Creating a big linked object

Hi all,

I am new to creating anything in SL, and I want to take a skybox, fill it with furniture and things, and then save it as one unit, to be rezed on demand as one unit.

Can anyone help me with the right approach to accomplishing this?

I am a coder, so if this involves scripts, I think I can tackle that, but is the script approach the right one?

Is there no way to just select several objects, and through a menu choice link them together as one unit, with all of their relative positions preserved, ready to be rezed as a single unit?

Any help would be appreciated.

This really depends on how big the object is. There are restrictions as to how far away items can be from eachother and still be linked... I believe it is 30m.

As far as how many objects can be linked... I believe that is unlimited.

One way to do this might be to highlight all of the objects and then select Take... I believe that this will keep your objects the way you assembled them, however, it will not link them

I have seen it done this way with a few prefab structures

First warning, there is a maximum distance limit between the furthest member prims, but its probably enough for this.

To select a bunch of objects, Edit one of them and then drag the cursor over the whole batch. It can help to have Tools / Select Only My Objects set for this. Then you can use Link to bring them together.

Some caveats, and there are bound to be more:
- You can't have some objects phantom and others not
- Permissions are on the whole house
- Beware of "No Copy" objects in the house; the finished object will be uncopyable, and that would prevent you putting the house in a rezzer, though you could still drag it from inventory, but you would only have one item.
- "No Modify" objects are difficult or impossible to incorporate.

The LAST prim added to the group will become the Root prim, give the whole object its name and be the default contain for any scripts dropped on the object etc. The easy way to set a prim as last is to select all of them as above, then hold down Shift while you click the intended to root to deselect it, then hold shift and click it again to add it back.

If you have any fancy scripted objects, you might want to check with the creators if they will work in this environment.

Artemis is right about the Group Take thing, which doesn't have the same limitations as linking. However the association is much looser and you can't just grab the whole thing when you want to put it away. Also, if you rez such a collection in a sandbox or other auto-return place, they might get returned to you piecemeal which might not be good. Do some experiments on a small scale first.

I've discovered this lil cheat... not sure what the actual object number limitation is... but I've gotten it to work with 300+ prims, select the entire object, shrink it with the stretch tool, this takes away the distance limitation for linking, link it.. then stretch it back to the right size. Now, you may have some objects that are too small in size to let it shrink much... then of course this doesn't work... but, eh, there ya go

Thanks for the reply folks, will try all these methods later tonight.

Is the alternative approach to do this with scripting?

ie., Add/drop all of the furniture etc. as objects contained/owned by the skypad, and when the skypad rezs, through scripting rez all of the other objects in positions relative to the skypad?

is this also a valid approach?

Thinking out loud here, but I'm not sure what role script "linking" would play, maybe all I need to do is have contained objects, that get rezzed when the skypad rezs.

The benefit of linking them I think would be at delete time, that it would all be deleted in one click.

One way to deal with this is to use scripts... and fortunately, the work's already been done for you. I, along with some of my competitors, have a product that'll help you package up large builds that are too big to link, so that you can rez and move/reorient them together as if they were linked.

Check out my picks in-world for my store (Lex Labs) or search for Rez-Faux.

Thanks Lex,

But I am interested in knowledge here.

I may in the end buy your product if it is cheap enough, because who wants to build what has already been built, it is better to stand on the shoulders of other people, but I am interested in learning.

I think there's at least one simpler script for packaging large builds that was posted open source to the forums. I also sold a copy of my source code to a person who wanted to see how I'd done it so that he could incorporate the math into his own project (with a contract that ruled out reselling and sharing it). Let me know if you're interested in this and we'll talk