Builder's Buddy ....

This strange title is inspired by my recent foray into the LSL Portal in a bid to work out how to build/write the custom rezzing system we needed for the colour change furniture layouts in the newly Theme Change equipped Love's Trinity event area.

I had expected this particular task to be full of pitfalls and problems which would take some serious thinking time to work out. As it turns out it took just 5 minutes of searching to find 'Builder's Buddy' in the LSL Examples Library. Builder's Buddy is a fully fledged scripting solution for managing rezzable builds; aimed primarily at the ever tricky problem of moving large unlinkable builds into place it turns out to be exactly what I needed.

Builder's Buddy offers two scripts, one is the main rezzing/derezzing and package creation script and the other it's companion item script which manages positioning. I very quickly had a prototype system working which allows a control panel to store large quantities of packaged rezzable layouts and a simple but effective graphical selection system allowing the user to decide which package they want to rezz out.

I was truly astonished to find such a polished and rock solid script solution such as this freely available for use/adaptation. A little further thinking made me realise that many of the existing commercially available systems in Second Life where clearly modelled EXTREMELY closely on these scripts; some of the commercial products are particularly expensive as well! Undoubtedly there are many value added things in the commercial packages but to be truthful with such a large chunk of the rezz/derezz problem solved the rest of the bells, whistles and flutes are easy to write in. In less than 6 hours the access control list I needed to implement was working fine and the control of options on transfer was already handled by the original script so with maybe another 2 - 3 hours of fiddling with notecards and some info passing to managed theme package the whole thing will be completed and at ZERO cost!

It really does seem that with some persistence and experience it is possible to have an awful lot of things and systems in Second Life without it having to cost Lindens ... you just have to be prepared to do some research and apply some serious thinking and common sense!!

I can highly recommend to anyone looking to spend lots of money on either things or systems in Second Life to at least explore how difficult it really would be to create the solution yourself ... you may be surprised!!!

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