[sldev] SL 2.0?

[Stickman]

I'm happy to hear the ideas about tying in external editors with
Second Life. I like them a lot.

Second Life suffers from not being able to quickly and easily see what
things will look like when placed inworld. Perfecting a texture
involves editing the texture, saving it, uploading it, applying it,
checking it, then going back to editing. Why can't it just be a case
of "tying" a local texture file to SL, and even if it's only displayed
locally, and then just clicking Ctrl-S to save and having it
immediately applied to the model you're working with? Bonus points for
sending it serverside, even just as a "temporary" upload, so that
other people can see the same thing.

Even more awesome, though probably too bandwidth expensive, is
updating the texture in realtime as you create it. Something like that
would probably requiring LL to pick a specific application to support,
while grabbing a file when it changes is compatible with any image
editor.

And why can't the same thing be done for 3D editors? I know every
action in Maya has an equivalent script command and gets logged to the
script output window. SL could just feed off that and show the model
in realtime in SL. And why can't someone else be granted "modify"
rights on this, and have it pop up in their Maya so they can edit it,
too? Sure, it might need to be "locked" for one person or another, but
that kind of cooperative build environment would be extremely useful
for anything, be it educational or professional.

Or, sculpties/future meshes could just read off a saved/exported file,
like the original texture idea, which would make it compatible with
everything.

I've been trying to get some animations to work for over a year.
Zwagoth was kind enough to make a "skeleton exporter" for me, so I can
work with a skeleton in Blender that's pretty much exactly what it
looks like in SL. And now that I've animated and I'm uploading, the
animation isn't showing up as I created it. Apparently the bvh ->
animation conversion is changing my animation too much. I know this
because exporting every frame of the animation separately, uploading
them, and playing them sequentially with a script actually results in
the proper animation. I'm trying to find a simple reproduction of this
asynchrony, but any animation simple enough doesn't show the same
symptoms.

My argument is thus: SL needs an easy, working pipeline. Right now.
Textures and sculpties are difficult to work with, as you need to
continuously upload them and make corrections. Animations have the
same problem, and simply don't work as they should in other areas
(repeated first frame, the above, etc.)

Whether that pipeline is choosing a specific, chosen application as
"the one" that SL will support, or stamping out the perfect format and
process for each asset type, I don't really care. As long as there is
one way that works quickly and easily, people will find ways to adapt
that process to their chosen method to get the same results.

Wait, this thread is about SL 2.0's features and how we don't know
what they are?

I seem to be off topic.

Stickman