There is a big debate going on in Second Life® ….  Ok, there is always a big debate going on in Second Life but this one is important  :-) . It is about Second Life content creators and what tools and technologies should be supported in the future.

One of the reasons for success in second life is that “residents” can create their own content. SL supports a set of primitive geometry types such as cube, cones, tori, cylinders and spheres. You can skew or shape or hollow these primitives, give them textures, and combine them to create some really cool designs.  Here’s a video that might help:

Now those of us in the CAD world know that this is nice but pretty limited. You can’t subtract geometry (take away a cylinder in a cube to create a hole). You can’t do too much freeform work. This was addressed a little bit with the creation of “sculpted prims” which allow you to create a kind of freeform surface by specifying a grid of points.

Sculpted prims (sculpties) looked like they had a lot of potential and do solve a lot of problems. Sculpties are different from other prims in that they can’t be created with the existing tools.  The root of today’s debate starts here (well, at least one of them.) A number of software developers created tools to create the sculpties (including myself, see Math Sculptor) or added functionality to existing tools like Blender to help in creating them. 

On one hand, this was good.  The folks at Linden labs don’t have unlimited resources. With the Linden’s creating a standard, all the creative resources of the development community could be brought to bear. There was an explosion of creative and innovative tools for SL sculpties.

On the other hand this was bad. You now had to leave SL to take advantage of sculpties (there are a few in-world tools but they can be limited).  Some of these tools cost money making it harder for the individual builder to compete against a bigger more well funded organization. Or, to compete, the builder would need to learn these external tools, some quite complicated.

In the end, most people found the negatives about sculpties were not that bad. Today, you can still create impressive builds without them and the people that absolutely needed a solution to the original analytical prims had one.  Part of what has reduced the debates is that that Sculpties still have a many limitations.

It is today’s discussion on the next set of improvements for content creators that is triggering today’s far more substantial debate.  More on this next post.