Building Outside SL- PLeeeease!!

I know it's prolly been said before, but hey, maybe I'll get lucky & LL will do it! I'd love to have the ability to build stuff outside of SL, using SL's editor. There's times when I'm not able to be online but at a computer and I get an idea but cant do nothing till I get online! Even if it would cost $L to upload my stuff I'd still be happy!!!

Just think- you have a crappy lil' laptop that you take with you. It cant run SL on its own, but would handle the Build Editor (which could be Downloaded). You could build yer stuff & upload it later. Would be so NEAT!!!

C'mon Lindens!!! I'm on my knees praying for this!!!

I have the same thoughts. It would be great to use a laptop and build while I'm at work. Either online or off. I agree that offline would be more convenant.

Would be downsides. Sandboxes die as who would build there. All pro builders do it at home to prevent people seeing all noobs do it at home so people don't see em mess up. End of building in game... Possibly?

I can't see it killing off building in-world, as we can already script outside SL. Then there's textures. You create them outside of SL and upload them. Hasnt hurt. Plus there's always something you might add later while in-world, or tweak. It might even benefit the Sandboxes as it'd free up space from larger builds and you wouldn't have new people coming up and asking "show me, show me" all the time.

Is giving an alternative to sandboxes a bad thing? I understand that there is a social aspect to building in a sandbox, but a lot of them are incredibly laggy and cause people to crash if a building project finds problems (e.g with the scripting).

Not to mention if I had a separate program I could be building something in SL on my second monitor while doing something else entirely on my main monitor =)

I don't really see this happening because, at least in my opinion, the SL client is so integrated into the online world that the only simple way to provide offline access would be to release a private server people could run offgrid.

While that in itself is something a lot of people also would love to have, it would make a lot of problems for Linden Labs, in terms of running their business.

Or maybe I'm stupid and the object creation client is totally modular.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah... still working on it. Prim math is a bit harder than it looks.

Should be out some time in the next few months... assuming I can stay on track this time. No, I'm not a Linden. Which is why it's so difficult.


Enjoy the screenshot goodness.

Tease! That's surely fascinating...

Wow that looks promising, Jeffrey. Just one suggestion tho. Instead of just mimicking the SL building functions, is it possible to add other more complex ones like mirror, array and those for making larger objects, similar to Cadroe's ring and shapemaker?

I would like that alot. I don't buy the "social aspect" thing: I just hide in the corner and tell people to leave me alone anyway, so I might as well be building offline. It would be less annoying



no need to be so haughty about a little third party app.
that's cool and all, but no offense, i'd prefer an official program.

I'm no programmer so I dont know if it'd be just a matter of separating the code or whatever. Surely if they can come up with SL, making an external editor that saves in SL format for uploading, shouldn't be too tough. And what the heck! If they want- charge SL Residents $L100 or so for it. That'd keep the casual builder online.

We already have external means to create scripts & textures so why not a Prim Builder? And yea, I could see some problems with it.

Sure. Mirror is already planned to go in, since I wrote one of the scripts that does that. Ringmaker and whatnot...


Well. All I can say is llGetPrimitiveParams will likely be emulated, but Primitives will be scriptable objects. So stuff like "Prim.hollowshape" and "Prim.cut" should make that a whole world easier.

Jeffrey,

That would be a god-send to those of us that prefer to build in off line. My personal online time has been cut to almost non existant. This would be a huge HUGE help to me.

Is it too early to ask how the final build will be uploaded into SL? Will it permit texturing?


Take care,

XML-RPC message strings, with luck. Going to try something called a feedback loop triggered by the user, since XML-RPC can only be initiated one-way.


As for textures, assets can't be automated and ripping them right out of the cache would be... well, you know. So likely not, though it'll probably store a key value for them for reconstruction.

I would love to be able to work on stuff while I'm offline. I spent Christmas this year at my in-laws place, and they have no internet. (Crazy, I know)

The problem I see with this is that you'd need your inventory offline as well, which would mean client-side inventories. Which would make it a lot easier for people to hack SL and make free copies of things.

Just opens a big can of worms, I guess.

Jeffrey, this is coming along so well! how long have you been working on this anyway? i remember when this was boiling in the forums as simply an idea.. how cool to see it near completeion.

i hope this works well for you.. and all of us! not sure if it would make as many external news sites and blogs as The Cornfield, but it would be a large step forward. just remember, when you get it finished and polished, LL will either come out with an integrated version or, if you're lucky, maybe you can sell it to them or something similar.

however, not being a scripter/programmer, i'm not sure if i understand Marcos' contention.. but, from where i'm sitting i don't see the need for an off-line inventory. wouldn't the program just save the build as an LSL script? then when you're ready, you just upload the script and *BAM* simple construction through a script. when you want to take out the build, it's as simple as running a pre-written script.

or as i'd prefer to say it, "Just Say Go!"

but let me know if i'm wrong on that.. heheh

hmmm this sounds like a good idea.

Now probably Linden Lab will encouter a new problem. Now it's obvius that sound goes as *.wav and textures in BMP, TGA, JPG etc. But your building? what extension so second life can read it. There is no way you can upload a whole building, cos if Linden will do this, what will be the limit? there will surely be a limit, check the sound files, just 10 seconds.

I think Linden has the scratch their head on this one actually, because I wouldn't know what kind of file Linden would have to create to upload a building so Second LIfe can actually read the data. This will be a long trip, i guess

Sounds negative, but hard truth

It's about 33% done, in terms of objects and where it needs to be. I've fiddled with it on and off for the last year or so, working in earnest since about October. I'm also using all of my own code as opposed to what the OSMP guys did, in part because I'm trying to understand the way prims work as good research into other projects.


Offline inventory will mostly likely be in the form of saved .SLOBJ files. If you want to save a backup in SL, there are already several scripts available to do that... but that would defeat the purpose somewhat.


In context here, I've made it so each primitive is an "object" in the programming language, meaning (if you understand Python) there will be plenty of extensions to toy with it. Alternately, I've built carbon copies of scripts like llGetPrimitiveParams, llSetPrimitiveParams, and the constants base from LSL to make crossover fairly easy on people.

It's still a lot of work, though. I hope to be done around Q1 or Q2 of this year, barring the fact it's my last semester at the Uni.

I'm thinking it'd be a proprietary format to SL and there probably would be a limit to the number of prims. Maybe something that's manageable since I doubt we all want to see 1 Million Prims in a build all over the place.

Any more progress on this project?

Yes. Impeccable timing. Jeffrey Gomez earlier posted:

Thanks, Torley.

Think you could forward that up to one of the Lindens that can review where I'm going with this? Just to be doublesure I'm not stepping on someone's toes by coding it.

Edit: Strike that. Just saw your post.

Hey Jeffery... I don't know if this would be possible with the primitive build tool SL uses but it sure would be nice to, say, cut of the corner off a box if I need to. Or make a dimple in a half sphere flat. Not sure if I'm getting my idea across. I'm tired and my eyes are buring from building. lol I know there is a term for what I'm thinking but I can't think of the term. When or if I remember it I'll come back and let you know.

I'd have to ping my friends on prim torture for that. Could be!

For early versions, though, don't hold your breath.

LL could make a build program that exports them in.. maybe a .big file?

or a file that saves the primitive perams and positioning of all the prims, and then SL could use that to rezz copys of those objects (admittedly you would have to re-texture the whole thing)

but it would be good for those people away from their PCs, only with laptops that cant play SL...