A few ideas

1. An external program that would export MAX, OBJ, or other mesh objects and convert them to something SL can use, by converting it as closely as possble to SL prims.

2. allow for body parts to contain more than one attachment.

3. allow objects to be more than 10m, by letting a cube grow 2x it's size maybe it could count as 4prims, andn 3x it's size it would count as 9prims... and so on exponentially.

4. when creating an object, have an option to 'mirror, the object for better allignment of odd shapes.

5. The ability to export the exact measurments of any certain AV, and each of it's body parts, so modeling animations can be more precise. creating anims in out of world now is fairyl hard when most av's are all sorts of sizes.

6. Allow for more comprehensive settings for other friends and AV's, such as if two AV's get married allow them to decide if there objects will automaticly be set to copy/mod/transfer, intstead of constantly having to update them, this would also apply well to group members.

7. A search for the inventory that would include more than the current directory and more than just the first word. (maybe allowing for sorting inventory out of world)

8. When selecting multiple objects in inventory to allow them all to be modified and/or moved at the same time. (ie.. copy/mod/transfer or moved to another folder.)

9. setting keys so ctrl+ins and ctr+home do the same thing as most other editors, copy and past.. just as ctrl+c and ctrl+v do currently.

10. allowing for an AV to set it's home on anothers property, if the land owner permits it. allowing lander owners to more options for friends (especially those that own sims) but without having to worry about some of the fears of giving them full access.

10.. is good for now hehe...

Tinker

4. Yes, mirror would be very handy!
6. You can right-click a calling card and grant modify permissions.
7. We've been asking. They've been investigating.
8. Pet peeve of many people. I'd love to see a simple queueing script that allows this.

Oh, dear god, isnt it about time we had a freaking FAQ in place to prevent people from stating the obvious and requesting the impossible for the 1000th time?

Apparantly not =P

Ignore him, Tink. He's a grumpy old fart. If he whines too much, ask him questions about beta to distract him. He'll go off on a nostalgia trip for days, reminiscing about how everything that could ever have been done or suggested in SL was already done in Beta. I dunno why us younguns bother to participate at all really - there really is nothing we can achieve or bring to the world any more that Eggy didn't already do *sigh*.

Oh, and Eggy... one of your other favorite things to say is 'instead of whining about it, go out and do something about it'. So instead of bitching about people asking the same old questions again and again, why don't YOU champion the FAQ?

FWIW, Tink, I agree with many of your suggestions. 4... oh god, yes... 5, 6, 7,8 and 10... would be very handy.

I love you Kris, I just do
The thing about me making a FAQ is that I have not the power to post it anywhere visible. Users cannot make a sticky thread in a forum, and it would be the most obvious place to put it. I suppose I could use the SL History wiki to compile a history of outstanding feature requests. Both of those who stand out for being nearly impossible to achieve with the current system and those who stand out for being a brilliant new addition that LL should really start thinking about. But people would never see it there...
The thing that annoyed me the most about Tinker's post isn't that it's yet another feature request full of pipe dreams. It's that there are threads on this very forum page about some of those, and why they would not be feasible. Common netiquette dictates that one should LURK in a forum for a certain amount of time before posting, reading the posts and getting a feel for what sort of people are here and what sort of things are usually discussed...

"1. An external program that would export MAX, OBJ, or other mesh objects and convert them to something SL can use, by converting it as closely as possble to SL prims."

This is not possible.

"2. allow for body parts to contain more than one attachment."

Its called linking. Aside from that, youre not gonna get more than one object per attachment point. The concept is simply ridiculous. The whole point of having attachment points is to allow an object to be attached there. You probably cant have more attachment points than those that already exist with SL's current architecture.

"3. allow objects to be more than 10m, by letting a cube grow 2x it's size maybe it could count as 4prims, andn 3x it's size it would count as 9prims... and so on exponentially."

You're not gonna get this. There is a reason why all these limits are how they are you know. If they were anything else, SL wouldnt be possible.


"4. when creating an object, have an option to 'mirror, the object for better allignment of odd shapes."

How does this differ from rotating an object 180 degrees?

"5. The ability to export the exact measurments of any certain AV, and each of it's body parts, so modeling animations can be more precise. creating anims in out of world now is fairyl hard when most av's are all sorts of sizes."

The server is not aware of your avatar's actual shape, so it cannot report information about it.

"6. Allow for more comprehensive settings for other friends and AV's, such as if two AV's get married allow them to decide if there objects will automaticly be set to copy/mod/transfer, intstead of constantly having to update them, this would also apply well to group members."

It's called the Partner Program. It's coming. Be patient.

"7. A search for the inventory that would include more than the current directory and more than just the first word. (maybe allowing for sorting inventory out of world)"

I second this. I dont know very well how the inventory works behind the scenes, but if its at all possible, It would be handy. It's probably been whined about a dozen times already. I myself am a major inventory whiner-abouter.

"8. When selecting multiple objects in inventory to allow them all to be modified and/or moved at the same time. (ie.. copy/mod/transfer or moved to another folder.)"

See 7.

"9. setting keys so ctrl+ins and ctr+home do the same thing as most other editors, copy and past.. just as ctrl+c and ctrl+v do currently."

The 80s are calling, they want their MSDOS shortcuts back

"10. allowing for an AV to set it's home on anothers property, if the land owner permits it. allowing lander owners to more options for friends (especially those that own sims) but without having to worry about some of the fears of giving them full access."

