A Technical overview of Second Life

Intro

Many activities in SL, especially ones related to content creation, require some technical knowledge. This includes Building using prims, Scripting using LSL, and other activities such as creating clothing and textures, though perhaps to a lesser degree.

Positions and Vectors

Every place in SL has a unique position. Look at the top of your viewer screen to see the current position of your Avatar in the current region, for example Ross/19.5/245.6/51.3. This means you are in the Ross region, 19.5 meters east of the leftmost edge, 245.6 meters north of the bottom edge, and 51.3 meters up from the bottom (which might be both underground and underwater). In LSL, positions are usually stored in a data structure called a vector, and might look like

  vector pos = < 19.5, 245.6, 51.3 >; 

The Southwest corner of every region is 0/0/0. The positions in a region relative to that corner are sometimes called world, region, global, or sim coordinates. We will talk about local coordinates in a minute.