The Big Prim Problem

I want to stress the fact that not all the megaprims are created equal. The prims which are within 20m, 40m and 60m have proven time after time that they are stable, well-behaved citizens in my toolkit. I've been rezzing them by the 10s both with and without collision. They are womderful

However, as has been mentioned, the larger more unwieldy (not to mention map killing) prims over 128 meters are failing to show as much use as the prims i mentioned above.

I think the Lindens can do very well in limiting the use of megaprims by recognizing the useful and not-so useful ones. You could also release your own versions with handy limits like physical buttons greyed out.

~Lefty

I use and rely on megaprims for certain complex builds that cannot be achieved any other way. Large domes, for instance. A cut, dimpled megaprim provides a very nice structure that would require hundreds of conventional prims. Surely this should generate less lag on the server, particularly since almost all uses of megaprims are phantom.

Re the size limit, I agree, but keep it at 256m or below please. My space station uses tortured 256m megaprims for the hull. The visible size is only 50x30x1, and would be impossible to replicate with smaller megaprims. I could and have built the same structure with conventional prims, but why subject my sim to keeping track of 1000+ objects when I can do the same job in 4?

I believe that the argument that "megaprims are good for griefing" is really throwing sand in our eyes; so many things are good for griefing that certainly listing megaprims as a potential source of griefing is, indeed, trying to scoop the whole ocean with a tea spoon.

Megaprims are intensely used by professional builders to enhance their buildings for several reasons: a single megaprim of 50x50 will replace 25 prims of 10x10 (so a huge savings cost), but, more important than that, if it's a cube, it'll only require to load 6 textures as opposed to 150 (even if all those textures are the same set)! This reduces both download time and, naturally, lag. Megaprims can also be sculpted — obviously with less detail than smaller prims — allowing to create extensive areas of natural-looking, organic landscaping that fits in perfectly with existing terrain (terrain shaping is, to an extent, a 256x256 megaprim with a set of four textures...).

By employing megaprims consistently, a professional team can work out a whole sim in much less time, but, more important, dramatically reduce the amount of prims that need to be rendered and refreshed on the client, thus providing for far less lag. Also, it consistently facilitates building of walls and similar structures that will help out the occlusion mechanism (that gets better and better all the time — congratulations on that achievement, btw, SL has become so much better thanks to decent occlusion mechanisms). Again, in some cases, a single 50 x 50 prim can be easily moved around, replaced, or adjusted — while on some cases, 25 10x10 prims might not even be linkable together (or just barely so).

A long time ago, when private islands got both a hardware and monthly price increase, it was suggested that the new sims might get more prims as an added value, ie. 50% more prims (22,500 instead of the usual 15,000) since the prices went up to 50%. Linden Lab did not consider that alternative (which would, indeed, have promoted a swifter adoption of the latest class 5 servers, since they would effectively allow for more prims, giving more added value for the higher price). Instead, builders relied extensively on megaprims to reduce the overall prim count, reduce lag, and provide a better experience. If the megaprims are effectively removed, thousands upon thousands of builds will be destroyed in Second Life, have to be redone, and in some cases (like the Greenies sim, which is perhaps the best example, but by far not the only one), the builds might not be possible any more due to prim restrictions.

Companies (RL and SL) have literally paid millions of dollars for builds that would now require to be retrofitted to use the limited small-sized prims, and probably require extensive adaptation to fit them into the 15,000 prim limit again. This has a huge cost in man-hours just to do the required adaptation — specially on the day that the ten thousand companies in SL suddenly find half of their buildings missing. Someone is going to have to pay for this. Most companies will not bear the cost, and pass it along to the builders. A few might be able to do the extra work — often amounting to dozens or hundreds of hours — for free, but not all. In some cases, lawsuits might even occur over who has to bear the burden of refitting existing builds. And the Fortune 500 are definitely able to pay for filing those lawsuits. Not a pretty sight.

I would seriously rethink your position and policy (since everyone who is familiar will Linden Lab will know that these kinds of "announcements" are a posteriori declarations on what LL's intentions are; the decision has very likely already been made) since it jeopardises an insanely huge number of buildings, but most of them — being on private islands, where megaprims are allowed — will now belong to RL corporations who will be quite unhappy with the 'decision'.

