OK, lame to quote it but if you read my blog you know I’m a sci-fi geek (I refuse to say fanboy about myself though others have used the word pointedly and often.) so I had to get a quote from the show. This is the first time I’ve gone through step by step to show you how to modify a script from the lslwiki to get the result you want. And to be completely honest, it’s a ton of experimentation. If you enjoy it you’ll spend hours at it, if you hate it, you’ll never touch it again, but knowing the concepts will help you understand part of the way SecondLife makes things interactive. Scripting is also one of the most lucrative jobs you can have in SecondLife. People charge alot more for it then generally any other profession.

The script in it’s entirety can be found here. However you don’t need to see the whole thing to see the part to mess with to create your own versions of fireflys and bling and little blinking annoying come here and see effects. The important part of the script to modify is right at the top.

There are several factors that let you turn those boring explosive things that come out of this script into fireflies. Let’s start at the top….

Anything that has a // in front of it in an LSL script is a comment, it does nothing in the script itself and Secondlife compilers ignore it. But it tells you alot about what the line before it does if the scripter is kind and generous.

The first section is all about how the particles are going to behave in general. A 1 means that it will do something and a 0 means it wont. So the first thing to change in the script as it’s written is that we want our fireflies to not change size. So we’re going to set the integer interpSize to zero so that the code won’t do that. We can also decide if we don’t want them to pay attention to wind. After all they are motorized aren’t they, who cares about wind?

The next part that makes your particles really unique is lower down under particle parameters.

Float age is the life your particle will have in seconds. Fireflies don’t live a long time so I have this set to 3 seconds. The problem with saying lots of time is that particles are constantly moving, so it’s hard to have long lived particles, and it increases lag. You’ll find one of the ways to make your particles move farther is to increase their life. You will have to do that stuff I talked about up top and experiment.

The other really valuable part here, for beginning particle effects is the startColor and endColor. I like my fireflys whitish yellow and as they die fading a bit more golden. So you have to figure out what color you want, find the RGB value of it and put it in, then tweak it as you see what happens. So now you’re asking how to find the RGB value of a color. That’s a good question. The easiest way I’ve found to figure out RGB is to use another script, this one requires no modification at all. You build a box, put the script in, then change the color of the box to what you want and the box will tell you what the RGB value is, it uses the building tools in SecondLife, it’s free and it works, all things I love. You can get that here.

So once you’ve done all that, you test it…. and test it… and test it.

Eventually you’ll come up with a close approximation of Mal’s ship. Wait…..

Scripting is a headache because of this thing. It’s why if you know someone who loves it you should be very very nice to them. I know this dosen’t read that well without code examples and I’m going to get blasted from the technical side for not being technical enough and the un-technical side saying “Huh?” But the real point of this article is the progression of people and how they got to be where they are, this is how I did it. I encourage you to find your own road….

Story: OK, so SecondLife came out with a new feature called sculpted prims around this time. I was extremely curious about these things as the detail capable in them was something that seemed really amazing. So I set out to mess with them. I started by buying a bunch of sculpt maps on SLX and seeing what people were coming up with. The thing with sculpted prims is that the actual 3d shape is a sphere. But the appearence to people looking at it is determined by a gradient texture map inherent in how you build the prim. So I started looking for ways to design my own sculpted prims.

The programs I used ranged from Blender to Maya to Wings3d, there are serious people who love all of these but for what I wanted to do I found many of them to be too full featured. The idea behind sculpties is that you first build the 3d shape you want the sphere to appear as in a 3d modeling program outside of SecondLife that then spits out the map so you can use it inside. I ended up finding the programs I wanted in Rokuro & Tokoroten. These are free programs that work kind of like the old playdough tools we used to have as kids. The one I used to design the falls was Tokoroten, I made a wavy map that had the backside flat, so it looked like the waves actualy rippled over rough surfaces underneath. From there it was a matter of animating the texture of water so it flowed ‘down’ the texture. Then I added rocks with my custom firefly particle texture. Again this is just the free particle script from the lsl wiki tweaked to what I want.

I really love this bit of landscape and the model is a dear friend named Arhiya that often runs around as a pixie. By the way, if you want to know about the title, this link will show you, but the applicable quote is, “Remember that Tinker Bell is magic. And when you say she mends the pots and pans — that’s why her name is Tinker — she does it with pixie dust!”

I think we should all take a lesson from that, “DO IT WITH PIXIE DUST!”

I’m off to find a pixie, next time I’ll go through the particle script and show you how I changed it.