What I'd really like...

Is for the system to stop treating cut 10m prims AS 10m prims.

Seriously. The limitations on design capabilities in this game are a crying shame.

Say I take a cube right? And I size it to 10m, then I taper it to a 4 sided pyramid....hey thats cool...if I have an 8m room...I've got a roof! Yay...boring.

So say I've got a 40m room...I should be able to take that 10m 4 sided pyramid and cut it into quarters and then STRETCH the now 5m to 10m on both sides.

But no...I can't. Because even if the prim itself is cut, the system treats it as a 10m space.

I find this to be unfairly limiting to builders. Its bad enough that most of us that aren't able to get an island as yet are stuck with +4/-4 terra limitations on most of the mainland, making landscaping more or less uninspired and boring...but to top it off, the system is forcing me to use 4x as many prims if I do ANYTHING but "fancy box" style architectural design.

I think that if LL wants to "improve" Second Life, they need to spend alot more time expanding and improving the primitives system.

Cause its well past time for CSG operations, but if the engine can't handle CSG operations, the LEAST you all could do is have prim math dimensions CONFORM to the actual dimensions of the prim so the rather basic prim butchery we DO have availible to us is at least USEFUL and not more trouble than its worth.

The Lindens would like a beautiful world out there full of interesting builds and content, but yet...builders are faced with limitation after limitation unless they're willing to pay inordinate amounts of money to gain access to 15k+ prims and full mod terra.

I, personally, think this sucks and would like to see Linden Labs spend some time trying to expand and improve the building system. Parcel prim limitations I can live with...but the archaic primitive system has to see some serious improvement in my opinion.

Maybe I'm not understanding you correctly... can't you get a 1/4 pyramid by taking the same 10m cube prim and Top size and sheer it?

-Ghoti

Yes you've misunderstood. You can take a 10m cube, and taper it to be a pyramid.

Then with cutting you can size it down to 1/4th its volume.

BUT...the system itself treats that 1/4th as a WHOLE 10m prim.

So basically what you've got is a 5m by 5m quarter pyramid and you cannot stretch it beyond those dimensions. Even though the cut prim itself only takes up 5x5, the system sees it as a 10m prim.

This makes advanced architectural design a needless hassle and causes the use of 2 - 3 times the amount of prims you might actually have to use in the cases of non-standard, non-10m designs.

You can get the same shape by shearing the pyramid. Box prims are flexible enough to do what you're looking for.
You point still stands for cut cylenders, spheres... all stuff I'd love to be able to use at a full 10 meters (Yes, rotor disks made of four 10 meter arcs. Purrpurrpurr)

I know I can shear the pyramid.

What I'm saying is that once sheared, its a 5m quarter and it cannot be sized to 10m as that quarter.

Thats the problem.

Logically, I should be able to shear the pyramid to one quarter, stretch that quarter to 10m dimensions, then copy that three times and arrange them together then...voila, a much larger version of the pyramid in four prims.

But you can't do that. Which is my complaint.

?? Sure you can. shear != cut, shear == shove the top to one side. That is, I can make a pyramid with a 20 meter base.

But if you could stretch the 5m quarter back out to 10m on two axes...which is what I'm saying, you could make a 40m base.

Its the dimensional limitations I'm talking about here, due to simple failings in the primitives system.

This is the last thing we want. If it worked the way you suggest, it would singlehandedly ruin the entire jewelry buisness, along with any other market that relied on tiny prims to deliberatly circumvent the size restrictions.

It's more of necessary simplifications in the primitives system.

If they allowed what you said then when you try to restore the full shape of the pyramid then the primitive would keep resizing as you altered the cut.

What's the implication of this?

As it stands you can set nearly all parameters in the edit window separate of each other. If the prim auto resizes (as I mentioned above) while you alter the cut then the scale parameters will become more jumpy than the rotation parameters are now. What would happen is you set some parameters, make some cuts then find all your set parameters messed up.

What this would mean is that instead of being able to alter nearly all parameters independently (which we can do now) you will be forced to set certain parameters ahead of others so that nothing will jump.

um, I don't get it.

I meant 20 meters on a side:



I dont' see how you'd get 40 meters on a side with the shape you describe... I must not be reading right.