Question on Linking objects?

I'm currently working on a project ship, however I've run into a problem where I can't link it together if any 2 sub parts are more than 30-35m away from each other. I get the error

Alert: Link failed -- pieces too far apart


Nothing seems to work, yet I see other people with objects that are much larger than my ship. I saw someone today with an aircraft carrier nearly the lenght of the entire Olive sim. I asked how he did it and he said that you create major sections, then link those together.

So I tried that, however that doesn't work either. I broke the ship into a front and a back half. I linked all the objects together for the front half as one obj, then all the objects for the back half as one object. Then attepmted to link the 2 sections together, but it failed. It seems if any 2 sub parts of any subsection are more than 30-35m away, it simply refuses to link them.

Anyone have any clues or tips on this? Has anyone found a work around to this? Are other people getting around this by simply laying parts next to each other and not actually linking them together as a single object? (Obviously that would be fine for a stationary thing like a house, but not good for a moble vehicle like a ship)

Any clues, tips, or ideas would be greatly appreciated...

Well, making vehicles with more than 31 prims is not particularly satisfying. To make anything physical, it has to be less than 32 prims (and the rider counts towards this limit).

As to the linking, there are two limits you can reach: too far apart, and too many prims. You can sometimes bend the rules a little, but not much. There are two ways to work around this though.

First, you can just keep the linked parts next to each other. When you want to move or pocket the whole thing, select all of the parts and Take. You can select multiple, unlinked objects and then right-click and Take them into your inventory.

If you take each linked piece separately, then you'll have to hand position them when you drop them into the world again. You can also script them so they re-align themselves. There are many ways to go about this, none of them are trivial, however. But if you want the object to auto-rez from a script, it may be the only way. All objects that are rezed with the llRezObect script command will be rotated to <0,0,0,1> or whatever rotation you give the command. (Whereas objects dropped from your inventory retain their previous rotations.) A way to get around THAT is to make the head object of every linked group have a rotation of zero. You can give it a transparent texture if it would spoil the look.

Hope that answers your question, and some future questions you might have had.

Heh, could it move? I doubt it...

Next time you see something that looks a little too big to believe, try an "edit" on it and look at the information to find out how many objects it's made of, and what kind, etc.

My tuppence worth...

When I'm completeing a large build, I usually link sub-sections and then link those sections together to make one big linked object. I've not hit any limits on number of prims yet. BUT, I do make sure that the parent prims of each linked section are close to the parent object of its neighbour. Sometimes I put in a smaller section between larger ones, so that the distance between parent prims is not too large to link them.

HTH

Correct me if I'm wrong, since this is a complete guess, but I'm not sure double linking like that really preserves the smaller linked sets. When you unlink, you end up with all individual objects and not the smaller link sets, right?

Assuming that's the case, then the absolute limiting factor would be the center points of the two most distant objects you want to link, correct?

And again, I'd like to stress the need for a BUILDERS FORUM for questions like these. Time to go bump the thread on the general discussions forum. Go post to it...lol

> You can also script them so they re-align themselves.

I guess you could have a central Foreman_Recorder object, which sends out a world-ping when you click it.

You make a slave-script and add this to each and everyone of your objects.

You click the Foreman_Recorder object, it world-pings, ie shouts WORLD_PING on channel 1. The slaves listen to this and shout their name, position and rotation. Might want to have slaves auto-assign themselves a generated unique name, since objectids are keyed to instantiations rather than classes.

The Foreman_Recorder object parses and stores all replies, waits till 10 seconds have passed since last reply then emails you the results in a sensible format.

Now you can copy and paste your email into your generator script, or to a Notecard datafile for the generator.

Might have problems with stack space in the foreman, so might want to have multiple emails, flushing the stack each time.

I take it someone already wrote this, but thought like writing a design as a mental exercice and cos I cant logon and cos I dont have time to code right now and cos I have to go back to work tomorrow (((((( and cos I didn't see it in the library

ZHugh

Yeah, you would think you could do that, wouldn't you? I know I thought I could. But here's the rub:

llRezObject is broken

The center of the object being rezed that llRezObject sets with the passed-in position vector does not always equal the center of the object as reported by the object itself with llGetPos.

