DesignerInstructions - opencollar - Instructions for those wanting to use the OpenCollar scripts in their own prim designs.

Updated Jul 20, 2009 by masteroutside

DesignerInstructions

Instructions for those wanting to use the OpenCollar scripts in their own prim designs.

1 - CREATE A ROOT PRIM FOR THE COLLAR

- This should be an invisible Sphere in the front of the collar, as this will make the source of the leash particles look the best, and is also required by the coloring and texturing scripts. To make it invisible apply a fully transparent texture, such as the one provided within the OpenCollar.

2 - NAME THE ELEMENTS OF THE COLLAR

The color and texture changing and hide scripts can apply color or texture or hide/show a group of prims at once. To enable this feature, give all matching elements in your collar the same Description. For example, you could put the word "Jewels" in the description of all prims in your collar which look like jewels. Then their colors could be set all together by the color script. The hide and texture scripts behave similarly.

NOTES

The root prim. The coloring and texturing scripts will not set color or texture for the root prim. This is another reason to have the root prim be an invisible ball in front of the collar.
Disabling the texture, hide, and color features. If you wish to prevent a group of prims from being colored, hidden, or textured, you can add "~nocolor", "~nohide", or "~notexture" to the description as well. (It is a good idea to look how the single prims of the OpenCollar are named, in Object Name and Description.) In our "Jewels" example, you would probably want to have the description be "Jewels~notexture", so that the texture script will leave your jewel textures alone, but the color script will still be able to tint the jewel prims.
Label prims. The default OpenCollar has 12 "Label" prims which are cylinders, cut 0.001 and 0.037, they have to be exactly like this else the label texturing with letters wont work! Each of these prims has a Name like Label~0, Label~2, Label~3 ... Label~11. The label script uses these names to identify which letters of the label text shall be on which prim. Each prim holds 1 letter, and numbering starts at 0, so the 12 label prims are numbered 0 through 11. If you want to have a label on your collar, you should include cylinder prims that are hollowed and cut this way, with the correct object Name as noted above.
The FloatText prim. You must have an invisible prim with the description "FloatText~notexture~nohide" in the center of your collar. Place the hovertext script from the OpenCollar inside this prim. The floating text script will be replaced in this prim during script updates.

Examples:

Description: spike — this groups these prims together and they can be recolored/textured and as group set to full transparent
Description: heart~notexture — lets say you have one or 3 prims that form a heart on your collar. Putting this description in each of these prims will group them (if only one it is a one member group but without the description it is not recognized as "element" of your color in the scripts) So now the heart prims can be hidden, the color can be changed but the texture cannot!!
Description: padlock~nocolor~nohide — here all padlock prims get grouped and they can later be changed by the collar user only at their texture.

The "~" symbols a new tag for this prim, remember ALL prims that belong to one kind of element of your collar need this. Most likely I can imagine to use for things like spikes a description as: spike~notexture —- so they can be hidden, colored but the texture you chose within reason cannot be changed

Read also: Important Info for designers AND OCDesignPictures

3 - COPY THE CONTENTS

Copy the OpenCollar scripts, anims, notecards, objects, and textures included in the contents of the basic OpenCollar -- from here on known as the OpenCollar guts -- into the root prim of your collar (ie, the invisible ball at the front). Do not forget to put the "OpenCollar - HoverText@FloatText - 3.007" script into the FloatText prim in the center of the collar! You can get this script from another OpenCollar's "FloatText" prim.

4 - RECORD THE SCRIPT VERSION AND DATABASE PREFIX

Several OpenCollar features depend on the object's Description being properly formatted. It should look something like this:

ToothCollar~3.027~tooth_

As you can see, the description is divided into 3 parts, separated by a tilde ("~") character. The first part (ToothCollar, in this example) is the product's name. It can be anything you want.

The second part ("3.027") is the version of the scripts that you are using. You should use the same number as the collar version that you took the scripts from. If you got your scripts from OpenCollar 3.031, then you should put 3.031 in this part of the description. This is important; the updater script relies on it. One of OpenCollar's greatest strengths is the automated update system that allows users to get all the latest features and fixes. If you put the wrong version, your customers might not be able to get updates when a new version of the scripts comes out.

The third part ("tooth_") is the database prefix. OpenCollar uses a web database to save its settings. This is useful because your settings move with you when you switch between OpenCollar designs, but it also means that we need a way for appearance-related settings from one design to be distinguised from those of another (eg, you don't want your color settings from the GlowCollar to be set on your LeatherCollar, do you?)

In the Description field of the root prim, change "tooth_" to something that is likely to be unique. A good rule is to use your initials, plus the product initials. So if Nandana Singh made a "Super Fancy Collar", she might put "nssfc_" as the prefix.

6 - RESET THE SCRIPTS

Select your collar object using the Edit tools and click "Tools->Reset Scripts in Selection" in the SL menu.

7 - CHECK PERMISSIONS

Make sure you have left all of the OpenCollar guts full perms. You can apply whatever permissions you want to the prims containing the OpenCollar system, but the scripts, notecards, textures, animations, etc, must always remain full perms.