i would like to clarify something about UUID Please

[VirtualKitten]

Dear Scibblers and scripters,

I just to clarify something I was told in a scripting group  in world in regard to UUID. I was told I could no longer rely on UUID being valid as they get re-assigned from inventories . I had to use names instead this means i have to put my animations in my build not in my inventory and use UUID. Is this correct or have you heard this being said?

[Love Zhaoying]

For "unique" (no-copy items) UUID is stable. For "copy" items, each new instance gets a new UUID. UUID does not get "reassigned", rather a new UUID value is created and the new instance is given that value.

If LL is now "reassigning" UUID's...*shrug* stop using them.

[Fenix Eldritch]

There has been no change to how UUIDs work in SL that I am aware of.

There are several different kinds of UUIDs, some of which can change under certain conditions. See http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/UUID.

Inventory items are just wrappers which point to the actual asset UUID. The asset UUID only changes if the asset itself has been modified... well technically, assets are immutable (cannot be changed) so what's really happening under the covers is that you're creating a new asset every time you edit it. For example, whenever you update the contents of a notecard and save, you are creating a new notecard with a new asset uuid. Objects that can be rezzed in-world are a different beast as well.

As far as animations go, once you upload it, that's it. The asset UUID won't change because you can't edit it further (renaming it or changing the permissions don't count because that's editing the inventory item wrapper, not the actual asset itself). I've verified this just now, by taking a full perm animation in my inventory, noting the UUID and then making copies, renaming them, changing their permissions, transferring them to an object's inventory and making similar edits to those copies. In all cases, the UUID reported by the "Copy Asset UUID" viewer function or a script with llSay(0,(string)llGetInventoryKey(llGetInventoryName(INVENTORY_ANIMATION,0))); all report the same unchanged asset UUID.

But all of this is moot, because you cannot start/stop an animation by its UUID anyway. You must use the inventory item name, which means the animation must be in the same object as the script trying to use it. The sole exception to this are the built-in internal animations listed on the wiki.

[Fenix Eldritch]

Correction: you can STOP animations by UUID. Apologies for not catching that error in my post before the forums edit window elapsed.