We want bigger prims! :P

Yea the sudden outbreak of these massive prims got me wanting more. LL perhaps it's time to increase the maximum size of prims. I know the drawbacks of this but theres a dire need for larger prims. Can you atleast increase it to 50m? Anything over 10m should be non physical of course to prevent lag. I have been building with these exploit prims (yes i know i shouldn't but i don't care). I have built a few very wonderful things using them.

A Sky dome that replaces the default linden sky with a very art filled parallax moving sky that has textured clouds, and i built a 1 prim sphere home for newbies that will fit on a 512 parcel. its very roomy and can have floors added to it. Please linden lab give us this. Yea we don't really need prims 256m in size, but atleast increase it by a small amount.

Here is a picture of my work so far: http://wolfeedarkfang.furrynet.com/images/hugeprims.jpg

Also Alazarin if your reading this, check out the size of that newbie house. If you could do that to a cylinder it would cut back on prims on those rental treehouse rooms behind it.

Yes larger prims would be nice... I am already thinking about the possibilties. I wonder what the implications will be on server loads with prims that size ?

The negative: No longer will we have to stare at big ugly box like structures, we can finally stare at GIGANTIC ugly box like structures all over SL.

What do you think?

When making building nothing is more frustrating than not being able to make a roof that completely covers the building. Esp. when it is round.

It doesn't have to be massive just big enough for a resonably sized house.

Didn't you include the answer with the question? BTW: If I remember an answer by some Linden (somewhere on these forums ...) right, one of the main reasons for not allowing giga prims are the problems regarding inter-sim border. At sim borders SL currently has to check for prims in neighboring sims for a certain distance (less than 30m) for some functionalities. If a prim could span a whole sim all these calculations would have to include all the prims in all neighboring sims.Even doubling the size of prims would make these calculations more CPU intense - and border crossing already is a problematic issue in SL.

In addition: the capability to place a box on my 16sqm parcel which completely covers all of the surrounding parcels and the neighboring sims, too, opens up some interesting possibilities for griefing, doesn't it?

Yes making prims bigger would help allot all over SL but, the prims also do not go small enough. I model for my SL living and creating detail is what I get paid for. The prim ratio between normal AV's and prims is very large, so creating detail like screws or even filling in the gaps between large prims would be a hassle. Yes, I know you can use a texture with alpha channels on it but the textures usually take too long to load for some people.

The lag that it might cause would also be a pain to people with crappy comps, but, this is a business and with every business change is required. Most of the people I have met on SL can run it smoothly; making the prims have more freedom would benefit LL greatly. First off, they would have SL users making better creations causing people to buy L$ from them to buy these creations. Second, they would have way more people seeing what SL is capable of and getting sucked into the game.

1. How about adding an additional prim type...

A "pie slice" prim, that's an up-to-60-degree (PI/3) slice of a cylinder, with the "center" for the purpose of cutting and hollowing being the corner of the tw straight sides.

This would let you build up to 20-meter perfectly round floors and walls, without any prim passing the 10 meter limit.

2. How about adding an additional "twist" option...

This would turn the positive and negative "twists" around the Z axis into "bends" of the Z axis in the X or Y direction. This would let you create slightly curved walls that could again be used to create large perfectly-round buildings. It would also, when used with cones, allow people to use bent cones instead of truncated tapered toruses to create many "horn" or "hair" or "curved branch" objects... reducing the load on the rendering and physics engines from the deadly lag prim. It would also let you make permanently and consistently bent flexible prims for hair and clothing.

lol. Couldn't agree more.

I've been using these huge prims lately and have noticed no problems with them at all, even at 256m size. Yea 256 is kinda too big. I would settle for 50m at max. Why should SL have to bend over backwords for people with computers from the mid 90s? My computer is capable of much much more and i feel it's being wasted in SL.

I understand that the 10m limit was to prevent the the prim from being readable in more then 1 sim, but just redo the coding if you have to. This sheit is tight! I wan't people puting some real power into SL and this is a major limit. I dont choose to go with the flow i choose to move the river! Change is good, if it is a good change. This is one i agree with.

