Huge Prims

Ok I am lost here on these so I have come to the forums for help and opinion.

Are Huge Prims allowed in SL?

I have a couple of them and really can see no benefit to them except to level out land if you are on the side of a hill. As a builder, I find them clumsy and rather annoying to work with and inflexible so they can stay in my inventory.

As a land owner I am finding it annoying when people put up these huge ugly spheres in the air trying to make them look like planets or space stations or asteroids or something.

The creator of the ones I have come across is a dude called Gene Replacemnt who gets mixed reviews as a contributor of content.

The more sensible shapes and sizes are uselss.

A 'box' prim is either 20mx20m - to small for 1024m2 and to large for 512m2 and the other size is 40mx40m. So who ever made them did not understand building.

When you hollow a box prim it is kind of a fake hollow which again is not at all useful for building prim efficient structures with.

The cylinders are great - if you want to make a gigantic can of Campbells Soup or a smoke stack that goes to the heavens


I remember reading a few weeks ago that Lindens do not like them - they affect server performance and upset prim limist by rezzing as the same volume of matter as several standard prims.

then I read this in a QA on Sculpted prims:

""Q: Can huge prims be used to make huge sculpties ?

A: Yes, see this snapshot : megapple""
from:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims

My mouth went dry, my heart stopped - now lindens want the skys littered with huge pieces of fruit.

So what is the understanding of people here and really, are huge prims legitimate in any circumstance, on islands only or what?

Huge prims are allowed.

I did see one really good use of this...on the sim Galactica, a very large prim was used to make the appearance of "earth" below the space stations. several would have been difficult to piece the textures correctly, this actually looks very good.

It's very, very hard to build decent cylinders or spheres large than the 10 x 10 limit, for example, a big building with a curved area isn't the nicest thing to build with any efficiency. What we need are prims that can be used to more easily build large sphere and cylinder-based shapes, then stop people being able to create mega-prims.

Huge prims are great to create large buildings and structures if you use cubes and parallelopipedes. Sheres are good for domes, and cylinders for towers. The real pity is that you cannot change at least the size of one of the sides.

ok so answer is YES ?

larger prims then 10x10 is allowed in SL ?

becouse i hear that is not allowed...but from ppl who i dont know...and i didnt check that information .....

Yeah they're good for it, but not ideal due to the inability to cull them correctly, and possible physics issues. What I'm saying is that we really need the ability to create prims that are actually just chunks of a much larger prim. e.g - we'd create a "sphere-piece" and tell it that the sphere size it is to emulate is one with a 100m radius. We can then specify which angle on that radius we want the piece to be. From here we could build a smooth sphere from many 10 x 10 pieces.

I believe that LL were going to ban huge prims but shied off due to the fact IBM was using them in its builds (I got that from some blogs - I'll let you make up your own minds whether that is true or not).

In general, I would say that huge prims are tolerated rather than allowed. So some simply rules:

i) Do not use them to grief - OK, so that applies to any object in SL, but huge prims do offer new greifing potentials but this is to be resisted.

ii) huge prims can cause sims to lag or malfunction (such as gravity suddenly pushing you up rather than pulling you down) - so
a) if on a private island - check with the owner first (unless you are the owner, of course), otherwise you could find yourself kicked off the island and with your land reclaimed
b) if on mainland, be prepared to come online one day to find your build decimated as the sim was malfunctioning and a Linden decided to delete the huge prims in case they were the cause

iii) do not use them in anything you sell, unless the recipient fully understands the consequences. You may not want an angry IM from a customer whose product has been dstroyed by a Linden deleting huge prims, or who has just lost their island home when they annoyed the island owner by crashing his Sim!

iv) stick to basic shapes and not grossly large - rezzing a complex spiral which fills an entire sim is just asking for trouble!

Huge prims don't affect sim stability, I read it somewhere.

Just as a matter of interest: how do they work? Do you need a brain the size of a planet to be able to make one?

Depends how LL implemented them. I mean, if you built them individually it's be a bit trickier to do yourself as you'd have to tell the prim the size of the sphere/cylinder you're building, and then what chunk of that object you want it to represent.

However, LL could easily get around this by allowing us to produce mega-prims client-side, that when saved to the simulator are actually sub-divided into smaller pieces no bigger than 10 x 10 x 10m.
For example; I could go into a 'build mega-prim' tab which would give me options for several basic objects, such as spheres and cylinders. I 'create' one however it is visible only on the client side at this point, I make it the size I want, texture it and click "Done". The client then breaks it up into the special new 10 x 10 x 10 pieces and sends these to the simulator.

This way we have mega-prims without using mega-prims.

The only problem with that (while a good idea) is coming back later and editing them

Could always mark them as a pseudo-linked-set which CAN'T be made physical (because that's the main problem), if you then choose to de-link it then all parts are separated and can be moved individually.
If you resize it while it's a linked-set (it would resize like a single-prim rather than only scaling) then it would become a client-side object, and once finished the sim will delete the original and replace it with the new one from you.

Hi,

How would I create a huge prim? I am looking to create a 20x20x20 prim for a planeterium dome.

Thanks for any help.

Corey Linden's response to the question, "What are the policies regarding Mega Prim?" question was, that they were only truly allowed in private estates where the estate owner has approved their use. On the mainland, the policy is .. if they are causing a problem, they'll be returned.

Also, you can't create new megaprims. You can only use existing ones.

If you want to see an effective use of megaprims in action, check out the sims Romenna, and Romenna2 (and soon Romenna3).[the sims are currently private, untill the build is complete, but you can gain acess by joining the group "Second Age" for 0L$] they are a massive city layout based on the massive ,old highly stylized stone buildings from Tolken's Second age. most of the city sprawl itself is using megaprims as base ground, supporting walls, and massive dome and arches rooves.even the athmosphereic cloud layers are a single megaprim the size of each sim.
although there are alot of technical problems with some of the prims, we've managed to work around a good deal of them. (any megasphere will have the boundaries of a megacube, letting people "walk on air" if they are on top corner of one. and no, they dont hallo out right, so using them for giant doorways and acessable windows wont work.)