The Big Prim Problem

– Good Things: are there legitimate current uses of megaprims? Perhaps with a good example location?
Trollhaugen
We have been building with mega prims for over a year and have had many Lindens out to our land to help us with lag problems and many other things, never once have they mentioned that out 20x20 or 40x40 prims are causing any problems. without them we would need well over 400 prims for what we have done with 75ish mega prims. please dont get rid of some of the smaller mega prims!

– 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.
bad ways they are used i have seen are they tend to cross land lines and are easy to make problems with but i think that if we keep the 60X60 sizes and smaller i would be a very happy person!

– 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!

I think the major reason they are useful is as prim-savers for builders. If the abuse of such big prims is becoming more rampant, why not take the problems out of the equation.. remove the big prims, but allow more prims on each estate. By allowing each estate to have, say, 5000-10000 more prims, the use of these big prims would no longer be needed.
Simple? yes. Why, in fact, is there a restriction on prim size in the first place? What is the purpose of such a restraint? and why is 10m the magic number? Would it hurt to allow prims to be twice that size? This could be another solution... allow the prim size restriction to be revised to double what the size limitation is now..
How about allowing the big prims to be the size of a 1024 plot? how about 32x32 being the largest prim? I don't see an issue with this. If there is one, would someone please explain?

Keep the Megaprims!

Do you have any idea how many places will be destroyed if you got rid of the megaprims? Do you have any idea how many people use these megaprims to build? Those who have encountered bad experiences with Megaprims and no good ones probably are not aware that they have indeed experienced good experiences with megaprims, but the builder was just smart about it and you didn't know the difference.

I think it's unfair that LL allows people to use the mega prims but not allow newer users like myself to...kinda putting them on a black market status and allowing some to make tremendous amounts of money selling them. The fairness of SL is that we can all create and use our imagination to create house, clothes, etc...but not allowing us newer users to create these mega prims has created a monopoly for a few chosen members. I believe if LL is to not allow newer ones to be created or make them available to use without having to spend a small fortune, then ALL megas should be disallowed.

I feel megas are a good tool for residents to use in their creations...but I feel there is a responsibility of the users to not abuse them or cause harm to other residents that will be have their SL experience dampened by the use of them. I say LL allow them, but put some minor regulations on their use..like ie. not too many on one place or not too large.

I just feel make them more available to all residents and put some regs. on them, make the users promie to not go overboard in their use...ty for your time, Az

Mega prims can be a great help when building homes when prims are at a premium. The current alloted amount of prims per sq m is rediculous. There are not nearly enough, and they cost too much. This place is getting very expensive to live in, more alkmost than real life! I think that builders who are building legit houseing structures should be able to use mega prims. I also think that yes, if any are causing problems, only that mega prim should be delted. Maybe Linden Labs can create its own form of megs prims and sell them only to qualified and respected home builders.

Mega Prims are not the problem, irresponsible users are. There are rules for dealing with irresponsible players, use them. I use mega prims in my builds for floors and courtyards. The idea of making all mega prims phantom would destroy that use of them. The people causing issues with mega prims will just find another way to cause issues. Deal with them, not with the tools that are used responsibly by others.

There is several good usages for them:

* Roads -> saves prims on laying around roads, floors, ceilings etc. and then they can be used for more creative purposes, ie. more detail
* Some round shapes would be at the very least be irritating to do from normal prims and would consume huge amounts of regular prims.
* Spam Blocks on mainland --> hide those nasty pr0n ads

Of course, everything great can be used for evil also.

I know i would miss huge prims.

Kindly stop your ongoing policy of abusing the customer base who support you financially by catering to, or having knee-jerk reactions to, the lowest common denominators in this society.

People can abuse ANYTHING, so are you going to ban EVERYTHING? So what if griefers abuse megaprims? If you ban the prims then YOU are the griefers, destroying all the great builds that use them and wasting the precious time (of which REAL life is made) of all said builders. In my opinion you would owe a huge financial reimbursement to all of those people if megaprims are banned. And you will owe additional land (because land=prims) to those whose prim counts you destroy who have to use large amounts of 10x10 prims to replace what you steal away. And that includes refunding all monies spent on purchases that use them as well (I have two beautiful trees that are megaprims and would expect full restitution if those were deleted).

Agreed that the super-huge megaprims should be eliminated. Our sim was griefed by an idiot who covered the entire sim with a giant box. The SIZE of megaprims should be limited to no more than the width of a 4096 parcel on the longest side. That way they can be used to create attractive barriers to neighborhood junk without destroying the builds that are existent in such parcels already.

Really. You guys are starting to make me regret ever hearing of this place, and I'm hard to irk.

I have found the smaller huge prims 20x20x0.5 in particular very useful and have had a number of occasions where something greater than 10x10 but less than 20x20 would have been really useful.

My primary home is a recreation of an RL building, The in world dimensions are 12.5m wide so in order to create the floors etc. I have had no choice but ot use 10x10 prims and 10x2.5 prims a waste of valuable prims (I have a 468 prim allocation on my plot so every prim must count.

My vote would be to alter the 10x10x10 restriction and increase it to something that the majority are happy with. For me that is probably 25x25x25 but others seem to prefer 100. As a parcel owner not a sim owner a 100m prim would never be useful to me but that is clearly very subjectibe however in practical terms prims much larger then 20x20 do not texture well unless you are tiling them. A 20x20 prism can take a complex baked texture as I have used this on my build where the side wall is a 20x20x0.5, the detail is not quite as sharp as the smaller prims as you would expect but it is acceptable. You can visit my build through my profile in world.

Relaxing the size constraint would allow full usage of all existing prims at a larger scale. and would actually reduce some of the problems associated with huge prims such as their misrepresentation on the mini-map (an SL bug I believe) caused by the use of what people mistakenly think of as being a 25x25 prism when in reality it is just a 100x100 that has been pathcut (the SL bug causes the minimap to show the pathcut prim at full size and appear to obliterate parcels around it. It may have other side effects too).

Depending on whether the problems are related to beginners misunderstanding huge prims and losing control or griefers, it could be set as an advanced/debug setting to allow the sizing above 10x10x10. Doesn't deal with griefers but those idiots will always be there. It does mean that only those ready to move into the advanced options will be exposed to the larger prims.

In summary:-
Don't get rid of them please. Get rid of the ludicrously big ones and set the limit to something higher than 10 but sensible. I suggest 25x25x25.

Final thought, is it possible to do an audit of objects? determine how many huge prims exist of each size and from that see which ones are being used most often this would give a good guide to where the limit should be. You may need to review number of users as well as number of instances as one user could skew the survey by creating a large quantity of a given size.

Please, please keep them but with a size limit of, say, 100 x 100 x 100. And make prims up to the chosen limit fully editable and legitimate. I have used megaprims for my skybox build and saved *lots* of my prim count. I intend to put up some nice scenery around my parcel to blot out some eyesores..but only if I can use megaprims.

If you do decide to ban them altogether then please, please consider upping estate prim allocations.

I don't know of very many things in Second Life that can't be used in abusive ways. The fact that a hypodermic needle can be used to kill someone doesn't mean we should outlaw hypodermic needles, now does it? I've heard residents call for the elimination of all script functions that can be used to create weapons. Fine, then. Let's have a Second Life without scripting. I can make a self-replicating miniprim that would be a heck of lot more annoying than that one 256m megaprim set atop a sim. Griefing will only stop when we can make nothing, script nothing ... and do nothing.

Megaprims are here. They are an integral part of many builds. To eliminate them would be to break a great deal of existing structure in Second Life. We need to deal with three things:

1) Griefing with megaprims should be a bannable offense. No second chance.
2) Linden Lab needs to solve the problem of prim parcel-overlap, and that should be a high priority. No prim should be capable of even being rezzed if it will overlap into a parcel for which the owner of the prim does not have build permissions.
3) The owner of a parcel needs the ability to return any object even only partially overlapping into his property, whether that object "registers" as being on his property or not.

I'd go even a step beyond all this. Give us the ability to build prims up to 256m in scale -- legitimate prims, rather than the tortured ones that we currently use in our builds. Many of the problems we experience with these are because they have been reshaped -- not because they're huge. I'm sure many people would be happy to replace legacy megaprims with "real" megaprims. I know there are certainly sizes I wish dearly to be able to make, but it just isn't possible. Being able to rez any size prim from very tiny (this thread doesn't deal with miniprims so I haven't harped on that issue) to very large ones, at any arbitrary size, would greatly simply many builds, and in many cases dramatically save on prim usage. How many builders haven't wished for a 20 x 40 x 0.2 floor section, or even "odd" parcel-sized prims (you know -- powers of two rather than powers of ten)?

I own land and I would love to use megaprims to improve my SL experience. That being said, I believe everyone should be able to use them for whatever LEGITIMATE project they have. The problems that obviously arise are: What are legitimate uses, what are legitimate upper size limits and most importantly to me, how can I get my hands on some?
If other residents can have them and there is no written parameters for their use, but yet through some completely arbitrary decision , it's decided that I cannot have them, then I feel all megaprims should be removed.
While life, both RL and SL, is not fair, ultimately the platform in which RL resides is fair! If SL wishes to stay true to an ideal that anyone can make of their SL what they want, then the tools to accomplish this should be available to all.

I find them useful in builds, when there is a limit on the number of prims available, and with the right textures can look even more effective than smaller 10 x 10 x10 sizes.

As for parcel encroachment. and hidden transparent walls. This is created because these prims are part of a much larger phantom prim. Check out the actual prim size in edit, and you will find that the base prim is far larger than the actual prim you are using. eg 32 x 32 x0.8 ... the prim size is 64 x 64 x 64. So although not visible, if that is used within 64 metres of your parcel boundary it will encroach other parcels, and cutting the prim for doorways etc will just leave a blank hole that you cannot pass through (it is still there, but transparent).

Please make these mega prims scalable and fully editable. so we don't have these massive hidden prims; that will considerably reduce the problem. And I for one wouldn't miss anything above the 64 metre mark, though I do accept for possible land use up to 256m would be acceptable; but hang on a minute, when do you get that much flat land, and isn't it rather boring to have everything flat, just to make it easy for building ?????

I am an estate manager for 3 private islands in Second Life. Two of them are for RPG groups- one is a giant city, the other hosts several RPG groups.

We need our megaprims.

With the brickwall that is the prim limit cap on private islands, we absolutely need to keep megaprims. There is no other way we can realistically create beautiful cityscapes, keep residents in certain areas, etc. Private islands are MUCH different than the mainland- we have full control over any and all megaprims put down there, and we can monitor the use. So we don't have any of the downsides of using them- we can easily return any megaprims put down that we do not authorize. There IS no downside to those of us with private islands.

I am currently developing yet another private island for residential rental that is already planned to be using 23 megaprims in order to recreate city and country areas. There is no other way we can make great-looking scenery while at the same time keeping us under the prim limit.

Take away megaprims from the mainland if you wish, but please let those of us with private islands use them as we will. =) If they're causing issues with the physics engine, I recommend having LL come up with megaprims that would work well with it and offering it to private island owners. I know I would pay Lindens to buy an LL pack of "safe" megaprims.

I say keep them, and make them legal !!!

There is NO valid reason for LL to limit prims to 10m x 10m other than to FORCE the residents to buy more land to be able to increase the prims count for their home/shop/whatever.

Using large prims not only entitles people to build more things on their parcels, it also lowers the lag (a 100m x 100m floor made out of one mega prim is much easier to handle both on server and client sides than the same floor made out of 100 10m x 10m prims !).

The edit tool should in fact allow prims up to 256x256m. Period.

How about they simply change the maximum prim size to 20,30 or 40m (whichever gets agreed up on) and remove all the other prims with dimensions higher than that. Not only will it solve the problem, but it will also eliminate the need for fixed-size prims like the popular 20x20x0.5.

I've been lucky that I have never encountered deliberate abuse with them. I have had one very negative experience with big prims, and one positive.

The positive experience is with the large Linden trees made by Heart. These trees are wonderful, and I've had no trouble with them. If that tree had to be built from regular prims, I likely could not have it, since it would run me over my prim limit.

The very negative experience I had was when my neighbor built a large skypod out of them. The prims appear much larger on the minimap than they actually are, and thus the object completely obscured the minimap of our entire sim and most of the neighboring sims. Not being able to use the minimap seriously hampered my enjoyment.

I Love the Mega-Prim's...
ive used them to great effect in creating gigantic sky islands at a private sim (Ali)
as well as used them to provide friends a full size blueprint of a startrek starship they are building which takes up most of their sim...
that one is in Beta Antares...
the simple fact of it is i could do with more...
the handfull of these mega-prim's that i have are very very usefull... but most of them are too much and would only be usefull if i wanted to upset other's maby setting the limit on prim size to the same size as the sim that they are in...
admittadly the prim i used in beta antares is larger but we can get away with them there as its a private sim without neibour's...

so far the only real problems ive encountered with them are the invisible hard point's when you change their shape from a box to a sphere the hard box shape remain's invisibley there the only way to get around this was to phantom the lot...

perhaps... if LL Charged people for the creation of mega-prim's thus ensuring they have payment detail's on record, the mega-prim's created for that person could be made non transferable.... this would bugger myself up since i like to sell the thing's i make... but most clients are satisfyed to leave the stuff i made under my ownership in their sim's..
so maby that wouldnt be so bad

at the very least if they charged everyone 10L$ for the creation of "each" mega prim created... then griefer's creating self replicating ginormous crap would soon find themselves paying a fortune just to upset thy neibour...

also please note the effect's created by mega prim's, can be reproduced by tortured prim's
ive noted that some of my creation's while they dont have any mega-prim's in them do create invisible hard point's and also are represented on the mini map much much bigger than they actually are...

Without huge prims I'd sell up and leave. Most everything I make is dependent on them at some level. Plus I have a large water area (purchased for more prims) and a few large prims enables this to be a lovely sandy beach, with out huge prims it would be left bare and ugly.

I agree with others, and as the Lindens are asking, here is my wish ... I would love some more standard prims in sizes such as 10x20, 20x20, 40x20 and 40x40 which are NOT made by cutting larger prims. Then throw in a few basic tools which are in even the most basic 3D apps dating back to 1985 on a Mac Plus such as alignment and lathe functions and we'd have so much more creativity.

I can see the need to remove the ridiculously large ones or perhaps limit them to private islands maybe but up to 100 x 100 x 100 I think are legitimate and the Physics Engine should be improved to accommodate them. It is annoying that placing objects can be so hard on a large prim.

That's my 10 cents worth

I've used the 20x20x0.5 for a number of things. We're using the 20x20 and 32x32 in a tree house right now. I can even see the use of the sim sized prim as a second level to build on. The use is minimal, but useful when used correctly.

I've never had a bad experience with huge prims. I've run into my own a couple of times but no one else's.

It would be great if LL supported prims larger than 10x10. If not full support, at least release their own version of them in the Library folder so that everyone could have access to them.

I've heard there are problems with the physics for anything larger than 10x10. I don't know that for sure; it's pure hearsay. Could mega-prims be physics exempt?

I use 'em and I like 'em. Please either support them or let them continue.

I honestly do not see a problem with Mega Prims. (at least the concept of them) I do understand and feel there should be a limit to Mega Prim sizes but not getting rid of them as a whole. -And- having a larger build able prim size would be helpful as well. But, I don't see this as an absolute plus if you make it a "Premium Account" feature only. there are some people in SL that build for a "living" and that might hinder them than help.
but there is also a radical side I see to this.
"hmm...this is just LL's way of saying, "HEY! we just want you to use more prims so you buy more land so we can make more money off of you!" but thats just a radical "out to get me" point of view.

Mega prims (the reasonable sized ones, not the ones that are ridiculously large) should be allowed. Their are just some things in building that can't be created well without them.

I could see banning them if they interfere with how our sims function, but to ban them because some people are abusing them is wrong. If that was the case, then ban scripting, for isn't that the basis of most of the griefing in SL?

What I would like to see, however, is a clear stance from Linden Labs on this issue. I have not used mega-prims in my builds specifically BECAUSE LL won't tell us if we can use them or not- or how they truly interact with the way our sims work.

There are clear and obvious advantages to "oversize" prims that benefit both Linden Labs and the inhabitants of Second Life.

The more options builders have to create engaging and interesting content, while saving prim count and often passing that on as a premium to those the build is hoping to attract, the better it is for all.

Like many things in governed environments, when something in demand yet is not offered it shows up on the black market. The troubles with big prims all seem to stem from this, that they were not "official," not created with care for the environment or its best interest, yet there is clearly still high demand.

It seems clear to me that the best solution is for Linden Labs itself to develop larger prim selections that work, have been developed, tested and cleared, and that work with less bugs.
Do away with the ones that exist, offer an option for those with big builds including the old ones to have theirs reviewed and maybe receive a "grandfather license" if they don't interfere.

There is no reasonable substitute for curved megaprims. Large spheres are impractical without them. Large sculpties have no equivalent with standard prims.

I would love to keep megaprims up to some reasonable maximum - 100m sounds fine. I support making them phantom if they're large enough, with a formula that allows for large non-phantom floors and walls.

SL will be a poorer place without being able to "build in the large" with megaprims.

I make builds of reasonable size the use of mega prims is a must. Please keep them.