The Next Level

     This article isn't as much of a technical one, I just want to take a moment to talk about two amazing supplements to scripters everywhere, PHP scripts and mySQL databases. Guys, seriously. This stuff is worth learning. If you can LSL, you can PHP...and PHP is a billion times more powerful than LSL ever was. mySQL is the simplest stuff in the world. The greatest advantage to using scripts outside of Second Life is that they can be accessed from any point in the grid, quicker than you can say 'hypertext preprocessor'. That means that communicating between sims has never been easier. When you throw a mySQL database into the mix, you can then hard-store data with your LSL scripts like you never could before. Seeing as those are basically the two biggest weaknesses of Second Life scripting, it's easy to tell why mastering these forces can boost your power as a scripter many times over. Believe me when I say it's a lot easier than it sounds. All you need is proper hosting that supports PHP and mySQL, and a few days tops of studying to get used to it. If you are fluent in LSL you will find that you already know many of the functions that PHP is capable of, you just need to find the name and format of each; this info is available at several points throughout the Web. Another thing to consider is that PHP is -so- much faster than LSL, and even if you can achieve the operation of a script entirely in LSL you can pass off much of the work to a similar PHP script to take care of the all of the heavy-lifting involved. So, definitely check this out. It is very much worth the meager time and effort. Perhaps in the future I will post some tutorial articles outlining the setup and implementations, but for now...it's all up to you. If you are serious about your scripting, take the next step!