New World Notes

SLua: Why Roblox Creators Should Also Look Into Second Life's New Scripting Language

Originally published on my Patreon

Last week's Second Life platform updates were mainly focused on the new Firestorm streaming option, but a long-awaited update to its scripting language might be even more important:

SLua stands for Second Life Lua, a language based on Luau (originally developed by Roblox), extended to harness the full power of Second Life’s existing functions. Think of it as LSL’s more powerful, versatile new cousin—offering you more flexibility, cleaner syntax, and features that make coding dramatically simpler.

Emphasis mine, because it's not only relevant to the thousands of SL creators who use LSL, but the hundreds of thousands of Roblox creators versed in Luau.

Signal Linden (Bennett Goble), head Software Engineer at the company, tells me Roblox's Luau and Second Life's SLua are pretty close: 

"It is the Luau virtual machine extended to work with Second Life," he tells me. "We've had to make changes to support the requirements of mobile agents (AKA moving between regions) which means changes to support serializing/deserializing the runtime state. To users, it is the same language, just with LSL functionality. So: the same events residents know from LSL, same functions, with subtle interoperability changes to the language."

This also opens up a new opportunity for scripters working in Roblox:

Second Life Combat 2 Development Tips from Linden Lab's Creator Tools Product Manager

Since Linden Lab recently unveiled Combat 2, a major update to Second Life's combat system, I got in touch with Kyle Linden, the company project manager under the Avatars and Creator Tools initiative. A Linden since 2007, Kyle's also a longtime gamer and even owned a roleplay region in SL before joining the company. "[O]ne of the things I have always wished for Second Life is easy to enter combat situations to enhance role playing games our residents create," he tells me.

While there are many impressive user-made game systems in Second Life, the platform's streaming architecture is not immediately optimized for high speed, physics-based combat out of the box. So I asked Kyle for some tips for community developers getting started with implementing Combat 2:

Second Life Platform Updates Coming Soon-ish: New VR Client, Gamepad Compatibility, Combat 2.0, Native Lua Scripting & More!

I spent most of yesterday's Second Life update meeting from Linden Lab preparing to blog about the mobile launch, but I also took some rough notes on current progress/upcoming features announced by the dev team, including Signal Linden (Bennett Goble) a head Software Engineer at the company: 

PBR graphics improvements: The Lindens acknowledged user complaints about the launch in recent weeks, and said that bug fixes and optimization work is actively going on: "So we have a lot of concerted effort on PBR now. "

As for upcoming features, they include several that gamers and game developers in particular will dig:

Tuesday Tool Tip: LSL Extension for Visual Studio Code

For the LSL scripter in your life, here's a LSL Language Server extension for Visual Studio Code. If that sounds obscure as Sanskrit, creator Jeremy Fairelander explains it simply thus: "My extension aims to provide professional-grade 'developer experience" features to make writing LSL code easier and more efficient."

Here's even more background, situating as another non-SL tool that's valuable for creating Second Life content:

ChatGPT Can Help You Create Working LSL Code for Second Life! Plus Other Experimental Applications Suggested by Soft Linden.

ChatGPT might seem pretty useless for a legacy virtual world like Second Life (I certainly thought so last year), but recent updates have somewhat changed my mind. In his off-hours, Linden Lab's infosec head (known by his avatar, Soft Linden) has been playing around with OpenAI's Large Language Model, and discovered some pretty impressive Second Life-related applications.

For starters: You can use ChatGPT to help script in Linden Script Language!

"GPT-4 (paid) works reasonably well for LSL," Soft tells me. "It will hallucinate some functions that don't exist, but it can save time on the overall first pass, and it can usually correct the code when flaws are pointed out. It can find some bugs if you ask it to find the defects in code you paste in. GPT-3.5 (free usage) is weaker on code."

The older free version is the one I blogged that hallucinated LSL like crazy. But Soft has seen some improvements since then:

"OpenAI’s ChatGPT lacks up-to-the-minute information, but simulates human reasoning to a much better degree. It knows what Second Life is, and shows evidence that it’s probably scraped our knowledge base and some old third-party Second Life forums. It can debug or suggest improvements to Linden Scripting Language code." Here's an example on OpenAI.

"You can ask it to proofread notecards. Try pasting, 'This is a notecard written for non-technical Second Life users. Suggest a bulletpoint list of improvements for clarity and ease of understanding' followed by your notecard. See what happens.

"You can ask it to help you brainstorm improvements on a business plan for your store or roleplay for your community. You can even ask it how to make your store listing sound more fun. Some suggestions will be bad, but sometimes it surprises you."

He's even used ChatGPT for Firestorm, the popular third party SL viewer.

"As an experiment, I  tried taking a screenshot of the items listed in Firestorm’s 'area search' floater, and asked for 'additional items that would fit a Second Life scene with these items.' It didn’t balk. It read the text out of the snapshot, made a few suggestions, and it suggested a beer cooler and some roasted marshmallow gear for an SL camping spot. Hmm!"