A compromise can certainly be met — surely prims over 256x256 are not so useful, even if you wish to flatten a large number of sims (a 1024x1024 prim cannot be successfully textured anyway, and it's far better to use just one 256x256 prim per sim — the advantage of having just 1 prim instead of 16 [1 per sim] is really not significant in the calculation). An alternative — and assuming that the real issue is the relationship with Havok 4, although I should add that I did intensive testing with megaprims on the Beta Grid and found that 40x40 megaprims worked rather well overall, even when subjected to intense physical testing/interaction — is obviously to increase the number of available prims on all areas where megaprims are used.

If you start removing features because they're used for griefing — where will you stop? Will llRezObject() — the most important key feature on all self-replicating prims — be removed next? (Or replaced by another function that is less harmless — but in the mean time, destroying millions of objects in the process)

As you so well put, there are one billion assets on the grid, and almost a hundred terabytes of data. And ten million registered users. Ironically, by destroying thousands of professionally done builds (removing the megaprims that make them happen) and leaving "holes" all over the place, Linden Lab will be the most powerful griefer that the grid has ever seen so far. Ironical that you're thinking to fight fire with fire.

I would please advice you to seriously rethink your position regarding megaprims. If the issue is that they won't work with Havok 4, well, make them impossible to set to physical. Except for vehicles, physically-set megaprims are not overly useful anyway. Or, as an alternative, give us more prims per server. Charging people to get more prims in a server than the usual number is definitely a good way to offset the costs; I'm sure that when presented with the alternative of paying more per month to be able to replace megaprims with normal prims and get an increase of the number of prims of server, versus having to deal with the huge cost of rebuilding whole sims (or even facing lawsuits for the effective destruction of existing content), quite a few will prefer that way.

Please give us options that we can choose from; not a popular vote. The ones that are going to vote against megaprims (allegedly because they're used for griefing) are not the ones that will face the huge costs of rebuilding. Also, it gives you the precedent to get public polls on all features that can be used for griefing, and who knows — this might mean no more IM group chat/notices, no more llRezObject(), no more physical engines, no more particles, and who knows what people will next vote on.

If the issue is dealing with griefing on the mainland, the solution are implementing social enforcement — or simply outsourcing the mainland to anyone who is willing to keep it griefer-free — not by removing more and more features until SL suddenly becomes an environment where you can't create anything useful. If the issue is a technical one, give us options and a compromise to allow us to evaluate our decisions.

Thank you.

The only thing that should come into consideration when deciding to kill or keep megaprims is the technical side. Abuse issues happen with prims of any size, and that should nearly always be dealt with at the level of the abuser, not the tool.

So, we focus on the tech aspect. Interference with physics is a problem. I'm not familiar with the SL code, so perhaps LL or other developers could answer this question:

Can the physics engine be taught to ignore megaprims?

If at all possible, I feel that the best thing to do would be to *simplify* the way megaprims work in the world. Just about every good use of them is as a static part of a build: solid locked floors, solid locked walls, phantom planets, etc. We don't need megaprims to bounce around like the rest of the stuff we've been playing with in Havok. So, slipping some extra code into the engine to minimize or eliminate the effects the new physics and megaprims have on each other seems to me like the best solution for all concerned.

The Big Prims have been lifesavers. Seems to me the problem really isn't so much with the object itself as much as with the users. Big Prims serve a very useful purpose. Land owners and estate owners are boxed in by prim limitations and Big Prims help to alleviate some of those limitations. Some one said that the issues with the griefers outweighs the prim advantage - thats NOT at all my opinion. Residents spend money - real money on propery - and its not cheap - and I think that any way that Linden or anyone else can contribute some tool to maximize land usage is a positive thing considering that many of the incintives for owning land have been abolished. Yes I think there should be some limitations as to the maximum size and 256x256 with more manipulation options would be ideal.

Michael Linden,

First off i like to thank you for posting on the forum. (Unlike some Lindens only post on the blog this is a step in the right direction with being intouch with us the users of Second Life). I like to say that i don`t like these MEGA Primes object. I have a few of these laying around after being left by griefter on land that has ceate objects. Now If you are going to support these object that have been created and are not going to delete them from the users data base. Then Atleast have the land mangement Lindens remove griefter objects tha have been left.

Thank You

Usagi

I say keep the existing megaprims and ALLOW US TO CREATE LARGER PRIMS to some limit, say 50m x 50m x 50m max or some number like that (64m?). Make the sizes over 64m or whatever required to be non-physical. There must be some logic that works that would allow larger prims! If we were allowed to create larger prims, then the Gene Replacement megaprims would probably fizzle away ("LIVE AND LET DIE" and newer builds would have legitimate existence that is "SUPPORTED" and "ENCOURAGED".

