Mega prims for building - do I dare?

I gotta agree with you here. LL fixes a hack(exploit) and now are complained at for fixing things. Go figure, some people would bitch being hung with a new rope.

Fortunately for me, I don't use the large prims beyond the 20x20x5 box in things I've made. I am happy to replace the item if megaprims drop out, it won't add too many additional prims, 3-6, typically. Most of the things I have sold are all transferable, so I can easily recover the pieces and replace the dysfunctional part.

I would lament the loss of the more impressive legitimate uses of the prims.

With any hope, LL will introduce larger prims that do not negatively effect performance, and then we can all be happy.

Ah yes, the old "it is easier to ask for forgiveness then to ask for permission" argument.

Everyone knew that they were frowned upon by LL and that they slipped into SL as a hack that would be very hard to control.,...but they used them anyways.

As far as impressive builds...i'm sure there are plenty of impressive builds that were made with mega prims....too bad, so sad.....sorry if that sounds harsh, but as I said...they knew the story behind mega prims but they used them anyways.

what would you say if LL came out and said that they'll need to stop allowing sculpties in SL because of performance issues (hypothetical, of course) would you be upset? would you moan about all of the cool things that you'll miss because sculpties have to go away?

I can tell when some of the shops I go into have mega prims built in. I start levitating. If it is really bad, I go up and no matter what I do, I can't stop going up up and away.

If I'm reading your post accurately, prims (mega or not) participate in physics calculations. Thats why you don't walk through walls or fall through floors.

I understand that most of the reports and videos out of beta use physics for toys, and you are quite correct, there aren't gobs of practical use for those. Floors and walls, on the other hand, are used quite frequently and do need to be known to the physics engine.

Given the way policy changes are announced at LL - the interview with Andrew above notwithstanding - I'd be wary of building with deprecated objects until you can either create larger prims on the edit menu (thus being legitimized) or aren't allowed by the system any more (killing the deprecated megaprims).

Avaria uses 20x20x.5 prims a lot, and the occassional 20x20x60 (I think that's their measurement??) as well... and having graduated from about 6000 10x10s to ~1200 20x20s to save primmage, we discovered, guess what?

Improvement in rez times!

Improvement in sim stats!

Less sim crossing rubberbanding!

Improvement in rendering times!

Note that these are not only megaprims, but they're mega*sculpty*prims.

Frankly, the "horrible lagginess" people talk about that are supposed being caused by megaprims seem to be conspicuously absent for many of us.

Perhaps the problem does not lie in the megaprims themselves.

Enjoy the view in Avaria Kro - Megaprim caverns at their finest (and we're almost done building everything!)

Usually that lagginess is from prims with other params enabled, such as flexy or physical. With megaprims that are either, it can cause humongous problems, the most notorious being crashing the Sim housing the megaprim(s). If used normally,just for building, it might be fine, but they are dangerous due to the effects o those parameters on them, and how they affect the Sims

Exactly my experience too.

Just so everyone is clear on this:



Not. One. Single. Feature. In. SL. Is. Guaranteed.




That's right, nothing. Read the service terms.

There's no such thing as 'this will always be here'.

Policies like that basically greenlight doing anything that works, because there isn't any solid ground - nothing to 'retreat to' at all.

I built a multisim railroad using standard SL features of early 2006, and it was trashed repeatedly by updates. It's getting redone again in early 2008.

Megaprims? Hah! That's simple compared to what I've weathered with permissions errors, parcel primcount behaviour, rezzing, scripts being globally shut off at times, &c.

Don't even *think* 'sticking to the rules' will save you. That's the biggest delusion of all.

That statement is rediculous. Absolutely rediculous.

It is true that nothing is completely guaranteed. But you have a better chance of not having your content deleted if you stick to the rules. Advocating TOS violations as revenge for service issues in the past is nothing more than childish. I've been through some of those issues you mentioned myself, and I stick to the TOS anyway. It's part of the territory.

The sense of entitlement is mindboggling.

I don't see how how Desmond's statement is ridiculous at all. The way I read it, he's simply stating the TOS guarantees that there are no guarantees at all. In my opinion, he hit the nail square on the head. *shrugs*

I could run out in traffic and get ran over, killed. But if I am told this is dangerous do I listen or run blindly in traffic because there's no gaurantee??

Hardly, if one chooses not to listen to warnings its their own damn fault not because there's no gaurantees.

Wow, people really can take things out of context and twist them around to mean whatever they want. There's a huge difference between common sense behavior in everyday real life and how things may or may not be from one day to the next in an ever changing software platform that we as residents, each and every one, have to agree to the TOS of, before we even enter into this virtual world.

I don't see what this quibble over TOS has to do with the megaprim question. The Lindens have publicly stated they will allow megaprims so long as the megaprims don't cause trouble, and mostly they honor that. So how do we get to TOS violations? Don't recall a single thing in TOS that says "Thou Shalt Not Build Prims Larger Than 10m On A Side."

Including the Lindens. Take a good look at what the Governor's Mansion is made of.

