Newbie needing some help!

Hi all,

I've finally managed to get online and have been playing around on newbie island (the one after orientation island) for a few days and trying to get used to building a few things and just the general interface of SL.

Building things in the sandbox has got my creative juice following as to what i can build in the "Real World" but i am getting more and more confused as to what is possible.

As i said, i havent gone into the main land of SL yet so i really dont know what is already out there but im hoping some of you guys can answer my questions for me before i get there.

1) is it possible to build something offline in a 3d modelling software and then import it into SL?
2) how does animation work? As far as i know you cant animate within SL. But you can create animations for your avatar in an external program (which is what led me to beleive that you can model offline). What if i want to create something, say, and 16 armed alien and each arm waves in the air. Is it possible to animate this at all without making my avatar the alien?
3) Continuing from (2), is it possible then to have this alien follow you around and you walk/fly maybe even TP?
4) i havent even looked and the scripting yet. How powerful is it? is it possible to program AI?

Sorry to ask so many questions but i really am confused and hoping i can find some answers here.

Thanks in advance.

Short answer: No. Long answer: There has been some development in this area but as yet no finished product. Sculpted prims which are still only in the Beta can be generated using 3d modelling software (the transfer medium being a "sculpt texture". Also, when you talk about using a 3d modelling software there isn't any "off-the-shelf" software which acts like Second Life's building tools due to the way SL uses primitives, for this reason Second Life's building tools are more powerful than anything else out there (to my knowledge) for building SL objects.

Short answer: Yes but limited. Long answer: Animation of objects without attaching them to an avatar is done with scripting. Functions within the LSL language have restrictions (like delays on how often you can move a primitive using llSetPos) which would make animating a multi-prim alien quite a taxing task. Other forms of animation are available, for example texture animations, flexible path primitives (wave in the wind or controlled by scripts) and alpha-blending tricks (turning a group of prims invisible while turning another group visible to give the illusion of motion) all have their pros and cons and their use depends greatly on the desired effect.

Short answer: Yes, yes and no respectively. Long answer: Scripting your alien to maintain a set distance from yourself as you walk and fly around is quite commonly used in "pets" and can be scripted in a number of ways. Teleporting of objects over great distances isn't possible, if you were to pop to the other side of a sim or teleport to a neighbouring sim then a clever script could make it's way over but teleporting between islands (sims not connected) isn't possible.

Short answer: How good is your knowledge of programming? and yes. Long answer: LSL is not the most powerful language, it's difficult to gauge how powerful. I'd say it's quite like an microcontroller in some respects since you have limited memory (16Kb if I recall correctly) and time restrictions but you also have the possibility of teaming up scripts/microcontrollers to work on tasks together. AI is an interesting question and I'm sure there are a good number of SL'ers who have spent time working on AI in SL but I only know of one from an article in New World Notes (AI fish, will look it up when I get a chance). Also when scripting isn't powerful enough you can ship your data out to the www and process it on your server, i.e. storing large amounts of data.


Hope my answers help and no doubt others will pop in to point out any mistakes I've made / differences of opinions.