If there is no datamatic (my word) reason to not allow us to create larger prims, then WHY stifle us? Obviously, the smaller Gene Replacement megaprims do not cause systems problems, so up the size limit why don't you!?

I completely agree with this, mega prims are an asset to builders. IF they encroach onto other people's land lines, the owner should be reported and the prim removed. If they arn't harming anyone, why remove them?

How much of the question here is about "out of scale" aesthetics?

Could the debate be about whether SL experiences should be limited to an "avatar" safe/scale size or if other ideas about scale and context are supported and encouraged technically and socially? (this is a good example of an innovative technology with a bad rap because it freaks people out)

Avatars are NOT people. Avatars are puppets operated by people and it is wrongheaded to apply limits based on the avatar viewpoint(which is really you viewing it on a digital display, through the SL browser).

The difference between how we perceive the world as mediated by SL and we can see objects outside of SL is the source of much confusion and poor user interface design. One does not equal the other.

We are all essentially "cameras" called agents in SL. It is retrogressive enough to import non-native and largely non-functional anthropomorphic avatar forms. It it worse to limit your view to that arbitrary and outmoded standard.

Cheers!

DanCoyote (is DC Spensley)

PS
And of course this does not take into account the very real limitations of mainland sims. This is a technical limitation that I believe LL will improve as they go. Any software company that can keep delivering a build with such frequency is heroic in my book and I think it is all of our jobs to push LL on to further heights by always keeping our demands far ahead of their ability to deliver.

As a Builder in Second Life, I have to say that having the ability to use certain Mega-Prims is a welcome alternative to not having enough PRIMS to finish a job.

While I'm not the most conscious PRIM conservative, I do, believe it or not, make a practice at keeping an eye on the amount of PRIMS I use when building. Because the PRIM limitations for parcel size can be quite annoying at times, Builders were forced into using Mega-Prims for things such as floors and walls.

There are two Mega-Prim sizes I use on a regular basis. First, 20x20x.5, which is useful for floors mostly. Second, 10x50x.5 which is useful for adding walls. Having these two Mega-Prims has helped alleviate the PRIM Limit crunch on small parcels, and gives Builders the ability to be more creative and better designers.

I fully understand that some Mega-Prims are simply annoying, like the SIM sized Mega-Prims, and even the 128x128x.5. I would like to see though, the ability to create special PRIMS that you could label as FLOORS or WALLS and have a larger limit on them, such as the 20x20x.5 or the 10x50x.5. These should be able to size to their maximum stated or anywhere in-between as well. Having these two types of Special PRIMS would help with the PRIM Limit problem suffered by users of smaller parcels who just want a nice quality home or store and enough room to either decorate or add inventory to once the initial build is complete.



Your friendly builder,

i think mega prims relative to the size of the sim. i have an island and we use the 100x100 as a floor base. some 60x20 for stairs. maybe if a person only owns a 1024 plot of land trying to rez a 100x100 prim could be blocked from rezzing if the prims were made official on the grid.
that would also stop griefers rezzing huge prims on build land...and the previous suggestion of them not rezzing if they overhang used with prim size versus land/parcel size being maybe another idea.

I am glad to be asked about this.

Since I discovered giant prims a few months ago, I have been using them in all my victorian houses. Even using prim alignment systems, I found it difficult to align prims with the 10 m limit in floors and walls without nasty seams, and prim drift along with the famous "click-rotate" bug can make building a nightmare.

Now I am using mega prims whenever I can, because they produce lovely seamless surfaces, and of course they also reduce prim count.

Some objects made with giant prims, like our 1 prim sculpty observation balloon in Wunderbar, would not be practical without giant prims. And our trees would become smaller, and the landscape emptier without being able to use giants.

There are tradeoffs that make giant prims not always the ideal solution: for example, to use a giant prim for a multiroom wall or floor, either you need to be able to live with the same surface textures in the different rooms, or you need to make segmented textures so the textures in different rooms can be different.

I would be sad if I had to give up my giant prims.

I believe the best thing would be to allow the use of the mega prims up to 50 m in dimension, and perhaps even to raise the prim size limit from 10 to 50, so that we could use the larger dimensions more effectively than with mega prims. The giant prims larger than 50 m in any dimension might as well be removed.

Why dont you put value added tax on megaprims?

