Hopefully in the first quarter of 2012 the need for Magic Boxes will go away. Until then, we occasionally have to move them. That often creates problems with the items we have in the Market Place. But, it is possible to move them and avoid the problems.

Magic Box Move

To avoid problems you need to understand that everything rezzed in-world gets a UUID, a Universal Unique Identifier. I get confused trying to remember how an object’s UUID changes or does not change when we take it back into inventory and later rez it again. In general each time something is rezzed it seems to get a new UUID. Also, it gets confusing figuring out which things in the box have which UUID’s and how those match up with the items in the Market Place. Thinking that through is too much brain damage.

So, this is actually a tutorial on how to move objects and RETAIN their existing UUID. This process is not limited to just Magic Boxes.

Obviously one can edit an object and move it with the red, blue, and green arrows. However, if you’re on an island region, that won’t work. Also if you need to move to the other side of a continent using build-edit-move is way tedious. Taking the object into inventory is how we usually move most objects in those scenarios, but that risks an UUID change.

Read through all the steps before attempting it.

The first step is to Take a Copy of the Box into inventory. This copy is a backup. If things go well, you won’t need it. Right-click the Box and look for Take Copy in the menu.

Set your avatar to use the land group of the new region you are moving to. Most rental places have a renters group one must be a member of to rez objects on the land. Make that group active.

Right click the object/Box. In Viewer 3 there is an option to PUT ON. There are sub-items for; Wear, Add, Attach, and Attach HUD. Use ‘Attach’ to attach the box to your right-hand or wherever. Travel to where you want to put the box/object. Then right-click the box/object you are wearing and select DROP.

Once you drop the box, immediately open the Build Tool and edit the object’s group. Set it to the new location’s land-rental-group. Most rental areas have a 2 or 3 minute return time for objects not belonging to their group.

Now give it a minute (I mean a full 60+ seconds) for the asset servers to update. Then reset the Magic Box. It will try to reset its self after a time. I’ve had problems with allowing the Box to eventually wake up and update things. It seems the web site checks the Box every so often. When you move it to a new region it takes some time for the Box and the web server to find each other. When you manually reset the Box you save the web site some confusion and avoid waiting for the Box to realize it has not heard from the web site.

I’ve gone through this process a number of times. It works. It can be unpredictable. Sometimes the Box reset doesn’t ‘take’ and the reset has to be repeated in a couple of hours. Sometimes there is some problem that doesn’t get corrected until the next region restart. These are problems beyond your control. So, watch your box and Market Place store for problems.

I won’t miss Magic Boxes at all…