Editing Programs

Is the in game build/editing tool the only tool used to make the items in game? The tool seems kind of limited, maybe I'm not looking far enough into it. Does/can we use any outside programs?

Now let me make one thing clear: All that you can do to your objects' shape, can be done in the in-world editor (this will change – see next paragraph). To keep everything running quickly and smoothly in this online world, everything is broken down into simple "primitives". These come in 7 basic shapes, and have a set of options on how you can cut, stretch, and twist them to take the form you need. It's occasionally limiting, but it's also sometimes interesting how much you can do with just a few.

If this still sounds too ugly, do not worry; these won't be your ONLY shapes for long. The new Sculptable Prims can, using a shape-map in the form of a texture, be bent into most any form, up to a certain level of total detail per prim. The catch is, they don't physically react as anything but regular spheres. If that doesn't matter, then you should be quite able to use a number of other programs, given that you start with a sphere vector map (and distort from there), and use a simple plugin to make it into a RGB=XYZ plugin (there's lotsa more stuff on that around here somewhere...).

Now if by chance you want to work with regular prims, but don't want to use the online editor then there's also a prim-editing plugin for Blender as well as one for Maya.