The Big Prim Problem

Get rid of prim limits altogether.

People will still buy land for the same reasons they do in real life:

-more space
-room to rent out
-to build different things -a store on one parcel, a home on another

"Prim limits" were a dumb idea in the first place. Every webmaster who runs a database knows there's no limit to the the number of items it can hold. And, we're all savvy to the fact there's only ONE little wooden cube in the database -the rest are just references to it.

And, they're hurting much more than they help. The most beautiful builds -be they furniture, pets, buildings or whatever, require lots of prims. But those beautiful items don't sell well because no one can use them. Instead, we all spend our time and money searching for crappier versions that use fewer prims.

Consider:

The more nice stuff I can buy, the more SPACE I want to be able to rez it and enjoy it -ergo, more land.

And if I have three houses full of beautiful high-prim furniture, I'm likely to decide to rent one out -ergo, more land needed so my renters aren't in my backyard.

When I can use as many prims as I want and build whatever I please, suddenly a whole world of new possibilities opens up. I can build a mansion and a hotel and a zoo and a spaceport.... Whoa! More land needed!

Get rid of the prim limits. They're just stupid, and they aren't working out for anyone, anywhere.

Get rid of the mega prims if you must, but get rid of the quanity limits on the smaller ones so we can build what we want, buy what we like, and enjoy SL without constantly having to put away the sofa to unpack a chair.

I would be happy for linden lab to allow larger prim sizes, but i do not want them deleting the mega prims that exist now because there goes everything I've done for my sim if they do... CONVERTING them is the only option i see... For Example. You have a 50m mega prim. LL raises the prim size to 50m maximum. Your mega prim will be converted to a normal prim and will stay 50m. Deleting them all together will seriously break a lot of content in SL since they have become so widely used and popular. Every since i came to SL 3 years ago i have questioned the reason why prims are restricted so badly... Philip Linden has explained it in a few town halls and it leaves me with the answer "fix the grid so it can handle larger prims and there will be no need for such a restrictive limit".

^^ My Cat store made with a few 50x50 spheres ^^

I have used plenty of megaprims for different projects, one of which is the cat store. It would have been virtually impossible for me to make as good a looking store using regular prims.

I have also seen 2 different sets of mega prims the ones made by Gene Replacement, which seem to work properly. And another set made by Charles Fauna that have like 100 different sizes from .5x.5x11 up to 65x65x.01 which dont work properly. What i mean by work properly is that a 20x20x.5 by gene replacement really only takes up 20x20x.5 and when editing the 'center' point is in the center of the 20x20x.5. The ones Fauna made the 'center' point is in the center of a 65x65x65 cube even if your piece is .5x.5x11 So if your land is smaller than 65x65x65 you ARE overlapping and in one area i was building in i kept getting these small pieces that looked like they fit on my land fine returned to me for overlapping.

I would say keep the managable megaprim and those that are not managable need to be removed. I'd put managable around 64m. Any bigger and they're just tough to work with.

Me? I hate them - Megaprims that is - Nasty big laggy things that cause all sorts of problems - Get rid of the lot of them!

Now - Replace them with properly supported large prims that don't screw with the physics engine and render properly. Update the bounds check on prims to make sure that the WHOLE of the prim is on land the owner is allowed to build on to reduce the possibilities for griefing. Give people access to all the currently supported prim types in sizes up to say 256 x 256. Stop them from being physics enabled if they're over say 10 x 10.

Shouldn't be hard to run over the database (well, in theory) and identify existing Megaprims and replace them with an equivalent .

My 2¢

Wow. As if lag weren't bad enough already, can you imagine how long it would take to rez a texture store with unlimited prims? Or a griefer attack filling up parcels with an infinite number of heavily scripted garbage objects?

Those limits exist for MANY very good reasons.

OK Michael, now that you have seen many opinions.....what is LL's take on this before it becomes too much of a flame fest based of differing opinions.

Will LL take the easy way out again and remove or limit something that already exists, thereby seriously damaging or destroying existing content?

OR

Will a harder headed stead fast approach be attempted against abusers?

I think after many of the comments here, the best choice is obvious from a 'customer' standpoint, so what is the best choice from the 'provider' standpoint?

Remember, we pay fees etc. for this, make enough people mad, and even bad publicity wont be enough to pay the bills given enough time.

A 256x256x0.010 prim is very hard on the physics engine since the rounding errors cause constant collisions.