Tacit approval is a bitch, isn't it....

*grins* A big slobbering one, apparently. I've had no problems with the ones I use. I've thought about using more than the 20x20x.5, but I tend to wind up with the whole 'falling upwards' issue.

*shrugs* I just think they need to get rid of the really big ones, sorry. Meaning those that are larger than the sim.. Otherwise, I can simply avoid going to places that make me 'fall upwards.'

I've never seen this "falling upwards" problem. Can someone show me a place where it happens?

I saw it on one plot, the neighbor had build a castle out of mega prims. If you started to walk, you floated upwards out of control, flying did no good either. Someone must have AR'd, because now they have normal prims.

The falling up effect happens to me when I combine AOs and a few other Huds. If I have Jax's free AO on twice, because I have it in two HUD positions by acident, I float upward. Same thing if I combine the Mystitool HUD with Jax's free AO

I don't use AO's, and it only happened in this one sim. TPing away you would control normally.

I'm a little confused, why don't they just fix the software? It isn't as if they are altering real life physics here, just changing some code. I realize it may not be easy, but if it is a choice between losing customers or rolling up your sleeves, most would choose the latter option.

SJ

I call it "falling upwards," because it triggers my falling animation on my AO It's a floating upwards and yes, TPing does stop it.

I've only had it happen with those prims that are not set phantom and larger than the 20x20x0.5. I do note that it is hit or miss on whether this phenomenon happens to me. I think one of the reasons LL wants to remove the megaprims is because the physics engine can't figure out where the bounding box is. So.. more than likely, it's just poor programming.

LL's concerns are reasonable. A mega-prim can trash a sim instantly. There are other ways of trashing sims, but a mega-prim is by far the easiest way. But rather than remove them, they need to simply add the necessary code to prevent people from rezzing them on a parcel that isn't large enough to hold a mega prim.


If (PrimSize>ParcelSize)
}
Bye!!;
}


If large mega prims lag the physics engine then have the the client set the large mega prim to phantom. Phantom mega prims are better than none at all.

First off - I have *never* advocated TOS violations as revenge for service issues in the past.

If anything, I've always had excellent service to begin with!

I'm not quite sure how you came to this conclusion. Incidentally, I checked with three Lindens, including Robin and Torley and someone who was on concierge (was it Cyn?) that said megaprim usage would *not* get me into service terms trouble prior to using them on my islands. And it hasn't.

Someone can search the old Linden Answers forum, I think one of my 'asks' was in there but I don't recall too well, that was prior to last March at least.

* * * * *

Re: getting content deleted: deletion is only one factor.

I've had my multisim transit systems wrecked numerous times, from at least:

- how parcel prim returns are handled
(the fix costs me about 25/mo in tier I had to eat to fix it)

- how object rezzing is handled
(still problematic after grid attacks when they tighten the grey goo fence)

- how LSL functions are handled
(long story, everything from warppos to how email is handled)

- how 'object entry' to a parcel is handled
(suddenly a flag that keeps out trains! massive negotiation with residents fixed this)

- how sim border crossings are handled
(our service provider graciously put all my sims at one colo facility)

And all that was sticking to 'the rules'. One thing was never a factor - megaprims!

In the cost benefit analysis of usefulness -vs- risk, megaprims trump many standard 'features' hands down.

* * * * *

Mindboggling sense of entitlement: Sure, I can see how you arrive at that.

No argument. I pay the Company roughly 150 USD a day. Or about 600 USD since the issue came up Friday.

For further perspective, Caledon represents perhaps 0.2% of the grid overall - roughly 1/500th, which with growth we've been for about the last year.

We aren't going to sink the Company if we are swept under the rug. But that's immaterial.

I feel I have a *responsibility* to not just roll over, with hundreds of residents relying upon me. I've gotten plenty of correspondence myself - the overwhelming bulk of it is that they want to use megaprims.

A few forum posts and an email for the sake of hundreds of residents - imagine the sort of person I'd be if I *didn't* do at least this.

If I fail after my best efforts, I fail. But I'm going to bloody well make the effort.

* * * * *

Fortunately, it seems that the Lindens truly understand the issues.

I've been somewhat pleased so far, and I'm sure my commentary has been added to the rest. I've already made what point there was to make.

And yes, even Caledon would survive the loss of anything 256m in dimension. We'd lose a few things, but nothing we couldn't approximate with some 100m prims.

I'm not sure some of my neighbours (including IBM) could say the same, however - we'd have to ask them.

* * * * *

Megaprim physics - yes, I use common sense and make the biggest ones phantom as needed, of course that's a factor, but after extensive testing I've never strained the physics engine even with Caledon's SkyCity.

Seifert - yes I'd heard of the 'gravity' issues too - if you ever reproduce them I'd be interested in seeing - though mostly I'd seen people simply 'pushed upward' by virtue of the fact that someone rezzed a 256m cube and they were now being pushed upward out of it. That was the 'antigravity' when I'd enquired myself a couple of times.