Proposal: Trees that act like prims

I'm thinking of making this a formal proposal, but wanted to get some feedback first.

Trees in SL are prims, but they don't act anything like other prims.

1) You can't put scripts in them.
2) You can't link them
3) You can only put them on land you own.

I'd love to have these restrictions removed.

Just one concrete example, would be nice to put a script in a tree that allows it to "grow", i.e., change it's size. Or to change it from one tree type to another. These don't seem like rocket science to me, but maybe I'm missing something.

Anyway, I'd love to get feedback.

One more thing Let us stop them from swaying. I'm getting dizzy LOL

It would be nice to link them and turn off, or tone down, the sway. Speedtree might afford them the capability to offer some of those features to us easily.

People have talked to me about trees that grow in size and shape when clicked. That seems practical from a real world point of view. We have to plant trees and shrubberies in such a way that they have room to grow.

That's not true in Second Life though. People landscape to fill a hole with a plant that's the right size at the time and always will be. Come to think of it, a lot of people garden with that mindset in the real world. The difference is that it actually works in SL.

Khamon, if I recall correctly, you sell prim trees that change season on command. What if you could start with base models of Linden trees, and switch between them to change seasons? And have them grow a little each time? (And yes, if we could tone the sway down a bit, that would help a lot.)

I'd like to be able to edit the Linden trees, actually. Or at least their textures. I don't know if SpeedTree will give us that kind of functionality or not. Barring that, I'm still interested in fractal prims (prop #318) so we can build our own trees and other organic shapes without using up a gazillion prims.

neko

I think the Money Tree showed that this can be done now, by adding an extra prim at the roots of the tree to manage the scripts, but it would be more convenient to be able to put the script in the tree itself, and access variables that would tell your script where to put its objects.

Actually, if they'd give us a scripted skeletal tree that we could add scripts to and change bark and leaf textures on, as well as adding fruit prims (or particles) or whatever, we could do all this, plus cherry blossoms drifting in the spring and autumn leaves in the fall. That would be cool. And it really ought not to be that difficult.

neko

Yes, it's possible to do that. But I still haven't figured out how to do another idea I had. I wanted to make a field of trees that was slowly, but constantly changing. New trees coming, old ones disappearing. But I couldn't figure out how to make the trees go away without being able to put a script in them to call llDie().