aubreTEC Labs

Question from WickedSF:

Where the fuck have you been?

The answer to this question is simple:  I’ve been working.  I was offered a rather excellent job as a project manager outside of Second Life and I took it.

Yes, I still intend to be active in Second Life, and I’ve been working on a couple of projects I’m very excited about.  I just got hit with the learning curve of working with a new company, coupled with some major changes in my personal life, and I needed a haitus.

I’m really excited to be back in-world, though, and I have some great ideas to start putting to prims.  We’re going to be culling our inventory - removing any products that we consider to be obsolete or no longer relevant - so that we can focus on making a few really, really good products.

Thanks for your patience, and I’ll see you in-world!

I got this question from TJudge:

It seems like you’re always involved in a ton of projects at once.  I can barely remember to tie my shoes in the morning.  Do you use some kind of program to keep track of all the stuff you do?

The answer to that question is, of course, constantly evolving, as anybody in a creative field I’m sure can tell you.  I think the biggest challenge when managing multiple tasks is in finding a way to keep track of those tasks without getting overwhelmed.  There are a lot of philosophies on this subject, but the increasingly dominant one comes from a book called Getting Things Done by David Allen.  The common term for this, in true internet abbreviation style, is “GTD.”

The GTD philosophy is complex, but it essentially boils down to keeping close track of what actions you need to take, when you need to take them, and what dependencies exist for these tasks.  It’s about structuring your time to maximize your resources and focus on the tasks at hand.

For this purpose, I recommend one of three bits of software (all for Mac, sorry) - OmniFocus, The Hit List, and Things.

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This from Viwoma:

I have a titler, one of those things that lets other people change the hovertext above your head, and when it speaks the text isnt prefixed with the object name, as with most objects. Its heard by everyone around you (so, probably llSay()) but its not the usual trick of changing the object name, because there is no colon (:) anywhere in the text which normally follows the object name, regardles of what it has been set to. Any ideas?

The trick she’s referring to, which I think of as “clean speak,” is a nice way to do object feedback without the mildly ugly object: statement text (”Luc’s Scripted Whatnot (verson 1.2a): I like monkeys!”).

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I got this question from Osiris:

What good options are there for saving persistent data, given that we can’t write to notecards and list data will be lost at reset?

Ach.  LSL is sadly lacking in provisions for the storage of persistent data, to tell the truth.  Storing any data outside of the script’s own memory is a pain, no matter how you go about it.  It’s possible, of course, but such solutions are not typically elegant.

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I got this question from ‘taurus:’

I noticed you managed to get the new te.leport.me hud to work on no script land.  I was wondering if you’d tell us how you did this and if you plan to equip your other items with whatever loophole you used here.

I’m actually kind of embarrassed to have overlooked this on the release, but I’m glad we got it worked out now.

Basically, there’s a small, intentional hole in the no-script land restriction, and that hole is the control event.  The no-script restriction is designed to allow things like flight enhancers and animation overriders to continue working, so the parcel assumes that an attachment running a control event is one of those things and allows it to continue operating.

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I get an awful lot of scripting questions via instant message in Second Life, and it occurs to me that some of the answers (the correct ones, anyway) would benefit others.

For this reason, I’m adding a section to my blog called “Ask Luc.” I’ll happily take questions and if I know the answers, I’ll post them on the blog.

Please note that this section is only for questions about scripting, Second Life tips, or personal (not too personal, you understand) curiosities. If you have a support question about an aubreTEC product, ask it here.