If you have ever noticed, when dealing with linked prims, that the point where the edit-arrow-cluster sits is NOT in the position the linked object reports as it's location... It seems reasonable to guess that it is that point that is being used by llRezObject as the "center". Unfortunately, there is no script command that will return that point. (I think the point is the average of the positions of all prims in the linkage, but I could be wrong.)

So either llRezObject needs to be fixed so that it sets the correct position (which is cleanest, but will break MANY scripts that are already using it as is)...

...Or a new function needs to be added that returns the correct "center" point, such as:

vector llGetAveragePos()


Now, I got around this in a clunky way: I had my foreman object get the positions of all the objects and store them (using a name & owner detecting sensor) and then I use that list to rez a second copy or each. I then have it sense each named object in the list (which returns two objects, original and rezed) and it gets the offset betwixt them and applies that to the list. The final list should rez correctly. It's a big pain in the hippo's butt. (Stupid pointy-hatted gnomes.)

[insert formal request for llGetAveragePos() here]

Thanks for all the replies, I think I found a solution which I'll share here since others have run into this.

BTW, I agree that a builder's forum would be great for questions like this. I'm sure there are plenty of building related conversations.

I haven't run into the "too many primitives" issue yet. Both halves of the ship consist of more than 32 primitives each, and no complaints when I try to link either one of them together. Perhaps that was upped in 1.1 patch?

Also it's correct that SL doesn't support sublinking. If you have to groups of linked objects and then try to link those sub parts together, it unlinks everything in both parts and then relinks them as one object again. So yes if any two primitives are too far appart the link will fail. Sublinking would be a nice edition to future versions of the engine. Because its also a pain every time you want to edit a single primitive you have to unlink everything and relink it back again. Sublinking would allow you to unlink into chunks which would be easier to relink.

But enough hooha, here's the solution I found. While the engine will not let you link objects that contain primitives that are too far apart, it will let you make a JOINT! So for example I can make a limited point to point joint between the front half and the back half. Now of course you don't DO anything with the joint, but it allows you to join the two subsections together. Moving one subsection will then move the second subsecton in conjunction with it automatically. Yea!

The 32 prim limit only applies if the object is physical.



Tell me about it....here's how I edit one object without having to reselect everything:

-Unlink big object. *leave everything selected*
-CAREFULLY ctrl (or is it shift?) click the one object that needs to be edited to deselect it, leaving all other prims selected.
-Relink all selected prims
-Edit the individual prim
-Unlink all, then add the edited prim back in

What a pain!

And if you screw up (accidentally deselect the group of linked objects) you have to relink everything all over again from scratch. This is easy if you're in a nice field and there isn't any objects owned by others around, but if you're in a cluttered area and you can't drag-select everything, it's a real pain!

The only nice thing is that you can edit the individual scripts/texture/etc (just not the size) of a prim by using the "select individual" (whatever it is called) in the build window.

Oh, and that's freaking cool, I had no idea about the joint option.

Even easier, and avoids mistakes:

*Using 'select individual' in the edit menu, select the individual object you wish to unlink
*Unlink it using the Unlink command in the drop-down menu or by hitting CTRL+SHIT+L.
*Select 'position' in the edit menu and modify the object as needed.
*When done, link the object back into the linked set.

Didn't know you could do that, I'll try it. Pretty cool!

At least I learned to use the camera and select/deselect really good from not knowing that..lol.

Yeah I didn't realize they had that option either. Something new to try.

Here's something else that's handy and, in this case, new:

You can now select multiple objects in your inventory and delete them!

You can't drag them as groups, but you can, at least, delete... Time to go clean out your trash!

> Yeah, you would think you could do that, wouldn't you? I > know I thought I could. But here's the rub:

> llRezObject is broken

Ah yes; I knew that, but I'd forgotten it.

