Second Life

Second Life (SL) is like a MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game), although many of the people hanging out there will be offended if you called it a “game”. It is a 3D virtual environment created between a database on a huge farm of Linux servers and viewer programs running on home PCs. But besides the bare simulated ground, everything in SL is created by one of the “residents” there. Objects in SL can have snippets of code inserted in them to add behavior. I have found this to be a fascinating environment to program in. I’ll start this talk with an overview of what SL is like and briefly touch on the organization of the servers. I’ll describe the scripting language, data types, programming environment and the foibles of the API library. We should be able to go “in-world” live and show some projects I’m working on in Second Life.