uploading?

this may be a silly question, but I have noticed links for uploading objects, etc.... Can you create objcets in third party programs and upload them so they don't have to be built in-world?

Not a silly question at all. It's actually a very common one, and a very apropriate thing to inquire about. The answer is mostly no, and a little bit yes. Let me explain.

Generally speaking, you can't upload externally generated models into SL. Every object in SL is made inworld. The reason for this is pretty simple. Unlike traditional games, SL is a dynamic, strreaming application. Because of this streaming nature, the information sent back & forth between the server and the client has to be small in order to operate in real time. With the whole world made up of basic objects that every client machine already knows how to make, the only information that needs to stream is where to put them, how to rotate them, what size to make them, etc., which is a tiny amount of data. Were external meshes to be imported, then every single piece of information about how to create each one would have to be streamed every time someone encounters one. Multiply that by hundreds of thouands of objects inworld, and tens of thousands of clients and servers, and the amount of data becomes huge. LL has said they'd like to go that route one day in the future, but it's unlikely to happen until communication speeds increase by several orders of magnitude.

Okay, now for the "little bit yes" part. Jeffrey Gomez, one of SL's most talented scripters, has created a mesh model importer. It's not exactly pratical for most situations, but it is one heck of a cool piece of coding. What it does is it takes your external mesh model, and rebuilds it in SL, replacing each polygonal face with a cube. Obviously, this makes things extremely prim heavy, and the resulting models are anything but seamless, but it works, which I find incredibly impressive. Jeffrey has said he's working on an offline building tool, which a good many of us are eagerly anticipating.

thanks for the response An offline building tool would be great!