Feature Suggestion - Weld Vertices

I can imagine that a great many objects in SL are designed such that they have no parts that will *ever* move. That being the case, I would dearly love to have a checkbox at the object level that allows SL to weld vertices that are within a given very low tolerance of each other, eliminating seams when an object is carefully constructed.

This might create a bit of a hit on the client side, I suppose, though it is hard to imagine that it would be drastic enough to cause a really significant impact, and the benefit would be a dramatically more pleasing build in many cases.

It makes sense to me that this could invalidate some LSL calls, like child prims using llSetPos(), but that is a non-issue in the types of objects where people would wish for this feature.

If you want to clean up most of the seam artifacts, set the facing prim faces to a 100% alpha texture. this causes SL not to draw that face, thus eliminating float precision and LOD generated artifacts at the joints of prims.

Welding is never going to happen, because object prims have to sense collisions even if they never move, and are thus limited to the the capabilities of the physics system.

Welding, if implemented client-side and within the limits of the physics system, wouldn't be a problem. Set "weld distance" on an object, and any edges or vertices in adjacent prims that are within that distance of each other, from 0.001 to 0.1 meters, would be snapped together.

0.001 to 0.1 is 100 steps, which is easy to conceptualize, and stops short of the physics precision.

That does not sufficiently clean up seam artifacts, I am sorry to say.

The welding would not be a server-side thing, I am only talking about the client side, as a visual nicety. It would not change physics one bit.

Although it *would* be nice to get rid of that whole "avatar tripping over the nearly invisible seam in the floor" problem, it is not within the scope of client-side welding.