Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdfjkl | Hacker News Reader

Many years ago when Second Life was a small community of incredibly cool and gifted people (around near the end of beta/beginning of live), I've written some games there. I've long abandoned SL, but the games still exist in world (because I have a lifetime account, so my virtual land ownership never expires).

I've set the games to email me when someone achieves a respectable score in one. I still occasionally get one of those emails. That's LSL (Linden Scripting Language) code that was compiled into bitcode years ago and the source hasn't been touched in any way since, and neither has the bitcode (or the script would've been reset and lost its memory - all the highscores are stored only in script memory) - and it still continues to run. This amazes me. That's the kind of stability many webhosts can only dream of.

Oh, the SLURL is on the bottom of these emails if you want to check out some really old games: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Stillman/65/81/24

View on HN

I used to be on the teengrid, and even some of those guys were insane. I used to know someone who had built a javascript version of the viewer. There was no viewing but you could access everything else (inventory, chat, map).

Teen grid also lacked the ability to get items from the main grid so the average build quality of anything was pretty bad. I wonder how many of those builders went on to work in 3d animation or something similar. Pretty much everyone I know who used to play it either ended up in coding or some artistic career.

> I used to know someone who had built a javascript version of the viewer.

Fellow former TGer-

Alpha Zaius/Ming Chen, I think? (Andy Ortman and his brother - featured on the news back then)

I think they post here.

I know the name, don't think I met them.

That was Katherine Berry's AjaxLife: https://my.secondlife.com/katharine.berry

She recently wrote about an experience with LindenLabs that caused her to lose interest in developing within SecondLife: http://kathar.in/post/149846332570/lsl-ui

I was on the teen-grid, too. In my time there, I met many really gifted teen programmers. They partly inspired me to pursue computer science, and, years later, I've even had the unexpected pleasure of meeting some of them in person!

> She recently wrote about an experience with LindenLabs that caused her to lose interest in developing within SecondLife: http://kathar.in/post/149846332570/lsl-ui

Augh. As someone who, back in the day, put significant effort into building up a semi-sane framework for UI construction in my own LSL scripts... that looks so much nicer than what I had to work with it's painful.

Yeah, I can see the Lindon board rejecting any UI element that wasn't unnecessarily obtuse or would randomly stab you in the face. It would undoubtedly cause confusion for people who run the official client.

> code that was compiled into bitcode years ago and the source hasn't been touched in any way since

Maybe the code was recompiled (i think they 've switched to mono now) , but the script state is saved separately.

No, legacy (non-Mono scripts) still run with their original bitcode. You can actually still compile to legacy bitcode to this day if you select the option in the script editor. Raw script memory is persisted and restored; recompiling would break that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com