Pardon the Ghostbusters reference, but Dusan Writer is concerned about the state of Second Life's building tools. He's been impressed by competing virtual world/3D development construction sets, like Autodesk's RealViz, Microsoft's Caligari, MellaniuM's AutoCAD to Unreal engine bridge... then glancing back at SL's internal system, and forced to dub it "frankly kind of quaint". But how do the Lindens bring the building tools up to date without making them even more difficult for new Residents to use, or eliminate the dynamic, improvisational quality of SL creation I call "Bebop Reality"? Dusan writes:
SL needs to realize that one of its crowning differentiators is being undermined week by week by other approaches to creating the fruits of our imaginations.
As I see it, the main concern isn't a lack of builder talent-- Second Life is abundant with that. The main concern is that so much of that talent is devoted to adding hacks and tweaks to the existing tool chest, like we saw here recently with Sean Augustus and Tories Canetti's mesh-based lighting system. It's a bit like a craftsman who spends years inventing a CPU-driven laser sight to help him cut perfect shapes-- then duct tapes it to a rusty saw. Anyway, read Dusan's full take on the dilemma here.
autodesk= autocad
realviz not.
caligari- love roman, hate the interface over 15 years..lol
anyhow. 3d modeling tools in sl were not the issue, yes import of standard formats would have allowed more professional designers a quicker entry and would have also weeded out the metaverse new builders who should be in school, not designing for multinational media campaigns yet,,:)
anyhow. youth learns... either the hard or easier way.
nothing is free.:)
whatever Wired says...lol
c3
Posted by: cube | Friday, May 16, 2008 at 04:51 PM
Short answer: they can't.
At least not with the SL client. What we need is a way to create prims offline with external tools, like we can with textures, animations, and scripts, and then upload them to the grid without the workarounds we have now.
It would also be nice if the clients provided their own local one-sim grid for testing our work.
Posted by: Nightbird Glineux | Friday, May 16, 2008 at 06:44 PM
ee gads missed that buyout..
autocade now does own realviz as well.
i truly question the "one company" toolset option.
adobe has begun to service model and made a major mistep in claiming ownership of all work created online using the online PS version.
they seem to have pulled back he original TOS, but i truly suggest creatives watch out or just like in SL, youre work in not truly yours....
c3
Posted by: cube | Friday, May 16, 2008 at 06:57 PM
Seems to me that part of the challenge of design is to deal with constraints imposed by budget, materials, building codes, etc. The difficulties in SL are different, of course, but getting around them is just as rewarding.
Posted by: Rusalka Writer | Friday, May 16, 2008 at 07:05 PM
I don't know...
I rather LIKE the constraints I have when building by being able to use only a few basic shapes to create things. I think that it's helped a lot of people think creatively about how to get the look they want, but use a minimum of prims to do it. While it's not perfect, I think properly chosen textures can also help. But I understand the yen for more complex tools.
Posted by: Oxytone | Friday, May 16, 2008 at 09:11 PM
I agree with Oxytone, however I do think it would be good to be able to create a sculpty from multiple basic prims, as suggested in the jira:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1452
As I progress with building, I am learning that a lot more is possible than one might think at first glance. But it costs prims like there's no tomorrow, and especially for vehicles with their 30 prim limit that's a killer.
Posted by: Laetizia Coronet | Saturday, May 17, 2008 at 12:21 AM
How to make SL better for developers, you say?
So glad you asked! :D
I could write a book about it, or ten.
After 5 years of devoting my life to endless frustration, I could teach a class about everything that could use some improvement around here.
How about starting with the things that are completely inconsistent with the rest of the tools and have never been updated in 5 years of development? ;)
Namely, the texture properties. They have no visual handles. We have to do it by the numbers.
Why can we drag stuff onto a person's profile but not to their chat window?
Why can we instantly get the key to an inventory object ("Copy Asset UUID") but not an object residing in another object's inventory, or an inworld object?
Particle systems are NOT programming. A particle system is a ROTE CONFIGURATION task, and an artistic one at that. A particle editor should have always been included with SL.
Ditto for Vehicles.
Oh, and does LL realize that *normal* software lets you visually configure camera paths etc.?
How about object animation? Key-frame object/NPC editor like Flash?
There's hardly anything truly dynamic and interactive inworld.
Linking limits. You can hardly do anything more complex than a chair with Second Life. Your average house needs to be split up into rooms.
Corel Draw had unlimited linking in 1982, can we get with the program here? ;)
Why on earth must everything be so tightly coupled to everything else?
Script messaging should have nothing to do with object editing should have nothing to do with physics. The whole linking concept is bundling everything together into an unusable, castrating mess.
Permissions! Don't get me started on how WONDERFUL it is to have to click 500 checkboxes all day long, and how a 5 minute patch could easily let us specify our preferred default mask on every new asset created to be fully permissive or group-permissive or whatever.
The whole concept of parcels is ridiculous. It is preventing people from vertically stacking anything, and it sort of defeats the point of having HUDs.
Why do we have no interface toolkit?
Everything out there that remotely resembles a platform has convenient abstractions such as buttons and windows. It does not force us to manually change the colors of geometric objects.
We *could* have built our own abstractions if the built-in scripting language had this little thing called modularity that's present in every other language all the way back to the 60s ;)
We did get really cool clouds though! They halved my framerate on a brand new $1500 laptop, rendering SL yet again unusable for people who think computers should last them 3 or 5 years instead of 1.
Posted by: Eggy Lippmann | Saturday, May 17, 2008 at 01:58 AM
One suggestion only:
Give us the option of using vertices instead of prims, or at least allow the separate vertices on prims to be editable. I could make far more efficient builds given that ability - sculpties are so wasteful in this respect, doubly so as they need two textures. So when we buy a parcel of land lets have the option of using prims or vertices. LLabs could surely work out an average equivalent quota , say 100 prims or 1200 vertices, taking that average from simple cubes up to cut and altered toruses (or is that tori?) Given a vertex limit in this way would put no more strain on the grid than as at present and would enrich the content no end. Oh well, maybe one day....
Posted by: followmeimthe Piedpiper | Monday, May 19, 2008 at 02:43 AM
I'm still waiting for the sculpty editor that the lindens were going to build into the client.
Posted by: Dedric Mauriac | Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 03:33 PM