Textures

[Hyman Kaplan]

Should unique textures be added to the contents of each prim on which they are applied?  If an object with a unique texture is sold and sometime later all instances of the original texture on that object have been deleted by the object creator, does the texture persist on the object that exists only in someones inventory if the texture is not in the prim contents? 

[Rolig Loon]

The texture is never actually in the prim, any more than it is ever in your inventory. All SL assets are stored in servers, accessible by their UUID.  When you place a texture in or on an object, or in your inventory, all you are doing is adding a reference to the texture so that the servers know which one to display.  If you delete a texture from your own inventory, you have just removed your ability to access it, but the texture remains in the asset servers.  Anyone else with its UUID and appropriate permissions can use it. A creator cannot "delete all instances" of an asset.  At most, the creator can restrict your access to it by making it no-copy/no-trans.  Even if the creator removes the asset from her own inventory and forgets its UUID, the asset remains in the servers.

Now, to your basic question ...  there is rarely any reason why you need to put a texture into the contents of an object, unless the object is designed to give the texture away.  If you simply want to display the texture on the object, drag/drop it onto the face where you want it to appear (or use the texture picker to do the same thing).  If you want the object to be able to display changeable textures, write a texture change script and put the UUIDs of the textures you want to use in it. If you want to put the texture on several faces of several prims in your object, drag/drop them individually or write your script to identify the faces and prims where they should go.