offline builder, import script, third party client

Jeffrey Gomez has produced a Blender based offline building system.
There is an import script available that brings the objects into Second Life.
The Protocol Team has a client that can log in and operate SL.

Can these be put together to allow one to build in Blender and have the objects appear in SL without having to use the standard LL produced client at all?

Nope.

We can't have players re-writing all the code. How would LL lose money if they did?

An object cannot be instantiated on the asset server without the client. Until someone cracks the SL client protocol, which they of course aren't allowed to do, but that doesn't mean they won't (or that they will).

I think they already have (libsecondlife?)

My understanding of libsecondlife is that that it in essence logs in and appears to the SL servers just as if it was a normal human working a local SL client.

I don't know if it sends keystroke or mouseclick coordinates or if it can send menu choices by name or what, but something like that, where the libsecondlife-related program would open inventory and drag the import-script-equipped object inworld , paste text into the notecards and otherwise do just what a human running the standard SL and using the import script would do, is what I'm thinking of.

Though Im not currently actively developing the protocol, I think something like this is their long term goal. Eventually, libsecondlife will allow residents to create 3rd party clients that can interact with the world just as readily as the LindenLab client can.
==Chris

Can this library be used to intercept the normal stream of data the SL client sends and add capabilities to the regular SL client, as opposed to only being used in a separate standalone client?

The Open Source Metaverse Project already has support for some SL things like prims, maybe it could be integrated with libsecondlife?

The libsecondlife project has a website at http://gna.org/projects/libsecondlife/ which has links to the mailing lists where you would want to ask these questions. You can also hop on Efnet in #secondlife (IRC) and ask if any of the libsecondlife developers are around. Asking technical questions about libsecondlife on the SL forums won't get you very many informed answers. But since I'm already posting here, the answers are:

libsecondlife is a full reimplementation of the networking protocol Second Life uses. This means it's fully independent from the official client, can construct and interpret any packet the official client can, which means in theory it has the full power of the official client. The only thing missing is documentation on how many aspects of the world work; what certain fields in packets mean, what sequence of events has to happen to cause other things to happen, etc. I contacted Jeffrey Gomez and did some research on an importer or exporter, and it looks like we don't have enough information to get things workingyet. The importer should work, but it doesn't, so something is missing or incorrect and there isn't enough known information to solve it yet. Exporting is far more difficult as there are several different formats the object packets use and all but one are unknown right now. We have some leads on being able to decode the object files from the local cache, but it needs someone putting effort in to it and I don't have the time right now.

As far as intercepting the official client stream, we have a piggyback program called Snowcrash that does exactly that. It can intercept, log, modify, ignore, and generate packets in the official client networking layer. It's the main debugging tool used to understand the protocol and build libsecondlife.

Posting here exposes the question to people not on the mailing list or who don't check their email. Posting about this subject here brings this to the attention of new folks and anyone else who hasn't heard of it. Posting here on this topic helps to make the general forum have a higher signal to noise ratio, which is always a nice thing to do.

Mailing lists are sooo twentieth century.

I was referring to using libsecondlife to use the already in existence and functioning LSL import script to generate the objects inworld, in somewhat the fashion of a keyboard macro program, to execute the same steps a live user would to import the objects, not to generating objects directly in libsecondlife. In other words, I was asking about a kludgy approach. Kludgy approaches sometimes work while waiting for the elegant approach to be completed.

The website for the project does not display properly in Opera.

SuezanneC,

That could be done with the 'Snowcrash' helper application which Eddy mentioned, however, libsecondlife isnt able to do that - libsecondlife is a full seperate client, rather than a set of extensions on the official one.

It's making good progress, I've got the chat & IM code sitting on my harddisk right now ready to commit, and the client can already login and perform general network operations fine.

Right now, I've been writing a test application which is an "offline" IM client for SL (which incidentally, I have ported to my mobile phone), but there's a lot of potential.

For an offline builder with an upload capabilty - the prim manipulation functions would need to be finished and tested, however it is not outside the realm of possibility.