Hey everyone! Hope you all are having a wonderful week!
Before we get into everything, we will be having a very exciting announcement later today during IGNs Summer of Gaming showcase! Make sure to tune in at 4pm ET to catch the Freedom Games showcase where we will be featured!
Today I’m going to discuss part two of the SL Creative Tool’s development progress. The focus today is all about the power and speed of object parenting and duplication.
What is parenting?
For those not familiar with 3D software or common game development practices, parenting is the concept of objects you see in game can have a parent object and/or children objects. Once parented, any child object will move and rotate with the parent object’s movement. In SL, deleting an object with children will also delete all of the children and duplicating an object with children will duplicate the entire chain on objects including their individual properties (color, settings etc.) So why is this useful? Well to be honest, it is more than useful, it is essential. Parenting objects allows builders to create crazy obstacles using the vast array of individual pieces found within the object browser. Parenting objects in SL is easy, simply select the object you wish to become a child, press Select Parent and then choose the parent object.
Supports
Once parented, most objects will automatically create support beams to connect the parented objects. When selecting the child object, builders can individually edit the Support component properties to achieve the look they desire. The Support component has four properties to edit:
• Enabled – to completely hide all supports from the object. This means the object is parented and will act accordingly but is not visually connected.
• Start Point % – decides where the support should start on the selected object.
• End Point % - decides where the support should end on the parent object.
• Preferred Surface – attempts to select the nearest surface to your preference to start the supports on the selected object.
Using these options, builders can achieve their desired support look quickly and efficiently.
https://gfycat.com/circularashamedduck
Power of Parenting
Let’s take a look at how parenting can be used to create some more advanced structures (and these still aren’t really scratching the surface on what is possible). Below, we can see a larger chain of parented objects (3 platforms with a set of spikes and spiked hurdle). Notice as we rotate and move the root object, all of the other objects and supports seamlessly track. This can be used as a gameplay mechanic or to speed up stage creation.
https://gfycat.com/madeupuglycockroach
It is also worth noting that a parent object can hold unlimited (for now) children objects. In the time-lapse below, you can see how quickly it is to setup a bespoke obstacle made from multiple obstacle objects. We can also see how helpful parent duplication is as we can spawn multiple of the same bespoke obstacle with just the click of a button.
https://gfycat.com/snivelinggargantuanclam
That’s all for today! Thanks for reading and as always, any questions on what you have read today, fire them away in general
Have a good one,
Adam