I'd have no issue with seeing the mega-prims gone, but as a replacement would like the ability to have larger prims in a single direction. (i.e. instead of 10x10x10, allow one direction to be larger but at the expense of one of the other sides being shorter, so 20x5x5 would be allowed because you are addition 10 extra sqm in one direction but reducing the max on the other two axises by 5 each. At the extreme 29.8 x 0.10 x 0.10 would be allowed).

I own half a sim on the mainland. I wish I could have a few megaprims to reduce my primcount. Creating a cube-shaped building that is 30 x 30 is a waste.. Instead of 1 hollow cube megaprim, it takes 6 x 9 = 45 prims. (This is how big my photo studio is)

But, that is selfish. I have observed several problems that (I've been told) are attributable to someone having megaprims on the sim: certain types of avatar shaking, extreme avatar leaning, flying strangely, are a few of the items I've seen. I was unaware that the fact that I was bumping into something invisible might be a megaprim problem.

Good luck with whatever you choose to do, Lindens. Either way, you'll get yelled at, I'm sure. In my opinion, as long as SL works, I'm happy.

-- Shoshana

I cant believe they are banning them, i just started using the smaller ones in some builds.. thats insane.

Wouldn't it be possible to make it so only people with payment on file can rez mega prims over 20m or would that not solve any problems.

Get rid of them im a builder to I can learn to do with out them there just another tool for griefers just ban them for god sakes

Limit the size allowed AND allow us to create them again...

This would eliminate the use of prims that are too large for what we need, therefore have to mutilate them to get them to fit. Give us the ability to create the size we need UP TO the new limit.

Why not give them a certain measurement based on length, width, and height... for instance, you can have a 256x256 prim, as long as it is 0.5 high (just throwing out example numbers). If you make it taller, it has to reduce one of the sides accordingly.

I believe if you get rid of Megaprims you will get rid of some of Second Lifes most beutiful and most elegant creations, and for the price of the land linden labs better damn well make sure we have enough prims to use on the land. But seeing as how they dont we have to resort to using larger prims, so fix ur shit or shut up

If anyone doubts the legitimate usefulness and essentiality of megaprims, I request that they first visit the City of Lond Ernil in the Romenna sims. The builder, Nick Lassard, has used megaprims in many of the large buildings for aesthetic and practical reasons. The 65k-meter prim is used for the sky. You'll see that the effect of cloudiness is quite convincing save for alpha-interference with the sun at times during dawn and dusk. The city's is a residential and commercial RP environment and its architecture is inspired by that of the Peter Jackson "Lord of the Rings" movies as it is supposd to represent a city of Middle Earth. As is the case with beautiful Caledon, loss of megaprims would destroy the city. The city has 5 vertical layers:
- A market and entrance area (under construction)
- An extensive forest built mainly with megas
- An open ocean environment centered on a sailing ship underway at sea
- The city haven environment
- The city sewers and underdeeps

Megaprims are essential to these sort of builds for reasons of prim economy, aesthetics and ease of construction.

I've used several different sized giant prims in most of my recent builds, including on my own land, as well as two Roleplay sims. The benefits far outweigh any griefing or land encroachment issues. I have never had any issues with griefing or land encroachment with giant prims. However, I have experienced both these situations many times over even before Mega prims existed in SL. Getting rid of Giant prims will not get rid of or even slow down Griefers or people who build over their land limits. This is not a solution, only a way to again enforce ridiculous prim limits and limit our creativity in SL. Please spend more time going after actual griefers than punishing your creative residents.

There are many pros and cons in regard to megaprims. I myself have used them extensively, and I find the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. Most of the drawbacks, I think, can be overcome with better education in regard to these unusual objects.

Cons: 1) Unusual size. Just because a prim says it's 16x16, it's probably not. If you look at the details of it you will find that your "16x16" prim is actually a cut-down version of a much larger prim. It's important to see how big the prim really is, and whether it will overlap your neighbor's property. SL doesn't "see" a 16x16; it thinks the prim is full-size. 2) Strange rezzing locations. When you rez a megaprim in-world, it doesn't always appear where you expect. I've had prims rez hundreds of meters from where I meant to put them. The safest way to rez them is to make a copy, "wear" it, and drop it. That way your prim will most likely stay nearby. 3) Inflexibility. You can't do as much with a megaprim as you can with a normal one. Once again, SL "sees" the full prim, no matter whether you say it's hollow, etc.

