Linked Prims

I have a Door object which consists of a frame and the door itself (well, actually it consists of more than this, but I'm keeping this explanation simple). Click on the door and it opens/closes. Click on the frame, and it pops up a dialog (assuming you are the owner) to let you set various options.

The frame has to communicate with the door, to let it know the settings, so it has to identify the prim that is the door. There are various ways of doing this. I'm doing it by locating the prim by name, and keeping a record of the prim in some way. I've tried different options for identifying the linked prim, but they all suffer from the same problem.

(Bear with me, I'm gradually getting to the point.)

I link the frame and the door. All is fine, everything works very nicely.

Now, I create a simple house, and two copies of the door, which I link into two different places in the house.

At which point the whole system breaks down, because the frames have no way of knowing which of the two door prims relates to which of the two frames.

Aagh.

What I need is some way of maintaining the original grouping of prims, even when they are linked into another set of prims. Unfortunately, this is not the way that link sets work.

Is there any way of doing this? I've tried playing around with all sorts of possibilities, but all of them trip up over the basic issue that once a group of prims is attached to another group of prims, they then form a single group, and the original grouping vanishes. Do I have any other options?

Merely refrain from linking them.

Most doors are NOT linked to the structure that they are part of. If you link them to the structure, scriptd, movable doors tend to cross-talk and screw each other up badly.

Multi-select to get the doors as well as the house when you take it into inventory, and you can keep it in inventory or sell it as a single item. Have 'build' active when you rez it from inventory, and the doors will remain selected with the rest, and you can move the whole build as a unit to position it.

i am not a scriptor but the simple answer is to make the scripts listen on different channels

Or the same channel, but listening for different commands?

Which is better from a resource point of view: two open channels, or more prims parsing all the output of one channel?

Neither. It's obviously using link messages, not listens, if the problem doesn't happen until he links it.

If it's using link messages, what's the big deal? Send the message to the one appropriate link number in the set. Done.

Yep. I try to avoid listeners if possible, for resource/lag reasons.

Ceera's idea sounds neat, but I want to sell the final prefab, and think it might asking for trouble to have the doors separate.

I think I shall hard-code the door names for the two doors in the prefab (which should fix the problem).

I was also hoping to sell the door units themselves, as separate items, but I don't think that is going to be viable. Back to the drawing-board...

Just use keys, then.

Can use something like Rez Faux to package the house and the door bits without having to link them.