Saving a house build with doors

[LjHarris]

Hi there. I've just built my first house. I have moving sliding doors, but when I save all the walls, windows, doors to save it as one object, the doors stop working. How do I get around this??

[Rolig Loon]

It's hard to give more than a generic answer because you didn't say how your house is constructed or how the doors are scripted.  Generally speaking, if the doors are linked to the house and are using a script that is designed for that setting, you can take the house into inventory and re-rez it with no trouble at all.  If the doors are not linked or if the scripts have no independent way of knowing how they are related to the house, they might do anything (or nothing at all).  The bottom line is that there is no single "best" way to create doors, but there are many bad ways to match doors poorly to the building they are in.  If yours isn't working, try another one -- preferably one that's free, like this one >>> 

 

[Lindal Kidd]

As Rolig says, it's important to know what sort of door script is in use.  If it's one intended for a door that's part of a linkset, then the door can be linked to the rest of the house, and the whole thing saved and rezzed as one object.

But lots of door scripts won't work if the door is part of a linkset.  In this case, you must link all the parts of your house EXCEPT the door(s).  Then, when you want to take the house into your inventory, you have a couple of choices.

• You can simply select the house, then the door(s) and Take them into your inventory as a coalesced object.  They will actually remain separate objects, and the conglomeration will appear in your inventory as a stack of little cubes.
• Or, you can get a "rez box" system, like Rez Faux.  Here, you put a script into each object and each linkset of a build, then Take them into your inventory.  The script saves the relative position of each part of the build.  Then you drop all the scripted parts into a rez box object.  When the loaded box is rezzed in world, you click it and choose Rez from its menu.  Then all the parts of the build appear and are positioned and rotated into their correct positions.

[Rolig Loon]

One common problem with doors that are not linked to a building is that they have no sense of their own rotation relative to the building.  They are independent objects.  If you move the building and door, either separately or as a coalesced object, the door script typically needs to be reset.  A linked door, on the other hand, typically moves relative to whatever the building's current orientation is, so its sense of direction can survive being moved or taken back to inventory and re-rezzed.   I'm using the weasel word "typically" in both sentences because there is no uniform standard.  The actual behavior of any door script depends entirely on whoever wrote it, but those two generalizations describe what's often the case.  If you have absolutely no idea how a particular door works, therefore, it can often be wise to reset the door's script after you move or rez it, just in case.  If you are building a house yourself, I'd advise you to go for a linked door so you don't have to worry about it.

[animats]

On a related note, I have a JIRA in, BUG 229442, to make linked doors play well with pathfinding. Right now, if you give a building pathfinding attributes, all linked doors will become immovable and scripts that try to move them will generate script errors. With that fix, doors would still move. You'd have to use each door once, then rebuild the navmesh, after which your building would be pathfinding ready. Buildings could even be prepped at the factory and would be pathfinding-ready on rez.

This would be useful for my NPCs, Virtual Kennel Club dogs and cats, and a few other things that use the navmesh.

Edited November 13, 2020 by animats