Interesting Discovery about Lost Inventory

NO LONGER RELEVANT

What you got there was a "coalesced object". If you select more than one object (by shift-clicking them), and take them into inventory, they will appear as one (with an icon showing several smaller, stacked cubes).
-When you return things from a parcel, it seems a little arbitrary which will be returned as coalesced, and which will show up as individual objects, but it's the same underlying mechanism.
You can certainly sell builds like that, and in many cases it would probably be easier than messing with a positioner script. -Coalesced objects is a comparatively new feature, much newer than the original appearance of things like Rez Faux, and many still use scripts out of sheer habit.
One problem, however, is that as soon as the coalesced objects are rezzed, they "detach". If the rezzer already had the build dialog open, the newly rezzed objects wll stay selected, and can be moved around together. If not, they are now just a bunch of objects in the landscape, and the rezzer will have to select them individually and move them around if he wants to fine tune the position. For a build consisting of two large parts, it's probably easier to just select them and move them around, but for a build with many small detail parts, a script may be easier than trying to catch everything by hand.

I don't think it would work as a way of packaging goods for sale. But coalescing, as it's called, can be a handy way to pick up and put down multiple objects you want to work with together for any reason. When they're taken into inventory that way the icon looks like a little pile of boxes.

I would say no, you have to assume your customers have no clue. If say someone is offering a 1 touch installation via a rezzer, and you are not, who would you buy this build from. I have found that even usinf the rezzers as a building tool to be invaluable. Say you have a fairly intricate build and get to the point where you either A. run out of prims, or B. back yourself into a corner with alpha channels and selecting a prim is a nightmare. Back it into a rezzer. That way you can just pack it into the rezzer as you go along. The land return may return as one item, it deosn't always. I have returned a few shops I rented, they often come in 2-3 pieces as well. Sometimes one section of a roof will stay unique. That would really be hell for a nubie, to align a roof prim.

Thanks for the responses. I never heard of coalescent objects before.

I know about the difficultly in aligning prim objects. I purchased a beautiful cabinet a while back and it took me for ever to align the prim doors.

"CX"

wow - what great news that you found your lost stuff, CX!

It's also a good idea to remember coalesced objects when you have items returned to your lost and found folder due to a auto return for example. There could be hundreds of objects returned but only one object in you Inv called 'object' or something helpful.

wow! What an experience that must have been. I would have been beside myself had I lost that build. I lost one box with some things and it made me sad for days..I can't imagine losing my build, home, and all contents and just chalking it up to SL loss and moving on. LOL!!

I am so glad you found your things.

When I - deliberately - store a build as a coalesced object, I do it by camming back and selecting the prims I want.
I have one prim named as a description of the build.
Shift-clicking then allows me to include or exclude odd prims.
The last pair of shift-clicks is to exclude and then include the 'description' prim. This becomes the root of the coalesced object and shows my chosen description in Inventory.

For reasons noted in posts above, a coalesced object would not be a good way of selling to others- unless your object was to inflict a nervous breakdown on (1) the customer and in turn (2) on yourself.

Ok so quick question about this..if say I wanted to move my house, could i select all the objects inside and take them all back together and then say rez them back all in the same position once the house is where I want it? This would save me a ton of time.

Yep, that works very well actually. Just be sure you don't accidently link 'em all. Which would be hard to do as the perms would hafta match, n' likely they won't, but still...

yeah, if you highlighted multiple objects and prims and then right click and 'take' you can then rez the whole thing at a later date. A tip would be, the last prim that is selected before you take into your inventory will be the root prim. So when you drag and drop the object from your inventory it will be the root prim that will rez at the point where you dropped the object on the ground.

Personally I would use an auto aligner to move builds around to avoid prim drift.

I've run inta several objects that for whatever reason were coalesced rather than bein' linked... Gawds know why they did it that way. 1st thing ta do in that case is LINK 'EM!

From reading the posts above I would be careful about doing it that way.

The house would rezz in exactly the same orientation North and South position for instance. You would have trouble rezzing in the exact height position. In a sky box it won't matter too much but in a ground build you may have the house hovering right above the landscape and find it hard to adjust downward.

Rainy thanks for the good words. I only lost two skyboxes. I was more careful with my Bourbon St Buildings.

"CX"

I am still a little new to all of this so will need to read up on the auto aligner and stuffs. But WOO this is awesome.

So basically then I could just take every single thing in the house, link the house as the root prim and then just drop it where i want and it's like I never moved??

(and sorry CX for hijacking and thanks to the others for your help)

ohhhhh... darn. I want to take the house from the ground to the sky so the house would be on a platform (i think.. so that's my plan right now). Still same thing you think?

I have the Rezz Faux tool and I would be happy to demo it for you or help with your build project in a sand box some where.

"CX"

Thanks CX! That would be awesome!

I am thinking I want a different house so I am going to look around today (so if anyone has any good links for builders of prefabs both houses and sky boxes I would be so thankful) but I will get up with you in world in the near future and you can just let me know when you have some free time Thanks again for the offer.

*editing this made no sense.. i still want to move my current house though.. lol i'm thinking way ahead of myself this morning. ahhhhhh!!! *

It just seemed easier to get the new house, and then be able to rez everything at once into it rather than one piece at a time..

A couple of additions to that: The "Select only my objects" option in the menu can be hugely useful for this. Check that, and just drag a selection box over the area.
*However*, do be careful not to cam so far back that the smallest objects are distance culled. You will only select the items actually shown by the viewer.

Ive used Rez faux for years both for selling commercial prefabs and as a personal building tool and I cant fault it, im still reiceving updates from the creator years later and I bet it is still only a few hundred Lindens. Check out SL Exchange, creator is Lex Neva.

There is no need to link the build.
It might not be even possible to do so.

If you have a group of unlinked prims selected, you can Take them into inventory as a unit - a 'coalesced object'.
My use of "root prim" above may have given the impression that linking was necessary or desirable.


Dealing with personal builds as coalesced objects works for me.
I just have to remember to be in Edit mode before rezzing the coalesced object. That way the entire collection can be moved and rotated as one. If I forget Edit, then I have to take the build back again if it has not rezzed precisely where I want it.

Dropping a packaging script into every prim/group to allow use of a packaging system seems to me to be over the top for personal builds.

Yes!
That one is a killer

I always check for orphan bits left behind.
It takes a bit of zooming and dragging selection.

The risk of prim drift/unalignment from manually rotating a build is too high in my opinion so I would never manually rotate a finished build that had been perfectly aligned and would allways use an auto rezzer. Only takes a second to link and drop a positioning script in the root prim so no effort involved. Each to their own i suppose!

EDIT: FREAKY 666 Posts!!!!!!! I shall retain the mark of the beast and will never post on these forums again!

If you have the Edit menu open before you rez an object(s), it/they will automatically be selected on rezzing.

Then you can adjust the position of the whole clump of them.

It's horses for courses.
A purely personal large build that grows and gets adjusted over time can be a bitch to organise as a set of link groups after the event.
If I'm taking a build like that, including furniture etc. then I'll live with odd bits of drift.

On the other hand, if I were selling a build, deciding to use a packaging system would be a no-brainer.