A few improvements to the EDIT interface

Here are a couple of loose ideas that came to mind recently, for possible improvements to the EDIT interface. I'd like some feedback and suggestions before making a more formal JIRA entry on these ideas. (I'm not on my SL system right now, so I can't look at the UI right now. Forgive me if some details are a little off.)

When you have one or more prims or linksets selected, the first tab in Edit does tell you how many prims are selected, and I think it also tells you how many objects (linksets) are selected. It seems to me that it would be useful if, when editing selected prims *within* a linkset, you had a clear indication of that - such as "3 prims in one 27 prim object selected".

When you select one prim in a linkset, and unlink that prim, that prim is all that remains selected, and the rest of the linkset remains linked, and unselected. But if you select two or more prims in a linkset and tell it to unlink them, those prims PLUS the remainder of the linkset are all selected. You need to de-select the linkset to have only the newly unlinked prims selected. I think it would be better for this to be consistent - preferably so only the freshly-unlinked prims remain selected, no matter if it is one prim or multiple ones that you unlinked.

When you are selecting textures in edit mode, an indication of how many prim faces are selected would seem handy to me. Mostly so you can tell at a glance if only one face or if all faces of the prim are selected, before retexturing it. For example, if you have a cube selected and click "select texture" all 6 faces are initially selected. You can shift-click faces to de-select some of them. Depending on the texture repeat and offset values, it may not be clearly visible which faces are still selected.

All of these are good suggestions, and the latter two are solutions to problems that plague me constantly when building.

Yes, please. Maybe post this to the SLDEV list to see if someone is interested in implementing this in the viewer?

The Edit Links is a good idea, however, the problem I see with the texture idea, how would you know which side is which especially if it's been rotated, you would still have to pan the prim, or select each side separately in order to establish its number.
In addition to your idea perhaps an option where you could see automatically the face numbers with a on/off feature, like we have under the beacons menu for scipts and transparency.

I like the idea of temporarily being able to see prim face numbers.

The main use, to me, of knowing how many faces are selected is when trying to retecture part of a prim that is in a build. For example, if you have a prim that is in a wall, and that has a window texture on the two flat sides. Knowing that you only have one face selected, and that you won't inadvertently re-texture the other side, would be quite useful!

How about the ability to move VERTICES and EDGES? Why is that so hard to program?

Bevel or 'inset' would be nice also.

Easy speak, but hard to implement. Especially mesh editing.

Primitives are just that. Basic shapes. The idea of a primitive is that instead of having to send a whole 3d mesh to the client (vertice 0 is at <X,Y,Z>, vertice 1 at <A,B,C> etc.) it just sends "there's a sphere at <X,Y,Z>" along with a few other values on how to modify it.

The moment you go into actually deforming the primitive in a non uniform way (ie editing only small parts of it) then you are changing the nature of the shape and would require the whole mesh to be sent. You can then forget being able to easily determine where each face of an object is, changing the shape via script or any number of other things.

If you need these tools, then we now have sculpties. My main wish for those though is to be able to build a sculpt-map from a linked-set of prims with some smoothing. That way I can have the nice and simple SL build tools but only need one sculpty to represent a shape that may require 20+ prims to emulate well.