Documenting Second Life® LSL Scripts

Documentation. The bane of every software developer's existence. Traditionally, programmers understood documentation was necessary so that those that followed them could figure out how to maintain their ingenious software creations.

However over the years with the emergence of large software systems and their development teams, the need to communicate the how and why of a design became that much more critical. More recently the pressure for good documentation has only increased with the emergence of open-source software, online collaboration and distributed development.

Even the source code for purchased software is being made available today to customers who then can customize applications for their own use. In fact many of the scripts that users can purchase for the Second Life® world allow their LSL code to be modified and hence tailored to end-user needs.

So communicating your LSL script's design becomes a value-proposition for your customers and this is where MiceOnABeam's visual formalism for designing a script can really help. States and the events that transition between them are no longer obscured within code. They become explicit and visible in the model so that a script's high level logic flow is immediately evident and easier to understand.

The latest release of MiceOnABeam, version 1.0.1, features a new documentation facility that allows developers to fully document their scripts by adding a textual comment to each component in their graphical models. As with traditional comments used to document code, the comments can explain the modeling component's design, it's usage or any other information of interest.

MiceOnABeam also makes it easy to peruse a script model and view the model's comments by simply moving the mouse cursor over any modeling component which will display it's comment in a pop-up note.

MiceOnABeam v1.0.1

MiceOnABeam version 1.0.1 is available for downloading here. Aside from the new component commenting feature described above, the release features a number of bug fixes and improvements to the user interface that help with selecting, moving and positioning modeling components.

Users can just download the new release and run the installer over the existing installation. For those who have the Professional version, your existing license file will continue to work with the new release.

See the MiceOnABeam v1.0.1 Release Notes for full details on the release.

Upcoming
I'm starting work on developing the feature list for the next release so please pass on your wish lists. To that end I've created a new forum Feature Requests on the MiceOnABeam website to capture your input. Please create a new post per feature that you'd like to see in a future release. This will allow other users to comment on each feature. I'll publicize a tentative list once it coalesces.

Antonius