Any news on Object Hierarchy?

[Creallie]

I was looking for anything about this and found out that LL were apparently trying to implement it, but then I found out that was from 2009. I've hit a brick wall in my own work where I really, really need this to be a thing. Did LL give up on it?

[Rolig Loon]

We've been asking for heirarchical linking since the beginning of time, but I don't think it's any more likely now than it was years ago.  It would mean a massive redesign of the way objects are put together.  We can dream, but that's about it.

[Creallie]

Has there really been NOTHING mentioned about it in 5 years? LL sounded hopeful in the interview

[Rolig Loon]

AFAIK, nothing official, but creators have certainly talked about it.

[Creallie]

Gah. I'm really not about working on stuff without any hope of an actual, usable system That really sucks.

[Rolig Loon]

Join the party.  We've been finding our way around that limitation for a LONG time.  :smileyvery-happy:

[Creallie]

The thing is you really.. can't find your way around it lol. You straight up, CANNOT a lot of stuff without it

[Rolig Loon]

Well, let's put it this way... you invent scripted solutions that get you part of the way there or you find   other things that you can do.  :smileywink:

[Six Igaly]

Before the OP brought this up I've never even heard of it LOL. But it made me curious (anything about prims and how to torture them does :matte-motes-big-grin:) so I started to read about it. Very interesting! But still not sure if I understand completely.

Does hierarchical linking mean I can do stuff with prims that I now use a tool for (APS)? If not, what would be the advantage of it? And if yes, what more advantages would it give?

[Madelaine McMasters]

Object hierarchy would be analogous to functions or subroutines in LSL. Imagine building a castle with four turrets. If you're thinking clearly (a challenge for me, if not all of us) you'll build the turrent first, then drag three copies to make the corners of the castle. So far so good. But then you decide that you don't like the spiral staircase, so you change it. Currently, you must change all four instances of the staircase, or delete three of the turrents, edit one and copy it out again.

Under object hierarchy, you'd link the turret before copying it and call that linkset "Turret" and ultimately link four of them into the castle. If you unlinked the castle, the turrets would survive as linksets, not be dissolved into individual prims again. If you edited the staircase in one instance of a "Turret", the change could be propagated to all other "Turret"s, potentially even in castles you built a year ago halfway across SL.

The power of hierarchy is enormous. The building tools I used in my RL engineering work have hierarchy (and so much more) and make SL building tools look like a child's toy. That is both the blessing and the curse of SL. Done well, hierarchy can be both powerful and easy to use. As others have suggested, it may be too late to do this well, requiring it to be done over.

 

[Rolig Loon]

The way linking works in SL, each linkset has one root prim.  Any child prims are linked directly to that root.  A child prim cannot have a child.  If heirarchical linking were possible, you could link a child to another child, and so on, creating a sort of tree structure of prims that are all interconnected but are on separate "branches" of the tree.  So, for example, you could make a house in which all the doors and windows are linked together, and that collection is a child of the walls, and the walls are a child of the foundation.  That way, if you wanted to swap out all the doors and windows, you could do it without having to select each one and unlink it individually.  Once you start thinking about it, heirarchical linking opens all sorts of creative possibilities.  Just not in SL today.

[Six Igaly]

To both Madelaine and Rolig, I want it too! LOL. I totally get it now. Thank you both for your explanation. I miss it already...

 

--While having dinner I suddenly realized there are similarities with a CMS-- Change a page name and it will be changed throughout the entire website, path names included.--

[LepreKhaun]

I've always looked at an object in SL as being equivalent to an LSL list, with the main difference being the change in indexing to base 1 in multiple prim objects.

 

What is lacking is nested hierarchies within both. And though I doubt that either will ever be implemented in SL, one may wish.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

I saw some ways in which "advanced object hierarchy" is useful. I missed one of the most important ones though.

Let's take the doors Rolig mentioned.

You have a house. All non moving parts can be one object which will be the "grandfather". To the house you can link some doors, the "fathers", to the doors you can link handles, the "child". This list can go on and on. Now if you move or rotate the house, the doors and handles will follow that movement. If you rotate the door, the house will be unaffected, but the handle will move with it. You can rotate the handle without affecting any other part.

The avatar skeleton is making good use of hierarchy. the hands are linked to the lower arms, which are linked to the upper arms, which are linked to the shoulders, which are linked to the chest, which is linked to the abdomen, which is linked to the hip. Move the hip and everything listed above will follow, move the abdomen and everything except the hip will follow, etc.

[Six Igaly]

The more examples I see, the more I realize I did know what hierarchical linking means, just not with those words :matte-motes-bashful-cute-2:. An example is, in animating prims I can use "anchors" which basically are serving as a "parent' then, all objects linked to that anchor will move accordingly.. Yes yes yes, I totally understand now. We need this badly LOL.

[Six Igaly]

Miracles do happen, so they say. :matte-motes-big-grin: