Question on mega prims

yeah I know...*groan*

anyways...

I read somewhere that flat mage prims, if rotated onto their side edge, will still project a "footprint" as if they were still flat.

I have seen this in the minimap with my neighbors mega prims overlapping onto my land. Even though the mega prim is not technically on my property , the footprint of it is.

The question is, will this cause any detrimental effects on my performance? Or do I just need to worry about any sim edge mega prims?

(ok, I worry about more than sim edge mega prims..I've seen enough damage caused by mega prims to know that they should not be allowed on mainland...too many people are clueless as to their proper use)

I won't cause any effect other than rendering the minimap useless since it hides any other prims. Mega prims up to 50x50 are widely used, don't underestimate their potential. Mega prims over 50x50 are the ones that MAY cause some lag if they are set to Solid and WILL cause lag if set to Physical.
By saying that they should not be allowed just because they may be misused by some AVs, is like saying scripts shouldn't be allowed because some AVs may use them for griefing. The posibilities are endless. Where do we draw the line?

We draw the line at controllable known boundaries.

The majority of mega prims are used to make floors and walls ...its easy and mindless to lay out a mega prim wall or floor.
It takes TALENT to design using standard sized prims....and use them efficiently while having them look good.
Many poeple, when having the option of using mega prims, turn an entire plot of land into a flat parking lot instead of sculpting the land and terracing the floors/property to match the land nicely.
SL has turned into a "parking lot" of large flat surfaces...its ugly and unnecessary.

Yes, well. This happens without megaprims, too. Difficult to find land for sale from "realtors" that hasn't been bulldozed flat as a billiard table. We could control that, of course: just get rid of terraforming, because "too many people are clueless."

It would save a lot of bother if people just assumed that megaprims can't cause whatever problems they think they're having. There's so much misinformation, disinformation, and superstition about them that you'd think they ate the Lindberg baby.

Well, let's put it this way... Rez a 50 x 50 x 1 megaprim, and it appears 50 M above the ground! So it it's really still a 50 x 50 x 50 cube that has been 'tortured' to a smaller size. But because the game engine doesn't KNOW how to properly render these megaprims, I'd be willing to bet that anything in that 49 M deep 'phantom zone, below the 50 x 50 x 1 prim, is likely to act strangely.

Use them with extreme caution, I would say. And only on your own sim.

I use a 50x50x1 as a floor with the cut side facing up. I have it set as Solid. I've had no problems whatsoever with it and it saves me a lot of prims that I'd rather use for the products I sell.

to answer to OPs question, the minimap does not show ANY prim at it's proper size.

see thread in building tips for factual tested information on megas, including comments from andrew linden on page 3

Um, no actually. Visit Pony Island. I have used *ALOT* of megaprims of all shapes and sizes for that build and it's anything but ugly, flat or boring. Don't blame the tools.... blame the builder if you really need to put 'blame' somewhere.

I avoid using megaprims in all my builds. OK, so they save on prim count, but as Markubis has stated and I agree with him wholeheartedly, "it takes talent to design using standard sized prims".

As there is no certainty as to whether they cause lag or not and at what size should they be used up to, I am very much against the use of them. Better to err on caution than to use them and unknowingly create lag etc.

Sticking a 50x50 on the ground is easy and requires no skill - we are given so many prims per sqm and we should stick to it. Using a "cheat" prim (megaprim) will undoubtedly cause some sort of server lag and if that affects my playbility in SL, teleports failing, etc etc - then ban them now.

I build all sorts of things. I always use nothing bigger than 10x10x10. If LL thought Megaprims were ok to use, then they would not limit the max size would could build.

You can create wonderful buildings etc without "cheating".

The other thing to be aware of is LL have stated that they can't guarantee that they will support megaprims indefinitely, so you are taking a bit of a risk with them. Having said that, they have been around for a while now.

no argument, but an observation... they also said we'd get havok 2 back in the day =X

@ general "mega's are lazy" posts
a mega is a tool, just like any other, proper use within a build adds to it rather than takes away, yes lazy people like them, and so many pro's. most anyone can layout a flat floor of 10x10's too... and it's just as 'lazy'... more so since it's wasteful in cases where a single mega would do the same thing, at a prim discount.

@'cheating' comment
Mega's are no more 'cheating' than several other things taken for granted on a daily basis, like networked vendors, AO's, the ability to hide sculpt maps, skins, etc... all of which use features that LL didn't expect or intend to be used that way. Mega's are just another thing they didn't plan, but we got anyways. Nothing is 'cheating' till LL says it is... and so far, they haven't

You're right, anyone "should" be able to lay out a floor or wall....but many people have no clue how to lay out a floor or wall correctly. I'm constantly seeing walls and floors with overlapping seams or seam edges that were not set to "clear" before being put together.

or walls floating 0.4 meters above the floor, and then strangely enough they also manage to rez everything else in the building to align with the walls, so everything is 0.4 meters above the floor, I see this so much and its so annoying, I even rebuilt a guys plot for him once because this was the case.

Atm, there are real 20x20x0.5 megaprims. These aren't tortured/dimpled and will have correct behaviour, indpendent of rotation.
The majority of megaprims use torture/dimpling though, which causes boundary issues. The issues are usually unrelated to the rotation. Boundary issues are:

1. Can cause high physics timing, due to collisions being handled wrongly (can be checked in sim timings)
2. Cause rezzing on top of them to be impossible or highly problematic.
3. Can cause avies to 'fly up', esp. when standing up etc.

You can check if a megaprim is normal or tortured by switching it to 'sphere', and checking if it's dimpled or not.

I've already stated in other forum threads that actually introducing MORE real flat megaprims, would solve some of the current megaprim issues, which are more related to the torturing/dimpling than to the actual size.

never had problems with this, but I tend to 'retorture' them so the cut part is out of the way


only time I ever see this is when the mega is moving or changing via a script that causes a full prim update(oddly set text does that), but you can get the same effect from normal cut/hollow prims with slightly less regularity. I've used a cut and hollowed non-phantom mega as a small parcel border that effectively coeverd the whole thing with no TP or sit issuses (but caught myself when moving it into place)


QFT (and suggested by many myself included)

dimpling towards one end or anther (rather than centered) can make a HUGE difference... and even allow for some physics uses (but I don't reccomend it, risk outweighs the use)

Well, for some value of "correct." As with all megaprims, if non-phantom, the void of a hollowed section still gets collisions. But I was surprised when I tested just now and found that I could rez just fine on top of a 20x20x.5, which I swear used to fail--but then, I was also able to rez just fine on a highly dimpled 32x32x40, which I *know* failed when I did it by accident just yesterday. (Maybe we got a little Christmas gift in the latest update?) (On the other hand, I'm on a nearly idle Class 5 at the moment, so maybe it's got nothing better to do than calculate surface intersections.)

On the thread as a whole, sorry, usually I'm more patient about answering repeated questions. It's just that for some reason, with this one, it seems no amount of information can combat the rampant misinformation. A few facts:

- There are things that cannot be built without megaprims: Some shapes achieved with a single megaprim could in theory be approximated by regular prims--except it would take more than can exist in a sim to be even recognizable as the same shape. (Then try cel-shading it!)

- The inability to rez reliably on top of a megaprim is the same reason it's difficult to rez on the inside surface of a hollow cube.

- The problem with mouse-drag camera operations pulled from a megaprim is the same problem encountered with regular prims that have been significantly top-sheared. (These can also be difficult to rez atop.)

- The griefing and misuse potential of megaprims is real--but it's nothing compared to cross-continent targeting of particles, or the sim-crashing ability of scripts.

It is *possible* for non-phantom megaprims to cause problems, and it's *likely* that physics enabled megaprims will. But that was the answer back up @#2. Hasn't changed since then.

(Oh, on the subject of transparent mating surfaces: to reduce lag, those should be achieved by scripted setting of a common texture to full-alpha, not by a full-alpha texture. But this all belongs in building tips or texturing tips or somewhere.)

People who don't have talent want to build too, though.



That's far more to do with the fact that a) SL's terraforming tools are horrible, and b) most prefabs have flat bottoms. If you want to create a building with interesting height changes, then it's far easier to give it a flat bottom and make the height changes purely internal. It might be more realistic to have a building which varies height because there was a hill on the underlying land, but if you try to do that in SL, you will still be finding new view angles at which the hill is poking through your floor eight weeks later.

So, its better to throw down a couple of mega prim cubes to flatten everything out?

Or is it better to build terraces into the slope for your builds...flattening when necessary.

I've seen far too many sims that are turned into a flat metal landscape of boxes.

Have you ever tried building a straightforward slope in the land editor? Unless the slope you want has exactly the same gradient, as the one you can build automatically with one of the three land brushes, it's ridiculously hard.

you don't live in a large city do you? beauty is in the eye f the beholder, whether it's you conforming to the environemt, or conforming the environment to you, the goal is to build something you have a vision for... if your vision requires a flat space to start, well... :hrug::

and THAT has nothing to do with megas, other than they are more useful in the latter scenario than the former (usually, not always)

I just noticed this too!! On a sky platform, a cut megaprim to 25x50 (so center is at the "edge" I used to never be able to drop inventory without rezzing a box first (100% of the time), today I rezzed a Christmas tree and didn't get an error (although I didn't see it). Turns out it had appeared, at the megaprim's "center" behind me instead of where I dropped it!