advice needed

I'm new to the game so I need some advice so I know which topics to read up on. I'm thinking about creating collectible cards in the game. I think I'm going to make the cards viewable with an HUD and make the cards themselves textures. I know how to put textures into an object and scroll through them like a photo album. Is it possible to keep the textures in a folder in your inventory and have an HUD be able to scroll though them? Or do the textures have to be placed inside the object?

Should I not use an HUD for this and make each card an object instead?

Yes, you can always refer to a texture by its UUID, if you know it. If you do, then you don't need to have the texture itself in the HUD's inventory. The problem is that once you make the UUID public knowledge, anyone else can use it without having a copy in their own inventory. If you want to make L$ by selling the HUD, you're potentially giving away your assets by using the UUID.

One way around this is to be sure that the script you use to power your HUD is, itself, no copy/no mod. That way, the buyer can't open it and read a list of UUID's out of it. Either way, whether you make the textures or the script no copy/no mod is immaterial. The buyer won't be able to copy or alter your textures.

thanks for the response Rolig, good info. In my case each texture would be a "collectible card" so I don't think I can put it inside the HUD. The HUD was going to just be the method used to view all of your cards. So I think I have to make each one a separate object instead. I want them to be tradable so having them locked inside an HUD won't help with what I was thinking.

I see someone else did something similar to what I was thinking called Combat Cards.

Ah... you read faster than I expected, so my edit of my own note crossed your new post in the mail. You seem to have reached the conclusion I would have prefered myself in any case. If the goal is tradable cards, it's nicer to have them available as separate, negotiable objects.

cool thanks

[EDIT] Looks like Rolig beat me to it. Oh well, I hope these answers are still helpful. [/edit]




Welcome to SL, Kev. Just so you know, there are those who will take issue with use of the word "game" to describe SL. It may seem a little silly, but some do take that particular 'mistake' seriously. After all, it's not really a game; it's a whole world. So there is a point there.

As for topics to read up on, that's a big question. SL, just like the real world, is totally open ended. The list of topics that relate to it is endless. I assume you mean in relation to building, since you came to this particular forum, so that narrows it down a bit. I'd suggest you stop by the Ivory Tower of Prims to get an introduction to the basic tools and concepts behind in-world building.

After that, it's just a question of practice, practice, practice. By all means keep coming back to the forum to ask questions, but really, the way to SL's Carnegie Hall is the same as the way to RL's.

If you've got prior 3D modeling experience, you may find SL's modeling tools appear at first to be quite limiting, almost silly. But the truth is they're anything but. Truly amazing artwork can be created with them. It's just a question of getting used to them, and discovering their particular quirks. They do operate on some different principles from what you're probably used to. Eventually, you learn to 'think in prims', and then it all falls into place.

Perhaps ironically, the more prior experience you have, the longer that process tends to take. People who don't know any different tend to take to it much more quickly than those with established paradigms from other modeling environments. If you're coming in with experience, you'll need to apply a lot of patience to SL before it will click for you. But once it does, you'll be all set.

After you've gotten a solid handle on regular prim modeling, you may want to expand your repertoire to include sculpted prims (sculpties), which require use of external 3D modeling tools. To learn about sculpties, head over to http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims. But don't make the mistake of thinking you can learn sculpties before or instead of learning regular prims. If you do, you'll end up shooting yourself in the foot. Sculpties, although they do appear to be more freeform than regular prims, are still bound by almost all the same rules. They're meant to compliment regular prims, not to replace them.




Great. If you know how to create a scrollable slideshow player, then you already know 99% of what you'll need to make your HUD. It's really the same thing.




Yes, but not in the way you're probably thinking. If the textures all happen to be in a single folder in your inventory, fine, but that's not what will make them readable by your slideshow player script. Nothing and no one in-world can see your inventory except you. So there's no way the player script could have the first clue about your folder organization setup.

I'll explain the concept of how it actually does work as I answer your next question.



Every item in SL has a universal unique identifier, or UUID. It's a long sequence of letters and numbers, a database key. You can plug the UUID's of your textures into your slideshow script or put them all on a notecard for the script to read, and then you won't have to put the textures physically into the object.

As I said, the script can't have access to your inventory, but it can certainly access a list of UUID's you plug into it, or list on a notecard you put inside the same object it's in.




That's totally up to you.