This week’s Thing is redcap, a command line program for uploading images into Second Life. redcap is available now. You can install it as a gem, or as a couple of standalone files.
Second Life uses images for many purposes. Inside Second Life, they’re usually called “textures”. A texture can be applied to a flat surface as a simple picture frame. More commonly, textures are used to give clothing or buildings a unique look. I often upload an image to Second Life so I can sell custom t-shirts. One of my friends uploads pictures from NASA for educational presentations.
I was inspired by Katherine Berry’s phpsimcaps project to create a Ruby command line utility for uploading images to Second Life. Rather than relying on tons of libraries (like the .NET implementations described below), redcap is a Ruby program that uses just a few HTTP requests to upload the image. Note: redcap is mostly a re-implementation of phpsimcaps, using Ruby instead of PHP.
The original way to upload images to SL was via the Second Life client, a monolithic program available on all platforms. Choose File/Upload from the menu, point to a file on your system, and click Upload.
With the advent of the libopenmetaverse project, it was possible to upload an image from the command line, no user interaction required. The process does require .NET or mono, so it can be tricky to get working, and not often the favorite for Macintosh or Linux developers. Unfortunately, this utility no longer appears on their project page.
SLImageUpload is a favorite for developers of sculpted prims, since it offers the option to upload a “single layer lossless” image, important for sculpties. The program requires .NET or mono, plus X11 if you’re on Mac OS X. Sculptie developers are also fond of importprimscript, another .Net/mono based tool.
The Morganthall family reunion is held on the second Saturday in July at Hagerstown City Park in Hagerstown Maryland.