The Big Prim Problem

[copied over from the blog at http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/10/12/the-big-prim-problem/
to capture more comments]

For quite a while now Second Life has been home to a variety of jumbo-sized prims, megaprims, and other larger than the usual ten-meters-maximum prims. The original “megaprims” were produced by Residents’ manipulation of the client last year; “new” ones cannot be made, but the existing supply can be (and are) copied and distributed. Linden Lab doesn’t support or encourage the use of these prims, but our policy up until now has been ‘live and let live’.

Back in at the December 2006 Town Hall meeting there were a couple of questions about these objects (see
http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/12/20/town-hall-with-cory-introductory-transcript/
) , to which Cory Linden answered: “I think the policy is to return them if a nuisance … oh, a follow up on megaprims: we are going to allow them on private estates as well.”

Some of these objects have now been recognized as being nuisances in several ways:

– the larger ones, when used on the mainland, often produce annoying “parcel encroachment” situations. The megaprims are difficult to interact with, and are often not recognized by Residents as being an object at all — “I couldn’t go past some kind of invisible barrier.” Abusive Residents take advantage of these problems.

– the presence of megaprims will interfere with the improvements planned for the physics engine. The bigger the megaprims, the more trouble they will cause for physics simulation in a Region.

– the graphics engine does not work well with prims over 256 meters in any dimension.

We are thus requesting your comments on The Megaprim Problem.

– Good Things: are there legitimate current uses of megaprims? Perhaps with a good example location?

– Bad Things: have you had negative experiences in Second Life due to the presence of megaprims (besides deliberately abusive uses, that is)? Please don’t use these comments to file abuse reports, by the way.

– Ideas: should Linden Lab remove all megaprims? Or at some particular size level? Or take some other, more creative action? If we remove them, they have to be removed on all private estates as well (otherwise they get imported back into the Mainland!). There’s one available at over 65,000 meters wide … that one will definitely be removed!

Please post your comments! We will make another posting once we’ve reviewed your comments.

As with any tool, the only problems I've ever seen coming from megaprims is irresponsible use.

I am a builder, and megaprims are a *very* valuable tool, particularly to those who can not afford huge plots of land. One 20x20x20 size hollow box can provide a beginning player with a nice 3-story home on a 256m plot. Used properly, they can create a large variety of effects. Without them, prim count limitations would make SL too much of a financial burden for a lot of people, myself included.

To do away with megaprims would be like removing fire from the real world. Great, you'd be safe, but back to the stone ages.

I support the status quo of correcting misuse, but still allowing megaprims to be used as the wonderful tool that they are.

I say keep the mega prims around,
get rid of the people that are abusing them.


****** The people that own land on water especially need them for platform placement. Otherwise Linden should give everyone with water property's Extra Prims to use!!!!!!!!!



-Just my 2 cents

I believe that big prims are a must if you own water property! otherwise you would kill all your prims on platforms to build!!! plus taken them away would only decrese the value of these properties.

In response to request made for resident input on the subject on Mega Prims by Michael Linden here's my take on the issue:

– Good Things: Non Cubical mega prims can be quite useful. one bane of many of builders out there is no conventional way to make a curving or circular structure with a radius larger then 10m without having to put up with a blocky sometimes imprecise curve made from multiple cubes at different angles. This process not only makes texturing it very hard it also can use a large number of prims depending on how rounded the builder wants it to look. also if a dome is wanted with a radius larger then 10m again that is nearly impossible with current conventional methods. Mega Prims solve those problems along with others.


– Bad Things: as mentioned Mega prims can be used for greefing just like any other object, Can't be seen by someone if their draw distance is below where the center of the object is and can cause “parcel encroachment” situations on the mainland when used on plots too small to contain them. however most of these problems are also caused by conventionally sized prims as well.

– Ideas:
Certainly not! The fact that they are in common use by many people proves that there is a need for them.

This would be a more sensible action.. sometimes they can be too big. As Michael stated the maximum size to consider would be 256m a side since the graphics system doesn't work well with bigger then that, however that is still a sim sized prim which a reason for would be rare indeed. perhaps something smaller like 60m a side could work. that way even residents with the lowest of draw distances could see at least one of the mega prims when standing next to it.

Yes, preferably what I'd like to see is increasing the maximum size prims can be built at to at least double the current size or better. While creating buildings over the last three years there have been so many times where I wished I could have simply made a 20m object Circular or otherwise. the 10m limit is stifling to the creation of less cubical large buildings and larger buildings in general. to prevent abuse on the mainland perhaps this could be a premium account only feature so that only land owners could create such useful prims for creating structures.

