A few wishes...

I've only been here for a week, so take these with a grain of salt.

1. Align Objects. I'd like to be able to snap objects to each other face to face, or center them on various axes... Essentially a 3d version of the align commands in Freehand or illustrator. This would make builds significantly easier to accomplish.

2. Temporary Explode. Let's say I've built an object that has three nested spheres (just for example). If I need to edit the innermost sphere, I have to unlink, move sphere 1, move sphere 2, edit sphere 3, reposition spheres 2 and 1 (without the benefit of the alignment feature suggested above) and hope that I can get all 3 relinked successfully by drag-selecting without accidentally linking the tree in the background.

I'd love to see either a "temporary explode" that moved all of the pieces in a linked object allowing selection of individual pieces, or a way to select interior items with a modified click. The "select individual" function just needs a little more power.

3. Ability to move the position of a "hollow" area. As a quick example, if I have a 10m x 10m wall, I either have to create a huge window to be able to see out of it, or I have to burn additional prims. It would be nice if I could position the hollow area lower on the prim.

4. Make trees count as 1/2 prim. I know they're actually more laggy than other things, but I'd love to do some landscaping and I just can't do what I really want to without sacrificing parts of the build to do it. Maybe make the first 10 trees count as 5 and then everything else normally...

5. Better lights. I want to do some spotlights that have directional control on them... e.g. architectural lights that shine on a wall, or ceiling spots that illuminate only a small part of the floor... Think art gallery spotlights.

There are a few others I'm forgetting, but these are the ones that I keep wishing I had as I learn this wonderful new world.

i endorse all of these!!

i myself have wished for almost all of these.. especially the alignment/snapping feature!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! there's no telling how much time has been wasted on creating something and then repositioning it endlessly trying to make it match up perfect.. UGH!
not to mention if you're tryingt o select a couple pieces and then accidentally move something, just to have to spend forever trying to get it back in place..

something that might help: the X, Y, Z position coordinates. when you are trying to match up pieces, you can match these numbers.. sometimes this doesn't really work out right though.. thus i still would LOVE to see alignment/snapping between prims.. instead of having a grid.

There's an option in the Debug menus somewhere "Hide Selected" that will accomplish this. You can select the other sphere, then hold down shift to also select the 2nd sphere. Once you've got both selected (and therefore hidden), you can then release the shift key to select the inner-most sphere. Now you will have the inner most sphere selected by itself. You can then uncheck hide selected if necessary.


I think once we start treating prims as half-prims we might start seeing other prim types affected. For example, toruses might start counting as double prims. I'm not sure how people would respond to this, although I think we're fairly unlikely to find out, as I'd assume something like this would probably be quite a bit of work to implement. LL would probably just suggest you tier up if you need more prims.


This would be a great feature, although I wonder if our video cards can do this? Usually when you see special lighting like this in games it's because the "light" has been baked into the textures when the map was compiled. Since SL is a dynamic world, it doesn't use compiled maps.

You can bake your own textures, however they won't look right at night, because there is no "self-lit" texture option. You can get around this by making the object a light source, but if you do this on more than a few objects in the area, you'll pull everyone's frame rate down (if they have Local Lighting enabled).

What we need is a "self lit" texture option that behaves for a single object or texture exactly the way that a light source behaves while we have Local Lighting turned off. That would allow us to bake our own textures containing simulated lighting on the surface.

Good suggestions, keep 'em coming =D

I've seen mention of the debug menus before... Am I blind or does something special need to be done to enable this menu? I'll have to check into it tomorrow, but if something special needs to be done... what is it?




My tree idea was mostly tongue-in-cheek... I just really like the way builds look when people add some plants and trees. I wish more people would do it.



I've actually built a few of these baked textures already, but that doesn't work when you want to have something that switches on/off, or if you're doing "mood lighting" indoors. Well... it can work for mood lighting, but it takes a great deal of pre-planning to get the lights and "light pools" positioned correctly in 2d space before mapping.

I've also seen some interesting uses of mostly transparent cones set to be "light" but, as you say, things get laggy fairly quickly.

I thought of two more ideas since I first posted:

1. Some indication that a stored IM has been received by the recipient.

OR

2. Add a "last logged in" field to the profile.

I've had occasion to send some IMs to people I don't know over the last week, but I have no idea if they've seen my message... if they've logged in lately, etc. I'd rather not bombard someone with a daily message if I can determine that they're actually ignoring me.

In one case, I suspect that the person I was trying to reach has left the game, but since he is a lifetime member, his land may never be available for sale or recovery... It would be nice to know that so I can make alternate plans. Seeing that someone hasn't logged in for 8 months would be a good indicator that they may not be back.

They would probably appreciate not having 14 messages from me in the event that they do come back.

To enable the Debug menu you do ctrl + alt + D (some have to add shift also) to bring it up. You have to do this everytime you do an SL install.