Archiving builds

I have been working on the tools and techniques that allow builds to be copied and archived. This means that a group of objects can be assembled into a project and their locations and rotations scaned and recorded. Once setup and recorded, the entire build can be erased and rebuilt in a matter of seconds.

The process can work on small to large scale. Smaller scale may be a single room arrangement. Large scale incudes very large building structures. Theoretically, a project can include an entire sim. It can only work within one sim for any one project. A project can not span two or more sims.

The tools also allow a build project to be moved and copied to a different site, in the same or a different sim.

There are still some quirks and bugs to be worked out. Anyone interesting in testing it out with your project, give me an IM

Tommy, as soon as we get time.... I'd like to archive my build in Hooper. I'll IM you in game.

Great work, Tommy. I'd be very interested in this. I'll get with you next time I'm inworld. Thanks.

This is a dream come true. Count on hearing from me!!!!

You'd better believe I'm interested in something like this. I've put together some rather large structures recently that would benefit from such a system. I'll be getting in contact when I'm on next.

Sounds like an awesome project! Count me in if you need some more victims..err..volunteers for testing!

My god, Tommy - yes Yes YES!

I'd be crushed if I lost the build for the Shelter somehow. I'd love a way to back it up

Glad to help out any way I can if you need it!

I would be interested as well... I have become sort of the historic preservation society in the Darkwood sim.. having acquired the cathedral, towers and windmill while there.. it would be wonderful to know that incase something happened quirky there would still be hope.

These are some of the uses of the archiving methods that I have found so far. Its important to understand that all the prims are recovered for reuse when a project is saved. It works best when you have full copy and mod rights to all the parts. NOCOPY and NOMOD objects reduces its functionality significanltly.

Some uses:

Historical preservation of unique, onetime builds.

Experimental build projects. Allows the storage and retrieval of evolving stages of projects as they develop. A project can be suspended and saved to work on a different one.

Premanufactured contractor builds. A building contractor can prebuild and deliver a contract building to the customers site.

Switching your home lot build. For example, you can make seperate builds for you lot; a house, a workshop, and club, a movie theater, whatever. Each one uses the full lot and your full prim allocation. Then you can switch from one building to another as you need.
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Level of Detail Zoned builds. A large building is made up of zones, each with a low level and a high level of detail, and prim count, versions. As avatars move though the build, the areas switch to high detail as they enter a space, and back to low-detail as they leave.

Switching gallary displays. Art or merchandise displays can be rotated between different arrangments.
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Switching rooms in a small house. ie from living room to bed room.

Some of this sounds really strange to me. You say it "saves a copy of the build" but also imply that it recycles the prims and dosn't save them per se. The description above kind of sounds like the building is being ressed "on the fly"??? Very interesting and hugely helpful probably, but confusing to me.

Do you think you could publish an explanation of what it actually does? What are the processes of cataloguing and saving a build?

A project is a group of linked objects. The objects can be assembled in anyway you wish. Each project object gets a unique name and a small support script. A copy of each object is placed into the Builder device contents. The device is controlled by a popup menu. On command, the device then scans a defined area, looking for all the objects, and recordes their position and orientation. With this information, and the copies of the parts in its contents, the Builder device can then rerez the entire project. The device can also erase on command all of the project parts currently rezed. So a complete project can be Erased, and Build from the device.

The device can be taken back into your inventory and later rerezed itself. It will retain complete information of the project and can Build it on command.

It can operate in two modes. One is Static and the other is Relative. In the Static mode it will rebuild a project at the exact coordinates of the original build. It is fixed to one place. The Relative mode will build the project relative to the position of the Builder device, itself. This allows you to move the project to a different site and recreate it.

At this stage of development, I am offering this to the SL builder community as a service rather than as a product. Although all the functionality is in the Builder device, it does take some preperation, organization and setup time to use it. It is a bit complicated untill you get the hang of it. There are also some newer functions that need more testing, such as clustering for very large projects. Some possible uses of this tech might also need more customization, for example, the level of detail use will need specialized sensors.

Hope this answers your questions.

I'll be in contact later, I have Immense uses for a system like this. It could save me many hours and headache's!

- Sam

This archiving process sounds awesome Tommy.

I have this HUGE prim constructed Tree in Butler and have been pondering for weeks now how the tree can be saved as I wish to sell the land and re-locate the tree to another neighbouring SIM.

Your program sounds like just the very thing to achieve that! Yay! )

I had been contemplating selecting all the prims in edit mode and then "take" them all... but the fear of " what if I haven't selected all the prims & the tree turns out a mess " doubt has given me cold feet to do that so far... lol

A big thank you for this great contribution to the cummunity, I'll be contacting you in game to request a copy of the procedures & tools.


Ayeshe

Very cool. Yes. Thank you that is much clearer.

I also have a line of re-positioning devices (named SnapBacks) in beta testing that serve a similar function. I haven't seen Tommy's yet, so I can't draw a direct comparison. But it sounds like we both recognize the need to cut down on all the time wasted re-positioning things in SL.

Good luck doing this after the fact.

Hi all,

I'd like to thank those of you who have experimented with the archiving device. Your feedback and ideas have been most helpful. They have resulted in some recent improvements and refinements, expecially in areas of security and the relative mode, allowing moving builds to different sites.

Free upgrades are available to anyone who has earlier versions.

Thanks again.

Please note, when using an archiver, if your build is no longer in world it will be noted by the dataserver garbage collector and removed from the database after some months (unsure of the number of months). Moral of the story: rez your build every few months after archiving .

I have never seens this happen. Both the parts of an archived build, and the archiver device itself, are stored in your personal inventory. I have never seen, nor have I ever heard of, things vanishing from inventory because they have not been used in some period of time.

are there limits to number of prims? My build is around 2,000 prims and I'd LOVE to double that number if i were actually able to move the damn thing reliably and quickly.

~Lefty

SnapBacks have no intrinsic limitation on the number of prims because the position information is distributed across the prims, rather than being centralized in one archive. I would like to get together some time when we're both in-world and see if they meet your need.

Lefty,

The Oz Archiver discussed at the begining of this thread stores and copies linked sets, not individual prims. One device can handle up to about 40 link set, that's a max of about 10,200 prims per device. And more that one device can be clustered on very large builds.