In Summation, Please don't eliminate mega prims unless the conventional Limits are increased. a 10m prim limit may have made sense when most residents only had small parcels of land on the mainland, but now in an age of Estates and land owners owning vast amounts of land 10m is just too small to create the wonderful looking Structures SL needs.

you get rid of mega prims, you can say goodbye to the greenies sim.

TY for posting here, Michael!!

There was some talk a while ago about megaprims and their effect on SL. See: /8/c0/208385/1.html . Long story short, Zero Linden seems to say in an office hour that they do bad things to sim-sim communications - really cranked up the cost of them. Andrew Linden chimed in on the thread; didn't know anything about comms costs but thought phantom megaprims would avoid a lot of the bad things they did to Havok. Any more details on things like this? Not sure it really applies to your question directly but a lot of people seem interested in their impact on the grid..

For your good things list: check out the Rezzable Hallucinogen sim!!!

The encroachment argument against megaprims is misleading. I have had many more problems of encroachment with regular size prims. In other words, encroachment is a problem anyway. Megaprims are not really making that problem worse. Idiots and inconsiderate folk cause these problems with any kind of prim.

I support the use of mega prims especially for building sky platforms and large walls. They are a great way to reduce your prim count on small plots.
They can be a bit of a pain to manipulate but this can he partially overcome with the Disable Camera Constraints option in the debug menu.

As mentioned they are invaluable as curved surfaces where there are few other viable options.

Having LL remove them from the world would leave me going bact to tem-rez and make some structures impossible.

As for abuse I think they need to be dealt with as just that, on a case by case basis as abuse.

My vote is to keep megaPrims and Perhaps add some limited new shapes and sizes. I would love to see them able to support a true hollow.

Keep them
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Keep the big prims that are useful for building. They save heaps in big builds - I use the 40x40x32 for land builds and also for making large platforms. The 20x20x0.5 is really great for buildings and such.

But not the ridiculously big ones
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The super big ones are a pain when the troublemakers do things like covering a whole sim with an invisible barrier.

Stop Boundary Overhangs
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There needs to be a change to the way SL resolves where things can be built to prevent people putting objects on land so that they overhang other people's property. This is already a problems with trees and such. Misuse of oversize prims just makes it worse.

IF Linden Labs decides to ban megaprims, they MUST give advance notice to allow us to adjust our builds. Two to three months would seem to me to be approximately right (although, of course, many builds will not be repairable because of prim limits).

And if they do ban them they must recognise that Second Life will lose more in richness than it will save in problems.

I think it would be not only be a shame to remove the megaprims, but it would do damage to many sims throughout SL. I've seen incredible builds that use megaprims, and to remove them would force the sim owners to either rebuild those places, or in the case of them having hired someone for the build, they're just in a bad situation. And yes, they can be used irresponsibly, just like anything else. People will always find ways to misuse something. How many "Pop guns" have we all seen converted to orbitters or worse? So don't let this be an elementary school situation, where the bully once again ruins it for the whole class.

And as far as the sizes go, I've deleted anything larger than the 20x20x60 prims that I had in my inventory. After that it becomes too difficult to deal with and stay in proper boundries. So I'm all for getting rid of the sim crossers and such, even 100m is too large for my use, whereas I can see people with land thats mostly water needing something like that.

I think the benefits far outweigh the negatives. Limit them in size if you want, but my friends and I have used them to make background buildings for our city. It saves hundreds of prims especially if it is just for a backdrop. I think you should get rid of cages that trap people before you get rid of these. they are far more annoying. Personally i have not experienced any problems with them and if you keep them on your land I don't see anything wrong with that.

If you want to get rid of them all together you should allow us more prims to compensate for our builds. Just my thoughts.

I use mega prims for my builds,but sparingly,my home is made from them and my club uses 6 of the 20x20x5,they save prims and aren't an issue for anyone I've come accross,I've been here over a year and have never found anyone who has complained about them.
Seems to me you'd be better off addressing the issue of thousands of spinning advertisements dotting the landscape and lagging out entire sims than worrying about the legitemate use of huge prims,looks to me like your going for the easy marks...again.

Mega prims are useful but like anything else their use is being abused. They are often dropped in the public sandboxes by griefers and it's usually difficult to get a name off them to file an abuse report. They should be limited to private builds. Maybe only on parcels that the builder owns.

It would be nice if prims larger than 10x10x10 could be made functional and normally available in world, without an exploit. Then mega prims wouldn't be needed. But if that is deemed an unrealistic expectation, then certainly mega prims will have to stay in some form. Prims over 256m definetly don't need to be kept for any reason. Prims over 100m have very narrow but legitimate uses. Prims under 100m are a staple of large scale building.

There's a bit of a problem with asking for input on the megaprims. There's a lot more non-builders than builders so most of the people who are going to respond have most likely been impacted by mega-prims in a negative way because if you're using them for building, people never notice they're there.

For my money, I would say definitely keep them! Downloading and rendering 1 object instead of 10 has to be better no?

Builders, if you want to keep mega prims, raise awareness of good uses of them! Point out places where they're silently improving experience rather than detracting from it!

I read in the forums about an interesting build, I TP'd there but saw nothing at all??? I explored, higher, lower, oh well, stuff comes and goes in SL all the time.

Turns out my draw radius wasn't high enough to allow the megaprims to render! The build was amazing and VERY immersive due to the larger prims, so they have uses even if flaky.

Just found the LM, for the good example category:

Just walk inside the megaprim Earth for the rest of the solar system...

I know builders love them since they are faster and easier.

Would it be reasonable to limit them to what works technically? So maybe to the minimum draw distance for example?

That way everyone would benefit the most!

I don't think megaprims should be allowed, but I do think that prims larger than 10m should be allowed. 30 m should be large enough for everything except a skybox. Perhaps there should be a specific large skybox prim that must be phantom and can't cross property lines.

In short, I wish that anyone could make a 30 m prim, but that NO prim could hang over property lines.

It might be easier to just split the "problem" into different parts?

- "Small" megaprims: commonly used for building and (guessing) probably rarely used with physical checked which leaves only collision checking which may or may not still be a big problem (need a Linden to know that I guess)

- "Large" megaprims: 50m+ in any dimension... less common? could be done without, or forced as phantom?

- "Mega" megaprims: 256m+ in any dimension... I haven't really seen anyone make a - widely used - case for these so these could just be tossed?

For the griefing aspects: if it's possible to keep them from being used as an attachment (used for visual griefing, or to "steal" money) and if the "mega" ones are deleted entirely (visual griefing and physics griefing) then whatever is left has no more or less use for griefing than anything else in-world?

they are great let them prosper

Recognise this scenario? ...

You have a plot of land. Next door is a 512 sqm plot. The owner of that plot got a year's subscription, bought the land, didn't know how to set the permissions, got bored and went away. Then idiots come and drop litter prims all over it including in the air. They're all visible from your plot. What can you do?

1. Quick! Fill up the plot with your own prims before anyone else does. A few trees here and there and it doesn't look so bad. Promise to sort it out if the owner ever comes back (they never do). Too late? All 117 prims used up? None of them movable? Argh!

2. Wait and wait and wait for LL to reclaim the land... meanwhile put up with the often offensive rubbish.

3. Erect a normal prim screen on the edge of your land to mask it. Perhaps the litter is 25m in the air as well as one the ground and it extends all the way along the plot. Hmmm... 32 x 25... awkward... maybe that's 12 prims from your precious allocation just to compensate for something that's not your fault.

4. Erect a megaprim screen. In case 3 above, use a 32x32 megaprim, sink it into the ground and you use only one prim, a saving of 11. Why should you have to "pay" any more for someone else's lack of consideration?

MEGAPRIMS TO THE RESCUE!

Just to set the record I use Real Life floor Plans on some of My builds like I am working out one right now that is 40 feet wide 45 feet deep and 26 feet high to use te small 10 x 10 would defeat the purpose of building by the time you get just one floor layed out you have over 200 prims but with big prims you have plenty to work with you won't be so large that someone won't buy your build because of the awesome amount of prims needed for the build. So lets look at this way big prims are a necessity for builders of homes and commercial buildings. Also with the -4 +4 restrictions on level or raise of flatten land it would also eat up your little amount of prims you have just to make your land flat enough to do anything with .

If you're going to remove megaprims, at least change prim allowances on sims to something reasonable, not the pitiful 15000 (which sounds great, but in reality isn't) it currently is.

I would KILL for the ability to make a long wall out of a single prim! It took 16 prims to make a large enough cube for my private getaway!
Anything, anything at all, can be misused. Particle emitters can flood a Sim and lag it do death. Kill particle emitters and you lose hundreds of thousands of useful and enjoyable things. Megaprims should stay.