WTF, dude, you've added more detail than *people will see* because of the avatar detail slider. Even all the way up those screws are less than a pixel in width.
You wouldn't happen to be the creator (or one of) that made a ~400 prim diamond ring, now would ya?
YOU CAN AFFORD SOME LOSS IN DETAIL
It works like this:
If you have to zoom in so that you can click on a .01m prim, that prim can go bye bye.

*chuckles* agreed. Normally commercial games will use textures for that screws instead of actual objects, for they know all it does is making their game slower and require more spec. than neccessary.

I agree, large prims would be a godsend (lindensend?), but I also see from their point of view what the issues would be. I can imagine a fairly simple set of rules though, that would give us useful, large prims, that shouldn't cause problems:

1) Any prim under 10x10x10m would obey current rules.

2) Prims larger than 10x10x10 would be allowed, but confined to the following rules:
2.a) Must be nonphysical (including attached to vehicles, obviously).
2.b) Must not cross sim boundaries (simple server side bounding box check).
2.c) Must not cross parcel boundaries (slightly more complex, but still simple check).
2.d) May be restricted against appearing in attachments, but would be nice for things like laser sights.

An alternative to just upping the limit to 50x50x50 or whatever:

Maximum size could be determined similar to how shipping companies determine maximum dimensions: X+Y+Z must be no greater than a certain number, length+circumference no greater than a certain number, or similarly, 'volume' must be no greater than a certain number. If you simply limited the 'volume' to 10x10x10=1000, and the maximum in any one dimension to 100*, that would allow some simple, very effective shapes, without allowing HUGE IMPASSABLE CUBES.

(* Note... 50 or 80 would be a more prudent, if seemingly slightly odd choice for the maximum length of a side. With a side length of 100, the center of the object would be greater than 64 meters away if one were standing at a corner, thus the object would not be drawn at the lowest draw distance. Running into things you can't see is a pain in the butt.)

For example:

A floor that is 100x100x0.1 (or with the smaller limits, say 50x50x0.4 - it could be no thicker than that) has a volume of 1000. This would be great for large walls of buildings, large floors, and the like - heck, it could even be circular. As mentioned before, such a maximum dimension prevents visibility/collision problems, and would be immensely useful. Even the 50x50 floor could minimize prim usage in particularly large buildings (clubs, skyscrapers, malls - heck, skyscrapers could be pretty darn cool, and are nearly impossible right now) by a factor of 25 (and circular generated floors and large domes even moreso)!

Large domed roofs would be easier, too - make one out of two or three stacked, twised, thin-but-large tubes, capped with a cylinder or smaller dome, et voila.

You can probably see where I'm going with this... If I had access to the code, I'd offer to do it. (And write a better parametric primitive generator... there has to be something wrong with that code, it's so slow! lol)

It's not the client that has the problem with megaprims, it's the servers. The servers have to exchange information about all prims to a distance of half-max-prim-size to make sure they know about overlapping prims. The bigger the prims, the more CPU on the servers is spent sharing that information instead of running scripts.

LL could fix this, but they have a monetary incentive not to. I'm sure you can see that. My proposal for a "pie slice" or "bent" prim would give you the most important advantage of megaprims while letting Linden Labs keep charging you for all the prims you use.

If you think that peeps can’t see objects as small as screws your comp must blow. My comp can see uber small objects from far away. To make prims smaller I cut and hollow them to make them appear "the right size, aka hella small" (like screws) and my comp sees them perfectly...Making prims "small" by hollowing and cutting them I assume would make it more laggy, wouldn't that be logical??? And if you’re a good 3d modelist you would know that smaller prims would be extremely useful, the small prims are “too small” only if you’re a newb.
Also the dude who thinks he knows that "commercial" game companies only use textures for screws has his head in the sand, frankly it won’t lag your comp if it’s a good comp. Halflife2 lost coast needed a pretty good comp to run it smoothly and, guess what (gasp) lots of people bought it and are still buying it!!! You think they cared about how the people with POS comps ran it…NO...they only cared about how good the game looked. And guess what, they sold tons of copies.
I agree with Yiffy Yaffle in that why the hell should we not have a game experience as good as it could be because of other people’s old comps? Wouldn’t you say that the majority of people who actually pay LL to own land or buy L$ has or can afford good hardware?

