Guild of Writers

It's great, that will be very welcome!
I'm blue-sky-ing here, bear with me for a second. Could there be a way to make this simpler?..
This is one of those things that many people will want (and will need) to use (like journals, linking books) but will not because of the required coding. At first sight this is 'simple' and 'standard' scripting here, the only thing that will ever vary will be the objects names, the animations, the script ID, etc.. all in all just a couple variables..Would it be possible to somehow use a system where you'd need to input only the necessary variables and let it generate the rest of the Python code? (I have no idea about a potential interface, maybe AlcScript, maybe the PRoperties panel in Blender)
But would it be possible?

(making things simpler is always good although it's often hard )

heh I kinda was thinking the same thing Aloys . Making certain things easier would be great, but it also adds more work for the ones that make it easier for the rest. It's one of those things thats on my wish list

Aloys, I have indeed thought about that and am currently working on something to assist in the creation of linking books and journals. It's still in the early stages, so don't hold your breath.

It would be separate from PyPRP -- Blender is just not good for a lot of things.

Anyway, (like I said) this "project" is still a good way in the future, so don't hold your breath.

I know I certainly appriciate anything that people do here to make Age creation easier!

While scripting for some seems easy and comes to them just fine, for others it can be hard to understand, or confusing.

I place myself in the latter catagory!

I can remember when I was first building maps for the FPS games. The editors are extremely powerful, but if you want certain things to happen, or need certain special effects, you'll still end up having to create script files.
There were many, many tutorials explaining how to create these script files and step by step what each one was doing. This step by step explanation made it a lot easier for the novice to learn so that they could create their own scripts to do something else also.

With Age creation, it's very confusing. You have scripting that is talked about with the Alcugs tutorials, then you come here if you're having problems or trying to do something that doesn't fit the Alcugs tuts, and someone here will throw out some script to you.
While I appriciate that, at the same time, I notice that 9 outta 10 times the scripting here offered by people will look completely different.
Here is how that feels:
You're trying to learn how to plant a tree let's say. You know that you could just stick it in the ground and hope for the best, but that there are things you should do to ensure it's survival and so that it will grow right.
You go to get information on this subject. You speak English only. When you find the "How To" books, you find one in German, another in Spanish, another in French.......and all the pictures look different.......

So you end up scratching your head a lot.

I've had people tell me "Just go to the Alcugs and they'll tell you." I've had others here that call that scripting bad or lame, and they throw something else at me here, but with no manual to tell me how to use it.
Still others tell me to open up another fan's Age and look at their scripting and see how they did it......and it will look even MORE different than anything else!

So it basically get's to the point that I just want to give up on my idea and move on to something more simple as it feels like I'm drowning in the pool of Scripting.

Scripting does not come easy to anyone. Not even to Cyan programmers. You don't want to know how many minor errors Cyan's scripts contain. Still I would recommend studying Cyan's code instead of code from other age writers. You don't want to copy the mistakes others made. For example, not every coder is writing scripts that are multiplayer compatible. Cyan's TPOTS ages should also be skipped because of lacking multiplayer support.

By studying Cyan's code you will see that they also use different ways to achieve similar goals.

That being said, it probably helps if you already know Python when you start. I did not have that advantage when I started scripting for Uru and I can tell you that this way it takes many months of studying the Uru Python code to get a grasp on it. I guess you could say I learned Python the Uru way (which some believe to be a terrible example of Python coding).

One huge advantage I did have was that I could see the effects of my experiments in real time in the vault of an UU shard (and correct anything that went wrong through the vaultmanager).
I guess that is the reason why my linking code looks somewhat different. I use several safety checks trying to prevent problems in the vault. Linking itself is easy but linking correctly is hard. Although rumors that it will kill the vault are vastly exaggerated, wrong linking will definately cause avatar corruption. Linking is an art, both IC and OOC. If you link to a Cyan age without passing the proper arguments you will prevent books and pages to appear on the Relto shelf or remove links from the Nexus. It is still my opinion that one should never implement linking to any Cyan age in one's own age, but if you really must do it then for God's sake do it safely.

What reference do we currently have for writing multi-player-oriented scripts? Can we decrypt and study MOUL scripts?

There are no released tools for decrypting MOUL scripts. If you still have an UU installation you could study that. Or you could look at the Prime ages in TPOTS.

Basically there are just a few principles to watch out for when implementing multiplayer code. I will start a new post and sum them up later. Then others can add anything to that post I may forget.

Great idea. I suggest putting that in the tutorials section so it doesn't get lost.