Offline Building ???

Has Linden ever considered offering residents a way to build/create items or structures offline? This would reduce bandwidth costs for Linden while at the same time encouraging players to build larger & more impressive structures.

Moved to Feature Suggestion.

Hi Xi -

It's a good idea to read a bit in the forums to see if your question has already been answered.

Your desire for an offline building capability is one shared by many customers, and most likely there are some on the Linden staff who, from an emotional point of view, would like to provide such a feature.

Unfortunately there are security problems involved in making such an ability available to us.

I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon.

It is possible that a customer might produce an offline building program that would allow one to produce objects using the RezObject and SetPrmitiveParams scripting commands, but it would not be fully integrated into the Second Life program.

Linden could also produce such a thing but there is no profit in them doing so. Those of us who wish to have a private building area are expected to pay the land fees.

The way objects are described in Second Life is very different than how objects are described in programs like Turbo-Cad, AutoCad, etc., owing to the tremendous compactness needed to stream everything in Second Life on the fly This compactness is not needed in an application in which all data is stored locally and changed only by local actions. Hence we can't just create things in other modeling programs and import them.

Here's a pretty image to look at while I write my reply.

Now then. Best I start at the top. This is a tough subject.


First off, prims differ greatly from "traditional" 3D modelling, as Sherri described. This is due to the streaming and bandwidth constraints of Second Life (ironic), and the bottom line is it makes an offline builder pretty difficult to set up.


But not impossible.

LL is pretty tied up right now and, yes - providing a free building tool isn't really cost effective. So, being the crazy person that I am, I'm working on a tool for Blender. Other tools for different programs (for example, OSMP and preliminary work on a Maya tool) have been done by other residents, though there's nothing fully featured as of yet.


And don't get your hopes up just yet. The above screenshot is from an app that's maybe... oh, 35% complete. But, as you can see, the interface and initial algorithms are done.


As for importing "true" 3D models into the world, that's another pet project of mine. The only way to do that right now is to make every polygon at least one primitive, which isn't very efficient.

I just wanted to let you (both) know that the work is going into this sort of thing, even if it's still (easily) a month away from being fully featured.



Edit: Almost forgot. Re, security problems:

Right now the target constraint on this system is an owner having the "modify" permission set. I've been grilled in the past over "people using my tools to copy others' work," but on the flipside of that, I dislike making these things closed source to benefit the few.

The security against copying in this case? Practicality. The process of getting the whole kit and kaboodle installed and set up is just too darned complicated for the standard griefer, and "copying" an object through this manner would take a long time to boot.

So, before the torches and pitchforks come out, I'd like to take the chance to say the security risk of such a tool is marginal if built properly. Hopefully that'll be the case here.

At one point you asked for the prim torture limits, I sat down a while ago and wrote them out...

(see the table at the bottom of that page)
http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=libraryprimtorture

Some attributes are dependant on others

Yay!

Such beauty brings tears to my eyes.
I absolutely can't wait to see the final product.