[Opensim-dev] Ways to bundle a building/content for sharing with others

[Ai Austin]

This might be a question for Justin as he has worked on the OAR 
mechanism and load/save-xml console commands....

It would be useful to be able to take some content, such as  a 
building or developed area, and to be able top save that in a  form 
that can be downloaded or shared with others to get the same content 
in heir own opensim setup.  save-xml, save-xml2 preserve the whole of 
a sim region keeping creatorid, ownerid, lastownerid and prim uuids 
as they were, and save-oar pr serve the whole of the contents of a 
sim region including the terrain height map.

The mechanism I have used to make a building available to different 
Opensim setups, or in different areas of our own build is to use one 
of two mechanisms...

a) save-xml on a sim region that ONLY contains the required content 
(I use a sandbox region just for this purpose), and note how many 
prims were in the region as a check.. I edit the creatorid, ownerid 
and lastownerid manually (i.e. change UUID for 3 X number of prims). 
Then on restore I use the load-xml with -newuid flag to ensure new 
UUIDs are used for the newly loaded prims.  I then check the required 
number fo saved prims did come back in.

b) save-oar on a sim region that ONLY contains the required content 
(I use a sandbox region just for this purpose).  load-oar into an 
empty sandbox region (as the terrain will change).  Then take the 
contents into inventory - with the disadvantage that relative 
positioning of parts is lost.  or link teh whole build and take into 
inventory to be moved where you wish with the disadvantage that major 
linked parts in a modular build are lost.

As you can see, the save-xml and save-oar are VERY clise to what is 
needed, but are really for archiving within one Opensim set rather 
than transfer of modular assets to others.  I think a mechanism to 
save-oar with a  flag to say -noterrain, and/or a mechanism to 
load-oar -noterrain that can ignore any terrain included in the 
OAR  and a way to say -add so that the objects in te oar are added to 
the current region, rather than everything being replaced would be 
close to what is wanted.  A way to make sure that all UUIDs in the 
new content are suitable for the target environment (Prim UUID, 
texture UUIDs, creatorid, ownerid and lastownerdid) may be needed if 
the OAR mechanism does not already do that.