Inclusion/Exclusion of prim to prim

I am just courious about the prims I was trying to do something as make a door on the side of a building. This task has a multitude of possibilities abound to solve this simple task.

During this trivial task I remembered one of my 3d modeling clases in highschool when we worked with BRYCE TM. (When it was still a useable software app) Now it is pretty much a depricated application. It was very similar to SL's skies and just the over all feel reminds me of those highschool days from time to time. Anyway, I distinctively remeber there being a feature that would take one object and remove it from another.

I belive it might have had something to do with prims having multiple editable splines. I have not seen splines but I was wondering about the inclusive exclusive properties of linking, and unlinking. The prims in SL only have one way to link and thats pretty much to slap to objects together. Keeping both of the original objects how ever I was wondering could you make it possible to make the linking options a little more accepting as to possibly hide anything that might overlap in two objects or subtract one objects prim from another? Or at least make it so that phantom will work on one linked object and the area that is overlaped by another object but not the entirity of the other object. As it stands now... you link one phantom object to a non phantom object both become phantom.

The possible benifits might include,
More efficient construction of objects needing empty space
Fewer prims used to create an object
possible neg's I see,
More cpu usage due to math depending on how implimented.


Please if you have any missunderstanding about this please contact me.

Thanks,
Lucidax burke

I think the reason LL hasn't done this is because of the complications with how the physics engine would have to handle this.

The ability to subtract one object from another has long been requested (I believe the general term for this type of object editing is Constructive Solid Geometry). Tthe advantages are obvious, but I think the cost of computation is the problem. Having all prims be additive is _much_ faster.

I had thought that might be the case thank you both for the wonderful insight. I just thought there might be anoter way or even a work around. hmmm... I think this is just a feature that will have to wait... Thank you anyway though. I see how the physics might affect things but if it is all one object it should act as one object I mean it is locked to some degree.

Actually, from a practical standpoint, the most difficult part of this is texturing, not physics. In theory, it wouldn't be TERRIBLY difficult to do this, but because of the way that SL transfers face data, texturing such an object would be very annoying. I expect it's something we'll see one day, but that it would be pretty time-consuming to figure it out just yet.