But it doesn't matter actually because that's what the slave scripts are for! At least it could be.

You give each slave script the public methods "GotoPos" and "GotoRot", which wrap either llSetPos or llMoveToTarget depending on status_physics, and similar for GotoRot.

Now you just get your foreman to res the objects in a pile somewhere and tell each object where to go!

Also, you could make some really cool effects once you have slave scripts! :

- res your objects in a box, have them form themselves into your house on their own

- memorize different configurations, make the objects move from one to another

- eg, you could have a load of coloured blocks formed into a face, and then you give a command and they all move around into the form of writing or something else.

To speed things up, you'd probably want to preload the positions into the slave scripts ("when I say goto 1, go to this position", "when I say goto 2, go here". Now you can just do a global shout "all go to position 1 now please!" and off they go!

One last cool thing that could be fun: make lots of really tiny objects, and get them to stick themselves to an object/avatar. Now, memorize their positions, and you can reform the shape of the object/avatar, only without the avatar inside!

ZHugh

P.S. Haven't actually tried any of this; it might work

::blush:: I beleve that was me
EDIT: Just read the date on the first post, nope, wasnt me
I was attempting to link the entirety of my floating laborotory together, and finally managed to!

There are several problems with the process though.

I dunno if I can post the steps on how I actually linked it... since *I think* its a bug. Well, here goes:

1. Go into edit mode.
2. Select all prims you want linked.
3. Hold down ctrl + shift to go into manual scale mode.
4. Scale prims down until you can link the set.
5. Scale the newly linked set back up to its original scale.

Problems with this:
The set will completely unlink if you attempt to unlink one piece (with select individual).

Any child movement is nullified. I had a scaling door on my ship and it no longer functioned in the big link.

The link will shatter if it passes a sim border. DONT DO THIS WITH PHYSICS ENABLED!!!

I attempted to get my lab to cross over intact 3 times, utterly and completely failing each time, the pieces were flung over the neghboring sims. ( My apologies if this affected you.)

If this is a confirmed bug, Ill remove these steps immediately.

er. Hope this clarafys a bit.

==Chris

(Please forgive any grammatical/spelling mistakes I make in this post, I've been having a chronic headache the entirety of the weekend and its sort of affecting my concentration.)

If you want to make an extremely complicated vehicle with unlimited prims, then why not just go ahead and build the thing as wild as you want it to be, attach it to your pelvis, and then put your vehicle script into a sing cube prim and sit on that prim?

I mean, imagine it the other way around, if you're limited to 31 physical linked prims but seemingly unlimited attachment prims, why not take the other route?

I'm not sure what the limit is (if any) of attaching objects to your avatar. I have one attachment that is 142 prims (a Dalek shell) which I attach to the pelvis (the most stable point of attachment on an avatar that I've found).

Granted two things: your vehicle may shift oddly when you stop to talk. It may also appear to lurch when you start and stop. You also couldn't have people sit on you or your attachments, but you could probably make a large prim for your vehicle that had a few seats linked to it. For that matter you could probably carry a lot of people around like this, if you devoted the actual vehicle to seating space while your attachment does all the hard work of looking good

You'll most likely want to lock your avatar into the motercycle_sit animation in your vehicle script which will give it more stability.

Lumi

Starax created a pegasus that you could ride by attaching it to your avatar. A script would put you in the sit position, and you'd fly with it like normal. Pretty interesting. It was over 31 prims too.

The 31 prims limit only applies to physical objects.

But this brings up something I've been trying to remember for awhile--what is the limit for non-physical linking? I remember 256 but I could just be making that up entirely. Is that it?

Shameless plug: Builders Forum still needed.

Backing up Garoad, I also think 256 is the limit for a non-physical linkset.

** deleted **

Thanks Julian.

And now I might as well complain that even though the forums were redone, there's still no builder's/texturing forum!

Isn't that what this forum's about, Garoad?

Hmm, maybe, I initially got the impression it was just a replacement for the "projects" forum.