New shapes?

I'm wondering if it is possible to add custom shapes to the havoc engine. Could something like this be possible?...

I want a stairway primitive.


And I want the spiral (they say its coming in havoc 2).

These two things could save us a whole lot of prims.

And a mile-high billboard primitive. It would help me confine my activities to selecting the appropriate pictures to display.

Seriously !

Allowing prims that had a total of 30 meters allocated to size would be SWEET
you could make a pole 29 meters long, a sign that was 14 meters by 14 meters, or the standard 10 by 10 by 10 cube......

Is this possible within the confines of havoc?

It would also help with the prim problem (walls would need fewer components).

lol ok "WHAT IF" they could just have boolean operations where you take two prim shapes and subtract one from the other and come up with a new one thus the combined shapes would be merged as one ...aaaand if that could happen we could all PERMANENTLY Joining our Prims thus creating one object reducing the prim count. ((please not sarcasm))

Sorry I asked about that ages ago when I started in Jan. heheheh

This wont happen mind you because Havoc is a physics engine not a graphics one it will not help in the graphical interface of the game and it all stims back to polygons and poly counts for the primatives. the basic shapes in the game are Very Low Poly shapes once combined those become high polygon shapes thus creating mathmatical havoc on the graphics engine not the physics one. Anyone that is very familure with Bryce/3dStudio/Autocad/Rhino/Maya/Truespace/or Vue despirit understand this and can vouch for what I am saying here.

I wish it could happen but a long discussion several several months back with some of the lindens and Phillip revealed based on the Client/Server system in place it would make LAG a major issue worse than it is now. Distance and packet loss would create to many "Unrezed" objects thus infuriating a lot of people. The system at hand now for what SL is, does an effective job but yes some tweaking is needed in the future.

I really doubt you'll see CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry) shape support in SL. The reason being that the representation of shapes are being streamed to you - so they can specify, a cube of x, y, z dimensions, at THIS position x, y, z. That is a true primitive representation.

If they allowed CSG operations, they'd either have to send all the objects involved in making that shape, and THEN make the client do the rendering for the result, or go to an entirely different method of streaming shape data.

It just sounds technically daunting to do in real-time.

CSG is an expensive operation for a polygon renderer like SecondLife or 3DS Max. It's a much cheaper operation for a raytracer, but for scenes of reasonable complexity, a polygon renderer will always be faster than a raytracer. (Raytracing is faster for very complex scenes, such as the entire SecondLife world as a whole)

That shape can closely be approximated by hollowing a cube, changing the hollow shape to a circle, and cutting the cube in half using Cut Start At and End At. 95% hollow should get you close to what you want - unfortunately you can't go any higher than that.

Cristiano

Something like this is already possible.

Cube, cut at .375 and .875
Hollow to 95%, Hollow shape Circle

The hollow wont go above 95 so the edges aren't quite sharp but pretty close.

UU

oh duh!

That's perfect!

Why not allow 100% hollow?

Sure, it's silly when the hollow shape is the same as the original, but in other conditions, it would be quite usefiul.