More manipulations for prims!

I've been playing around with prims alot lately, and there's just some stuff that cannot be done without it looking tacky as all-get-out, or using alot of extra prims just to get the same effect as, say, having the ability to hollow out a cube in more than one direction so you'll have a "crossroads" in the center of it. Or being capable of dimpling a sphere 4 times to get the same effect. Or maybe even being able to dimple a tube and round out the flat edges of things.

The way things stand, joining 3 tubes together requires a tacky-looking half box in between them - and what's worse, is calculating and fine-tuning this half-box thing when one tube is higher than the other. Instead of just skewing a cube (which would be a heck of alot easier), I have to figure out the precise angles and skews and cuts and such just to get my tubes for my fun park lined up, and even then I have tacky-looking edges.

Another thing I think might be interesting is more-or-less an overhaul of the way prims work. For example, rather than them remaining separately-drawn surfaces when you "link" them to make "one object" (even though they're still separate prims.. go figure), perhaps have an option to really make it one solid object - a solid vector object that only draws what you see, not what you can't.

Chances are this will take a bit more computing when you first link the objects to form this one solid object, but I'd be willing to bet it'd be easier on everyone's video cards to not have to render all that extra garbage you can't see. Not to mention you could send the information to the clients as a vector string, which could cut back on the amount of time it takes to even load the object.

Think about it. 1 object, only renders the sides you can see versus, say, 120 objects, of which every single face is rendered just to make the same "single object" appear as it was designed. Of course, once something like that is linked, editing it without de-linking it first would be somewhat impossible.

I'd like to hear some kind of responses to this one.

I agree, you should be able to weld two or more prims into one, but I'm no techi-wiki-freakie so I'm not sure if this would slow things down or speed them up in SL.

I'm a big fan of modern "organic" architecture created by Frank Gehry. Many of his designs have long curved structures: surface areas that are curved along a curved path described by a diameter that is much longer then the 10 meter limit SL currently has.

This new prim type, lets call it, the curved plank, would enable large fluent organic architectural designs in SL for large buildings. Think of Sidneys Opera House, the Guggenheim Museum (both in NY as well as Bilbao), the Chinese Wall, and many many more.

Maybe some readers think that a hollowed-out, partly-cut, x or y flattened tube might be a solution, but its not; the curvature isn't constant.

I'd like to be able to put negative values into the cut and advanced cut features. This would allow you to place 'doors' into a hollow cube.

As is now, set you your cub to hollow 95 and cut to say 0.05 and 1.0. It will look roughly like this:

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So you've got a door in the corner, neat, but not too useful as most doors are nearer to the middle which is currently possible. However if you enter values of -0.125 and 0.870 you would get this:

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Hope those ASCII squares appear okay for everyone!

Naturally, the negative value can be no bigger than the other value's difference from one. So since the end value is 0.870, I could go as high (or low depending how you look at it) as -0.130, I wouldn't though as this would be the same as not cutting it.
This allows more flexibility in cuts.