I would limit prims to 128m so that users with a draw distance of 64m could see them.

I also recommend changing the "draw distance" to be "Snapped" to the nearest 16m with hysteresis and then make the the "draw distance" area be rectangular. This would improve the ability to cache objects and reduce server loading.

1) Databases take up space, regardless of entry size. Eventually that database will fill up
2) There is not 1 wooden cube and a billion references. Each prim has several attributes, XYZ size, XYZ rotation, hollow, cut, path-cut, alpha, texture UUID.....
3) Prim limits aren't based on DATABASE size, they're based on USER BANDWIDTH.

1) Databases take up space, regardless of entry size. Eventually that database will fill up

Time for a larger disk.

2) There is not 1 wooden cube and a billion references. Each prim has several attributes, XYZ size, XYZ rotation, hollow, cut, path-cut, alpha, texture UUID.....

But only ONE cube. Each time it's "called" the various attributes are applied.

3) Prim limits aren't based on DATABASE size, they're based on USER BANDWIDTH.

Bullshit. Sorry, but it just ain't so. Lots of people buy several pieces of land, leave some of that land bare, deed it all to a group, then fill the remaining parcel with many more prims. But the lag is no worse.

I ran SL back in February on a 14.4 dial-up connection. It was slow, but it worked. Bandwidth keeps things moving faster and more efficiently, but the prims will load just the same.

Not true at all I have a 256x256 on my sim at waterlevel with the splashing water script, this depends heavely on colisions to see where the splash is, I get no false positives or false negatives on this detection. if anything it saves lag because I have 1 script running to detect colisions for the splash where with 10x10 I would need 676 scripts doing the same thing.


A draw distance of 64m is ridiculas low, if you need draw distance that low you need more memory better graphics card and get out of that spinning ad filled sim.


Much better change has already been given and is worth repeating, detect by bounding box in stead of center, that way you always see what is within your draw distance nomatter how big it is. bounding box is already known to the server for the physics engine so linking that data to the render updating should not be that much extra work (for the server, programing wise depends on the code)

Yes, please remove all prims, and physics needs to go too, also take out voice, oh, and don't forget to remove all streaming mp3/quicktime access as these tools enable terrorism online.

OMG, i almost forgot, some people use hatewords and spam in text, so maybe should disable that except for trusted linden lab people oh, and any corp that will pay them enough money should be able to do anything at all. (IBM uses large size prims).

Thank you.

p.s. Hi Gene, nice job on getting banned so now you can't make more useful sizes :/ (Should always have used your talent for good! lol)

it looks like everybody loves megaprims! I DON'T

Wipe them out! all, no exception. a good builder can do anything with 10x10x10 prims. a good builder can do this big construction with no megaprims at all. Like someone refered before me: "if you need more prims, pay for it!"

yes, and land over the water, have diferent value from land in a water front, and diferent from a mountain, and diferent in all aspects. who needs megaprims to build that nice platform?

the only reason that i beleive megaprims can be handy is to place a nice background, outside the SIM (with a dimpled cube - but only for SIM owners)

simply remove them!

the fact that IBM, BMW and such big companies use megaprims only proove to me how bad builders they are.

15,000 prims is good enought to build a large building with as much detail as you need, and still don't use large prims.

i have 3 years of SL, not as much as other, but enought to tell you that i never had any limitation on building anything.

saving on prims is cheating, as i saw someone building an entire SIM with them to build a shopping mall, to save as much as possible to have the maximum prims free for renting!

and about terrorism, bah... i never been in trouble about megaprims, i don't like it only because of performances.

megaprims are like those bad scriptors that make megalaggy scripts! wipe them out! remove them all! die to megaprims!

Wrong, the 2048 leaves a noticable gap at horizon, the 65535 leaves a 2mm gap which can be aesthetically seen as just a horizon line.

The 256x256 region argument is also only valid (1) on the mainland as islands are independant. Objects can not flow over null space (2) if your LOD was high enough to see them 4 sims away from where they were dropped.

If the 65535 could be used on the mainland to cover a whole continent... don't you think it would be done? Has ANYONE ever seen a 65535 cover one of the continents?

I am also starting to think (but am not game to test) that an object spawned in one sim can only affect the physics of that sim and maybe the neighboring sims for just a few meters (just as you can only move a prim a few meters into a neighboring sim.

So, I call FUD.

