripting Language to the open source (yet a bit Microsofty) develpment platform Mono. But of course careful readers of the Herald will have seen this telegraphed in the comment section of the Herald.
While this change will lead to much gnashing of teeth and breaking of scripts in the short term in the long term it seems like an excellent, and perhaps necessary, move. See also Clickable Culture for reportage on this important development.
Prokofy Neva
Aug 3rd, 2005
Oh, ok so all the scripts are going to break with what amounts to a GIANT GAME PATCH lol. Yeah, and people said I was wrong to task the new guy with this “issue” lol. All the mission-critical scripts for businesses will have to be changed. The top monopolists in SL have their own scripters and will adjust. Others who rely on them will be screwed unless they care about customer service — which most don’t. (The tekkie default is usually “customer service is for chumps, let me get in some sandbox time before my mom picks me up from school”. We already have a phenom of oldbies and even some enterprising newbies plunking stuff out in the world, especially free stuff like video viewers, and just never logging on. They come on to cash out their vendors or get their little friends IM’s, which are capped in any event lol.
So a new opportunity will come in 2006 for the userers to regain their purchase over SL. We use to see rentomatic scripts costing 5000 or 10000 per non-commission use, with no-mod/copy/no-transfer on them, or else 1 to 5 percent commission *on every transaction*. This adds up. So now that these kinds of scripts will all be useless, new usurers, especially those who want to capture all your proprietary information for free to advance their own reputations and businesses, will have a new hammerlock on you. (This monopoly was just starting to break when I commissioned a new script to do things that the old defacto monopolists didn’t do, but they ruined that person’s business then out of spite by releasing their own script into open source to ensure that only they could control that market.)
“Gosh, Prok, you just not be a game dev.”
Indeed. I just treat it like a “normal world” where you hire people or pay for products. I don’t have to go to Detroit and take a course, get somebody’s huggy bear, suck up to somebody, and learn how to weld, in order to buy a car in RL. I just buy the car. It’s not personal. They don’t have to love me. Not so in the medieval village of SL.
Jim Purbrick
Aug 3rd, 2005
Uri, I assume that because you misspelled both my names it was intentional? Don’t worry about it, I heard them all at school. Then again with a name like Urogenus you’d know all about that
Urizenus
Aug 3rd, 2005
Well, at least I spelled ‘Jim’ correctly.
Jim Purbrick
Aug 3rd, 2005
Cheers, Uri!
Cocoanut
Aug 3rd, 2005
I am wondering what this means for me. I’m already hamstrung by not being able to script. It’s not easy to learn, and just building is so time consuming I haven’t devoted any more attention to learning to script.
Should I just not bother until the new language comes in? Or should I bother, on the theory that learning the old one will help make learning the new one easier?
As for scripts breaking, my SLExchange box broke, and so did one door I had in inventory. SLExchange told me that sometimes they just break for no reason. I figure it is due to updates maybe.
coco