None of this suggests ChatGPT is great with Second Life -- it's literally coded to give you the most mediocre content on the web -- but it's worth playing around with your various SL projects:

"Find a friend or three," Soft advises, "bring up ChatGPT in a browser window, and brainstorm together. Treat it like an unbusy friend or an intern and you may have fun or learn a few things. Or, failing that, you'll better understand its limits."

Soft Linden has also been experimenting with Elon Musk's LLM Grok, and so far the results are notably less useful -- but also hilarious:

 

Tutorial: How to Use Second Life's New LinksetData Feature to Create Roleplay & Quest Games (Guest Post)

LSL LinksetData is a relatively new addition to Second Life scripting that veteran devs say can powerfully transform interactive experiences in Second Life.

To illustrate how, longtime scripter Grace Ling, creator of the popular roleplay app, Really Needy HUD, explains how it's used in her roleplay system -- and how it can be used in a location-finding game.

Read on for her tutorial! 

No, ChatGPT Can't "Write" Code. It Even Makes Up Code That Doesn't Exist.

Fun comment from reader Ravelli Ormstein, spinning off from my post about how full of fail ChatGPT is when you ask it a question you're an expert on:

First, I asked ChatGPT to write a LSL script that would turn on a light when the sun went down. It wrote a nice script, but it didn't work because the AI was using an LSL function that didn't exist. So I complained about it. The AI apologized and fixed the script by using another non-existent function.

This went on until I specifically asked for a script that only used existing functions. The script was usable and in the style we usually write them, with a 300 second timer. The AI kept apologizing for making mistakes until I asked it never to apologize again.

This is an important point, because I've seen some people claim that ChatGPT can write Second Life apps in Linden Script Language (or for that matter, any coding language). No.

Very roughly analogized, ChatGPT is like a natural language version of Google search. So if you ask ChatGPT to write a working script that happens to already exist in its massive database, you may sometimes get lucky with an actual useful response. Otherwise, you'll only get an answer that's most probabilistically coded to appear like a useful response -- in other words, the AI version of Making Shit Up. 

Anyway, more fun from Ravelli with ChatGPT, with a plot twist:

Powerful Scripting Update Coming Soon to Second Life - Here's How It'll Improve Interactive Experiences

(1/24) There's a super great upgrade coming to @SecondLife scripting, that I don't think is getting great attention it should. Before I go on forever about why this is great and will fundamentally change #SL please consider a retweet and maybe a like - to help spread the word. :)

— NeoBokrug (@NeoBokrug) October 19, 2022

Longtime Second Life community scripter NeoBokrug (who keeps the legendary roleplay Wasteland regions running), has a meaty and important tweet storm (above) and blog post here highlighting LinksetData, a much-needed update to Linden Script Language. You should definitely share it with the LSL scripter in your life, but if you're not a scripter, the short version is: It'll make interactive experiences in Second Life much more powerful and persistent.

For instance, consider the Really Needy HUD (a former NWN partner), which turns Second Life into a first-person Sims-type roleplay game: 

Watch the Latest Feature for SL Roleplay: Dueling Pistols That Can Spin!

Lads and ladies, we're here with our first roleplay revolvers: The Duelist's Pride! Designed to be used idly, in roleplay, and wearing for fashion.

DETAILS HERE: https://t.co/svfWmKUsiI

Now available in BASSETT TOWN - https://t.co/oVEdA24qBR pic.twitter.com/g2fPNyCYzL

— Walton Wainwright (@SLContraption) April 29, 2022

Just in time for the Fantasy Faire and the steampunk-themed SL19B anniversary, Walton Wainwright's dueling pistols come with a seriously cool feature I haven't seen in Second Life up until now: Revolvers that can spin in-game:

If you're wearing the gun as an accessory, we've included multiple gun spinning options, a stylish toss, occasional reloads and other idles that play randomly, which can also be toggled off in our menu if you're looking to not twirl your gun or reload all the time.

Watch the trailer above for the supremely cool effect. This is made possible, Mr. Wainwright explains, by SL's recent avatar skeleton upgrade: 

"Creepy Mark" Bot Becomes Top Seller in Original Metaverse of Second Life

After so many stories about Meta in the Metaverse, the inevitable finally occurred: Meet "Creepy Mark", a chatty bot with a suspiciously familiar appearance which you can buy to silently stalk you in the OG metaverse of Second Life.

I just got my own personal Creepy Mark, and now he won't leave my side, following my every move while promising not to abuse my personal data and so on.  (Watch above. He does seem to get confused with climbing hills!)

The smartass brainchild of Moon Bunny Inc & Subculture X, Creepy Mark was the brand's #1 top seller in animated objects in the first days it went on sale, and became a mini-viral hit, ironically enough, on Facebook.

"My business partner created him," Moon explains. "I have been known to complain about Facebook censorship and such, so am guessing that had a hand in inspiring it!"

I'll be impressed with Meta's Horizon Worlds when it has a Creepy Mark bot of its own. (And all the technical and community prerequisites needed to make that possible). But until then, he's available to creep on you in the metaverse before the metaverse was cool.

As for how Creepy Mark works, here's a brief summary from Scribzy, who scripted it: