What is content creation?
The Openlife grid starts as a empty landscape. It is the ability of the individual to create content that makes the world we see. Content includes buildings made of prims (primitive shapes) and textured with graphics files, as well as your avatar's skin, hair, clothes and accessories. Without content creators, we would all be GRAY shapes.
Any OLG citizen can be a content creator. To explore building with prims, you can work in one of the many sandbox regions. Openlife building tools include the ability to make 100 meter x 100 meter x 100 meter objects as well as micropims down to .001 meters. The different primitive shapes as well as the tools (profile cut, dimple, shear etc.)can be used to make an almost infinite variety of complex objects. Shapes can also be made using sculpt maps.
The original primitives take on the appearance of plywood when you are building. Textures can be added during the building process or on completion of the object. You can edit each prim as a whole, a group of prims together, or you can choose Select Texture from the list of options, click on one surface of a prim and texture JUST that side. You can set the repeats of textures and the direction. There are other choices such as Shine and features such as Light and Flexibility. There are a variety of already uploaded textures in the Library of each avatar's Inventory.
The clothes in Openlife as well as the skin your avatar wears are also made of textures that have been uploaded to the server. Once a graphics file (tga or png) is uploaded, it resides in the uploading avatar's inventory. These files can be shared with others or kept for personal use. The graphics can be made into skin or clothes by dragging textures into the appropriate slot of the Appearance window.
Current Building Issues and Workarounds
The Openlife Grid is in development stage. Current (end Q4 - 2008) building issues include:
Cannot link already linked groups of prims
Linking groups of already linked prims can give disastrous results. Workaround: Link at the very end of your building. If you need to add an already linked object to a more complex object your can use the Edit Linked Parts feature and unlink the object ONE PRIM at a time. The alternative to that operation would be to ADD the new prims to the already grouped object ONE at a time.
Cannot safely UNLINK a linked object
Unlinking a object can cause what builders here call exploding prims. This seems to happen most often with rotated objects and torus shapes. A typical group object made of boxes and set to 0 -90 -180-270 degrees will often unlink with no problems. Workaround: Unlink ONE prim at a time. Be sure before unlinking that you have a BACKUP of the object.
The Undo (Ctrl + Z) operation is not consistent
While Ctrl + Z works well to return a prim to its original position in some cases, it can also - at times - change the rotation of the object as well as simply NOT returning it to its former position. Be prepared for unusual results. Be sure you have a BACKUP.
Editing individual linked prims sometimes gives unexpected results
(Note: this appears to be getting much better :D) Editing linked prims - especially moving them - has been problematic. One result can be the disappearance of the other objects of the set while keeping the edit prim only. Editing textures currently works fine. Editing textures on several prims at once works fine. Always make your edits with a BACKUP.
Cannot take a coalesced object into inventory and have it remain together
Not all LSL scripts are implemented. Some scripting will cause the region to crash.
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