07-03-2003 14:30
" Hmmm... wouldn't it be cool if you could hook a bunch of torii together, then enable "physics" on the whole thing and make a long chain? "

This idea has occured to many people, but I'd just like to point out here that it doesn't work very well yet. Hook two torii together and the system might chug along. Hook four together and you'll almost definitely start to notice "lag". Add more and you merely increase the pain. Add too many and it will go away for a long time, probably get restarted, and most likely you'll get the "You have been logged out of Second Life:..." message.

The good news is that when the physics engine gets upgraded (in SL 1.1 or 1.2, not sure which one) then we expect to see a big boost in performance. While it's not yet clear how many links in the chain we will be able to support when that happens two things will be true:

(1) you'll be able to make longer chains than currently possible in SL

(2) you will always be able to make a chain long enough to drag the system to its knees

Finally, for those of you who must experiment, might I suggest you try making a chain link by linking four or more boxes together (the key here is that boxes are convex) then hooking a few of those together to see what happens. (Hmmm... now that I've suggest it I wonder how well that will work.)