Yeah, that's easy to say for someone, who makes money with land sales

All i gotta say to you nonnux is "sure anyone can use a 10m prim but mega prims do the job in 1/4 the prim count most of the time. Plus it's been needed for years for us to have larger prim sizes and this is our way of shouting it out. IMO 10m is a very silly limit to put on a prim size when for years i see people having to overlap them just to get the size they want when they really shouldn't have to at all."

the limits exists for some reason. like 15,000 prims on one single sim... or 117 prims on 512 sq. m. or just like 16kb memory for scripts... or 1024x1024 for textures...

there are many ways to use more memory then 16kb on scripts, it will just work as megaprims, will consume more sim resources. there are many ways to break the rules, but in fact sometimes you cause more problems than beneficts.

i know you all love to brake the rules.

And no, i am not a land resseller, if you need more prims, pay for it!

if you need a megadome, just use a script to place al the faces needed, or, do not build it at all.

if you are poor, and can't buy more prims, build stuff for your size.

this discussion will never end!

PLEASE DELETE ALL MEGAPRIMS (as you did with gambling!)

And just where do you think those variables are stored? How do you think they get to the user? Magic?

It'd be more acurate to say that "cube" is merely a couple of bits of the database entry that tells the client what type of prim. The CLIENT knows what a cube is and how to render it (the sim's physics engine knows the bounding box).



And my 10 minute rez-after-teleport-while-on-a-cable-modem has nothing to do with how many prims and textures there are in the area.

Right.

I totally agree with the Vast majority of people that mega prims are a very useful building tool in sl, i can see the potential for abuse , but as someone else pointed out :

"Seems to me you'd be better off addressing the issue of thousands of spinning advertisements dotting the landscape and lagging out entire sims than worrying about the legitemate use of huge prims,looks to me like your going for the easy marks...again."


Well Said. and one reason to never go to mainland

Well.. after I found out there is a possibility that the super prims would be removed, I rebuilt my store today.. oddly enough.. people rez faster now in here..

I know nothing about how megaprims affect performance except that, logically, you would think that a client could more quickly render a 20x20x.5 wall than a wall composed of 4 10x10x.5 cubes.

I have been griefed by a megaprim griefer. I STILL support them. My current build-in-progress in Rakshasha (http://slurl.com/secondlife/rakshasa/111/145/40/) would be useless without them. It is composed almost entirely of 20x20x.05's and, thanks to some fancy texturing, is gorgeous. Now I have the prims left over to really make it a rich environment, without resorting to server-consuming "temp rezz" prim fakeouts.

Builders aren't asking for the tools to wreck havoc. Heck, I even deleted all of the megas I received that were over 100m. And the 65,000 m prim is just scary.

But, 10m is not enough.

I should also note that, once I discovered megaprims, I wanted to play with them so badly that I BOUGHT MORE LAND on which to do it. If they were to suddenly disappear, there would really be no reason for me to continue in 2L.

Right-click - Abandon Land. Logoff. Try World Of Warcraft.

As has been mentioned before, you try finding a builder who can do Greenies Home Rezzable, or Rezzable Hallucinogen without megaprims. You won't.

Probably it's gotten unnoticed, but megaprims have one more peculiar 'quality', namely:
If you make a 'cut' in mega-prim f.i. transforming a parallelepiped into a prism it becomes invisible, but it is STILL THERE for any physics interaction, so you can't walk or drive through this nonexistent part of a mega-prim.

I've seen it many times when these 'still existing nonexistent' parts block the roads etc.etc.

DELETE THEM ALL !

We use them to map the architectural floor-plan on an entire region. Then we delete them.

I vote for Yes to megaprims. You could have a registration form to allow people to submit a request for permission to use megaprims (only owners with permission can use them). In that way you can monitor who is using them and how they use them.

Unless LL specifically adds megaprims to the feature set of Second Life, take them out. Unsupported hacks have no place in SL in my opinion.

From the testing I have done in the havok 4 beta, huge prims work really well. collision is great on physical sphere, and hollow is respected on cubes. PLEASE DON'T REMOVE THEM!!! Huge prims should be controlled by land owners. if your neighbor sucks, tell your landlord. If your landlord doesn't do anything about it.... move!!! Just like real life, what is the problem? If the landlord cant keep their land rented they are bound to correct what is causing the problem. right? HUGE PRIMS RULE, LAND OWNERS UNITE AND REGULATE!!!
PLEEEEEEEEEEEEASE!!!!