Take a LM and give it to them. This was removed at the request of a thousand whiners. I hate it as much as you do, FWIW.

I love you too, Eggy. You know I do

But you're still an old fart. Though I'm sorry I compelled you to write a full and concise explanation rather than your usual 'bah humbug' type reply.

re: 1 - I would disagree that it's impossible - I've actually seen software that does similar. But certainly very very unlikely to be implemented by LL or even a third party. And indeed a 'mesh to prim' convertor would be the only way it should be considered if it was gonna be. I would be dead set against having external meshes importable themselves.

re: 4 - He's not asking for 180 degree spin, silly. Remember when I made my prim wings? the complex, bone-structured ones? It took me hours to note every single skew, twist and cut in each bone and replicate it for an inverted duplicate for the opposite wing. What Tink is asking for, and what has been asked for numerous times, is a button to make an inverse copy of your prim - if it's a spiral thats got a right hand thread, it makes a left threaded copy, for example.

re: 5 - I too would love the ability to export my numbers (avatar shape)... which I currently write down on paper... even if it was something only the owner could do for themselves via some dataserver request. The reason for me is that I want to be able to model Kris as accurately as possible in Poser to avoid some of those multiple uploads to tweak an inch or two in a pose that the animation preview doesnt help you with. I'd love access to export a lot of other stuff, too. Like the contents of my inventory as a heirarchical XML list.

re: 10 - I think just a checkbox with 'allow setting home here' to go along with the 'allow LM here'. (Btw Eggy, last time I was at your new place, you have it set to not allow LM's! bah!). It shouldn't be enforced. I have a number of people who want to log in on my sim who don't necessarily want to be or can't be in my group.

And more owner definable perms would be great. There are a few people I would like to give full land rights to. A few I'd like to give full Estate rights to. And some I'd like to give partial rights to. It'd be cool to just have a list of authorised officers where you could just tick along a row of perms per person to set stuff like 'can edit land, can return other people's objects, can't return owner objects' etc'.

Yes it is. Haha. And indeed it is.

Seriously, the point about a FAQ that wouldn't work is simply that if the FAQ writer is not interested in open-ended progress and says technologically false things like "SL speed cannot be improved because objects are dynamic" then constructive discussion becomes impossible. We hear a lot of it even without a FAQ, ie. appeal to authority.

So, better to have no FAQ at all than to have a biased FAQ that enshrines nonsense that the newbies then just repeat without understanding the issues. SL optimizations are a huge case in point, since dynamic objects merely mean that you have to flush out your old optimizations when an object is reloaded, not that you cannot do them on data that's been streamed in. A bad FAQ can create chaos by spreading disinformation, because techno-newbies don't have the background to realize that a mere difficulty isn't the same thing as gospel.

If there were to be a FAQ though, its most important entry would be something derived from Philip Rosedale's and Mitch Kapor's visions, something along the lines of "There are no predefined limits, everything is possible, and the merely difficult is mandatory, because it is our goal to take over the world." As a technologist, I find that admirable and inspiring, but it means that saying "No" in a FAQ is off limits.

Can anyone point me to this magical software that can convert a mesh into a SANE number of primitives? I mean, DUH, of course you can do a crude approximation with voxel rasterization, and of course you can use triangles as primitives to render an exact copy of the mesh (XyObject does that), but that would be more prims than SL can handle, and an order of magnitude more than what a human would build, which isnt what he is asking I guess. Last time I studied anything about AI, 3D pattern recognition was still a bit primitive. How do you take a bunch of random points and figure out what they would represent? Genetic algorithms? How many days would it take for a reasonably complex scene?
If you want me to believe what you say, please point me to this magical software that can do an efficient conversion of meshes to prims.
And Morgaine, for the love of god, stop being such a silly dreamer, LL is a business. They are not going to rearchitect their entire software because of a silly feature. When I say that something is not possible I say that its not reasonably feasible within the constraints of the current architecture. "It's not possible" to link objects hierarchically, but if LL wanted to devote the resources to implementing it, there's certainly no great law of physics preventing them from doing so, given that OSMP already has it and all of that.

I refer you to Philip Rosedale and Mitch Kapor, who see no conflict between dreaming and running a viable business. In fact, they see it as a business opportunity, because when you implement something that exists only in your dreams then you are giving yourself a great chance to corner the market.

I'm with them on this. And I notice that you're lurking around in this particular dream too.

None of the feature requests that I've read are asking for such conversions. All SL prims are 3D, and while some people might have requested tesselation of imported meshes (although I don't recall a request for that either), you wouldn't do a 2D operation with 3D objects. Or maybe you meant volume-fiiling the space enclosed by an arbitrary mesh with SL prims? Um no, that wouldn't make sense, so I'm having trouble understanding the conversion thing. Forget it, no conversion of anything, thanks.

If someone defines an 8-vertex mesh with the vertices at the same locations as a current cube prim, that's exactly how it would appear. It would have more per-vertex data associated with it (but note that multiple vertices on a single plane are easy to optimize away in a 3:2 ratio), but it would have far less parametrization data stored with it. Namely, just a single scaling vector. Other hidden parameters would be no different to those of ordinary prims, eg. center of gravity, bounding box, and so on.

Maybe I'll do a search for "conversion" if I can figure out the forum changes. I haven't seen that come up as an issue before.