The Easy Way?

I'm doing a large build on a 4096 sq.m plot, and the build is only slightly smaller than the land itself. It's quite a few prims, and for one reason and another - I find myself wanting to take it into my inventory every so often in order to work on something else for a while.

The problem is that dragging a selection to cover 'every' prim before I 'take' the object sometimes misses out prims. I'm wondering if there is a way to automatically select 'all' prims belonging to me on my land, so that I can 'take' it to my inventory with ease.

There's a lot of prims to select manually, and a lot of them are hidden so it's easier said than done. Please tell me there's a way to select all prims beloning to the land owner in one step - or at least in a better way than 'drag' selecting them.


Thanks.

As a landowner, you could simply return the prims to yourself. However if you have a ton of unlinked prims, this will make a mess of your inventory.

Thanks, Siro.

Well I'm not too worried about the inventory mess, but the problem with doing that is; I don't think I'd be able to re-rezz it in one piece whenever I want to continue working on it.

I'm not sure if the Lindens have any plans to do something about this limitation, but I hope so. Building is a major part of SL so you'd think we'd be able to 'group' and 'select all' with our large builds.

heh im sure the lindens will make it more difficult...
try something like BuildersBuddy to rez your building in place
it also has a clean option if you leave the box out.
~LW

Thanks, LV.

I'll take another look at it. I read about it before, but the idea of manually putting a script into every prim caused me to ignore it even though it's a great tool from what I read.

Actually you are indeed able to put an entire assembly of different objects into your inventory as a "coalesced" object, if you take them all at once (though some will warn of the occasional bugginess in this feature). I know that in at least some cases, returned objects also get stuck together in this manner, but I don't return objects enough to know which cases.

As for selecting everything, if you have a long enough draw distance you can deactivate Limit Select Distance in your Client menu (and possibly add in 'select only my objects' or some such from the Tools menu), then look at your build from above and drag-select the whole thing. Though yeah it would be kinda nice to be able to select objects by just selecting the land that they're placed on.

you could use one of the various 'house-in-a-box" solutions... it requires dropping a script in the pieces you want to box, but once done you can take the box to inventory as a single object, and re-rez whenever you want with perfect placement

Okay, this may be a stupid question, but when you're using the Builder's buddy to box a large structure, do you have to put the script into every individual prim, or can you put it once into linked sections?

And if the former do people tend to put the script into each prim as they rez it or wait until the structure is complete? Seems mind-bogglingly tedious if you have a +300 prim structure.

One script into each root prim of your linked objects / parts is enough

btw, the up-to-date version of builders buddy is here

http://www.libsecondlife.org/wiki/Builders_buddy

or here

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Builders_Buddy

so that's where it's hidden... was looking for it the other day to compare to what I was building =)

Brilliant thanks! The idea of putting it into every prim was pretty depressing.

The scripted solutions people suggest are actually rather good. If you're still looking at trying to multi-select your entire build, you might try playing with the camera and select options. I have no idea how large your build is, but if it's all generally at the same level, it shouldn't be impossible to take it into inventory as one object.

Thanks all.

I'm going to take a look at Builders Buddy, but I'm curious about where to find the "Limit Select Distance" option mentioned by Al Sonic as well. I've looked everywhere in the menus and preferences etc, but I can't see it!

The key part is to just wait several seconds with the selection rectangle active before you select take or take copy. For a build with a lot of prims, it can take quite awhile for SL to actually get everything selected. I often wait 10 or 20 seconds and keep watching to see if stuff keeps getting highlighted. I don't know of any way to know if you've got it all, but this has worked for me with builds of about 150 prims.

Thanks Ralph.

I know exactly what you mean, I've noticed the delay when deleting a large selection as well as selecting them. This is partly why I'm anxious to find out where this "Limit Select Distance" option is to be found. It sounds like it could be related to the selection problems I'm having because the only prims it won't reach are those in the far distant corners from the camera.

Sorry, I really should have specified – lots of advanced features (though, heh, how is disabling Limit Select Distance an advanced feature?) are hidden away in the Client menu, visible only after hitting Ctrl-Alt-D. A lot of the stuff made available there is just for debugging and similarly un-common activity, yet some of it turns out to be really handy for builders everywhere.