And no…I wasn’t the creator of the jewelry thing but I have created an object more then 750 prims. (sadly it doesn’t link and has 3 parts to the one object)

Tell you what, my ~150 prims avatar, all spheres, I've checked, use polygon as much as 20K faces when rendered. And that number, from what I remember, is about the number of polygons used by an entire level of HalfLife (2? I do not sure).

But the fact is, all those games use extremely high compression and technique and prerendered everything -- as most objects are static (like buildings and backgrounds). While SL has to /download/ and Real-Time rendering everything you see!

Well, excluded the fact that 750 prims would take a long time to load on those has connection slower than 1GB DSL. I believe that the number of polygon used by that objects would nearly the same as HalfLife2 entire level combined

can you see each screws modeled? i mean really modeled, not into the texture map or the normal map?

no.
cut the crap out mr "i know everything"

actually they DO care how smoothly it run , its why they have peoplex called level designers and 3D modelers, wich is also why you obviously aren't, if they where not caring about the framerate, heh why bothering to invent new methods to pull out visual details while keeping the cost low?

actually a noob builder in sl is the kind of person that use 750 prims for making a single object, wanking on his all ungodly perfection of building and whine because he can't link it fully or because he can't get more prims.

and this is the message of someone that ACTUALLY work in the game industry, when making a game we have a target machine, the game must run properly on it and with a decent framerate, we don't go ballistic just for the sake of contempting our ego, its reserved to peoples that make nice pictures in 30 hours of rendering.

[left]That's[/left] [left]definitely[/left] what cheeses me. I have a computer with almost cutting edge hardware, and it's being wasted on SL because the lindens are bending over [left]backwards[/left] for people with computers from 10 years ago. Isn't second Life [left]supposed[/left] to be a [left]miracle[/left] of modern technology?

The whole [left]Shaders[/left] idea got thrown out the window because of this crap, people like [left]michi[/left], and i were looking [left]forward[/left] to them. :/ Were never going to get them now or [left]havoc[/left] upgrades because people don't [left]wanna[/left] get a better computer to run it on.

--

Now about the Linden Servers.. I believe they can handle larger [left]prims[/left], but [left]there's[/left] a small drawback about [left]sim[/left] borders not reading it right or something... But heck Sim borders suck anyway. I [left]mean[/left] you can't cross them anymore without having a mouthful of dirt. Sim borders are the problem and they need fixed. :/

That's definitely what cheeses me. I have a computer with almost cutting edge hardware, and it's being wasted on SL because the lindens are bending over backwards for people with computers from 10 years ago. Isn't second Life supposed to be a miracle of modern technology?

The whole Shaders idea got thrown out the window because of this crap, people like michi, and i were looking forward to them. :/ Were never going to get them now or havoc upgrades because people don't wanna get a better computer to run it on.

--

Now about the Linden Servers.. I believe they can handle larger prims, but there's a small drawback about sim borders not reading it right or something... But heck Sim borders suck anyway. I mean you can't cross them anymore without having a mouthful of dirt. Sim borders are the problem and they need fixed. :/

Yes, please do this. It would be very useful!

I wonder couldn't they just put it as an option? If older engine is found, use the old code, if the engine support new shader, then use it.

I remember a few versions ago they had options to seporate old from new. In preferences they had 2 modes of how to handle the loads on your computer in the graphics tab. one for computers that had less then 512 ram and the other for above.

So its definatly possible, but what i've witnessed Linden Lab don't wish to because it's work. They doesn't think about scalability as much as they say. As you can see they chose to remove the shaders rather then to spend time fixing them, or make them optional.

No, the optional shader driven engine and the physics engine upgrades ain't making it in because happy happy go lucky Tao of Linden apparently doesn't include option of someone up the food chain actually taking bunch of programmers by the collar and telling them to sit there and code the stuff until it's done no matter if they personally *like* the idea of working on that piece of code, or not.

Look up the explanation thread how implementation of havoc 2 went, and why it's still not in. It's... quite enlightening --;;

SL is problematic on average computers from 3 years ago, even upgraded, and 5 years ago... you're talking Geforce III and Radeon 7000.

What "shaders" idea got thrown out? I had to upgrade my video card for 1.10 because of all the new shader code... and my video card was *new* three years ago.

The "Havok 2/3" upgrade was held off because of problems in the server code. It should have little if any effect on the client side because the physics isn't implemented there.

Added as Vote 1952.