Ability to 'Shortcut' to inventory items

This will assist in reducing the size of inventories - there are a number of items, such as AO's, shapes, skins, hair and clothing items which are used for several different outfits. Currently people create copies and have numerous copies of the same item in folders. This not only increases the volume of the inventory, but separates items from useful information, such as 'how-to' cards and landmarks etc. If we could create 'shortcuts' to items, then the original item could stay in the manufacturers box, and the bandwidth used to download several copies of the same item would be reduced as only the small 'pointer' would need to be downloaded.
Inventory can be frustrating to use sometimes, and this might help quite a bit.

This sort of thread belongs in the Feature Suggestion forum.

Moved to Feature Suggestions.

This is an old and often repeated suggestion. Apparently it's not high on the Linden staff's priorities. The supposed saving of inventory space is probably somewhat illusory - a reference to an inventory item may take about as much space as a copy of the item. Using pointers doesn't really solve the problem of separating items from notecards pertaining to the items, the shortcut wouldn't have a notecard with it. There's also the problem of what to do if the original master item gets deleted. A confirmation dialog could get produced when the deletion occurs intentionally, but inventory items are known to vanish without good cause and not come back. What happens to the shortcuts in that case?

Hmm, you mention having the original item stay in the box. I don't think a box's contents are known until the item is rezzed. I think that presents a problem.

A "show original" menu entry would solve that.
The obvious options are: the shortcut is grayed out, or the shortcut vanishes. Either is reasonable. I don't see a problem.

The biggest reason we need it is that if you have no-copy clothes you can't use folders to organize your wardrobe into outfits without buying multiple copies of the clothes.

And for prim attachments in outfits, having shortcuts *would* save space, because a copy of a prim object is a separate editable object. This would also help when the object is an AO or other scripted object... you wouldn't have to load the same animations and configure multiple copies of the same object.

If you have a hundred copies of a copyable item and one gets deleted due to Linden or operator error then you still have 99 copies left. If you have one real item and 99 shortcuts and the real item gets deleted then you have zero items left. That seems like a problem to me.

Sure, it would be nice to have shortcuts, but one can solve this by not buying no-copy clothing. It's annoying but it doesn't cause SL to be unusable or immensely difficult to use. The need for a refinement like this is felt by people that "live" in SL - but is it of importance for Circuit City's customers using SL for shopping?

As far as I know inventory items have fields something like: Name, Description: CreatorID, OwnerID, Acquired, Mod, Copy, Resell, Share with group, allow anyone to copy, next owner mod copy & resell, for sale, original, and copy. A shortcut would probably be implemented with the same fields and thus any potential space savings be reduced by have so many of the same fields duplicated for each instance of the shortcut. The actual prim information about an object isn't stored in inventory - it is loaded from the servers when the item is rezzed. This is why you can't see the number of prims in an object by looking at it's properties in inventory - information about the object's components doesn't appear till the item is rezzed. A one prim object and a hundred prim linked object take the same amount of space in inventory, I believe - which would be about the same as what the shortcut record would occupy. Why do I suspect that a shortcut would end up using using much the same data structure as a separate item would when it could just have a pointer? Because that would be the quick and dirty approach instead of the best practices approach, and that is what I've come to expect from LL.

This may not be too well written, I just woke up.

In practice, one should assume that a Linden inventory system that used shortcuts would get screwed up annoyingly often - that shortcuts would assign themselves of their own doing to pointing to objects other than what they are supposed to, for example.

The interface design team would probably find it necessary to include some sort of flashing, animated display with oscillating lightning bolts and maybe a video clip or some such to distinguish between shortcuts and real items. They're always champing at the bit for that sort of thing.

If the use of shortcuts allows people to avoid buying duplicate copies of no-copy items this reduces the "number of dollars of transactions" figure, and I think we all know how LL would feel about that.

I'm not opposed to shortcuts for items; it just doesn't seem like a high priority matter in a simulation that doesn't have properly functioning sim border crossings, can't keep the inventory straight, can't reliably teleport, can't save scripts and notecards reliably, can't display the ground without making it look like jello in an earthquake, etc.

At any rate this is an old and often suggested topic that has been discussed at great length; those who want to discuss this would do well to use the "search this forum" and the advanced search page to read the old discussions. It's a lot more efficient than starting anew.

That's correct. Shortcuts are not backups. This is no different from symbolic links in file systems, which have existed since before the book SL was inspired by was written. This isn't a problem, it's just how things work.

First, maybe 10% of the clothing in SL is "mod/copy/no transfer". Now this might not bother you, but there's 10 womens outfits for every men's outfit... so I've already got about 10% of the clothing choice you have. Less, because most of the guys clothes that ARE out there seem intended for pimps. I should cut this to 1%.


You wouldn't say that if you were a guy.
Since they wouldn't ever have a reason to create a shortcut, why would it matter?
Only if Linden Labs is completely incompetant. It would be a genuinely bad idea for it even to be possible for any of these fields to be different in the shortcut from the original. The only thing that the shortcut would need would be a pointer to the original object.

We're talking about attachments, which never leave the inventory. If I have 10 outfits and thus 10 copies of an attachment, then 10 copies of that attachment will exist on the server... if not immediately then by the time I've worn each outfit once. If they were shortcuts then only one copy would exist.

Because you're trying to argue that shortcuts are a bad idea, so you're making the worst possible assumptions about how they would be implemented.

It sure sounds like you are. You're not just arguing that this should be a low priority, you're making up reasons why it should not be done at all.

Oh, and shortcuts would *increase* the amount I spend on clothing... because right now I'm more likely to pass up buying clothes rather than buy a no-copy outfit that I like, or a copyable one I don't or that costs five times as much as the no-copy version.

Obviously you've not used shortcuts on a computer. Create an empty file or folder, create a shortcut to it, delete the original. *Gasp* the shortcut still exists. Try using it. "File not found."

Now, if we could have hardlinks like in Linux, then by deleting all the hard links we don't have the object any more, but each hardlink is the SAME object. Creating softlinks to any of them is the same as making a softlink to any of the rest of them. Windows has no notion of a hardlink, only softlinks and copies. Currently in SL all we have are copies.

(Hardlinks are hard to describe without using them, it's like creating a copy, only without the copy. It's basically another entry in the filesystem that looks like a copy, but the hard disc just points to the same data.)