Pros: 1) New horizons in building. Megaprims allow for building heights and styles that were heretofore inaccessible with ordinary prim limits. Skyscrapers and towers, moons in orbit or low-prim skyboxes are all made possible with megaprims. 2) Save on prim-counts. Small lots with low prim allowances are able to use their prims more effectively, on things like furniture and decoration, rather than investing them all in a building structure. This can be an incredible boon.

Conclusion: Used responsibly, like any tool, megaprims can be an amazing benefit. I believe personally that their usefulness far outweighs the problems, so long as people understand the issues involved. So long as prims don't overlap others' property, I think they should be permitted on all lots within SL.

Serenity Woods has a set of floating islands at about... 600m. They're giant sculpted prims, about 40-60m^3 if I were to guess (they vary in size), and are suppose to be a rather close representation of the plane of air from Everquest. Their likeness aside, they are quite nice, and it'd be a shame to see them go. There's no way a collection of 10m^3 prims could come anywhere near replicating one of those mega prim islands.

I myself was considering using mega prim sculpties (phantom of course since the current physics bounding volume is so imprecise) for a tree design I've got in mind. There's just no way you can get the same sense of enclosure from the 10m^3 constraints without using at least three times as many prims.

As was said already, what needs to be considered is the technical aspects. Ethically prims of any size can be used to grief, as has been seen recently with 1m^3 through 3m^3 physics cubes bouncing and gyrating about sims, bringing them to a screeching halt. A collection of 0.01m^3 prims, tortured sufficiently, could be loosed within a sim and get stuck somewhere to the same effect. That doesn't mean prim torturing should be removed. As I had read from a recent post by Andrew Linden:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/10/04/second-life-havok4-beta-preview-temporarily-offline/#comment-491767

"My current idea for solving the problem with objects overlapping parcels is to allow the simulator to ask the question “Is this object colliding with that parcel?” and then allow the parcel owner to return that object to its owner, or to move out until it is no longer overlapping..."

The post goes on to suggest that this could also limit prim sizes to be no bigger than the parcel on which it's placed. This solution seems a very viable and straight forward answer to the problem at hand. Objects (or prims) would no longer be able to cross into another's parcel and could not be made big enough to do so.

As for solving the griefing issue, write an llReturnObject(key) and an llReturnObjectsOwnedBy(key) for land owners to use to send problem prims back to their owners. With the recent addition of llGetObjectDetails, it would be possible to create a user maintained "ban list" of problem people and have their objects automatically returned in the event of a grid wide attack. Even this could even be made automatic if scanning sizes and amount of objects scanned were increased sufficiently.


P.S.
Please get the forum tags working again. It drives me nuts to not be able to link passages and italicize them. >.<

To me it is a business decision. Linden wants more money and to get it, they see mega prims as a deterent to this end. Why, because you can get more on a plot without using up all your prim limits per plot. If you are forced into the 10m limit, you use more prims to build and then when you do, you will buy more land to get more prims. Linden Labs gets more tier fees.

Anything can be used for greifing in 2L, not just mega prims, but mega prims reduce the need for more land tier fees.

So this whole thought of getting our opionion, LOL
They dont care, just pay more money to them is the goal.

You've stated the graphics engine has trouble rendering prims larger than 256m.

256m is also the size of a sim, and prims larger than that never have worked correctly (thus aren't actually in use).

You've stated even the new the physics engine has issues with prims larger than 10m.

The old one also had the 10m limitation, thus there are no correctly functioning physics enabled objects using prims over 10m.

Thus you can limit physics enabled prim size to 10m, and non-physical prims to 256m, without destroying any content.

Do not, I repeat, do NOT make prims larger than 10m phantom. Their /primary/ use is for floors and walls, which need to be solid.

There *are* legitimate uses for prims as large as 256m (but no larger). As pretty as Windlight appears to be (judging from the screenshots of the new version), it is unlikely you can put arbitrary galaxies, planets, and stars up as your background using it. The last one we actually got to use didn't even have a lunar cycle. "Fake skys" are the use of prims this large. They might also be useful to separate the area skyboxes are in from the more public area below.

Please *do* make prims larger than 10m fully editable (e.g. sizeable). They are very helpful for walls/floors. That's actually probably their most common legitimate use. I was unable to use them to save prims in my skybox due to none being large enough, yet small enough to not encroach on my neighbors' property.

Further, please allow returning /anything/ over propertylines, using the bounding box to check, not the prim's center. There's no excuse to not add this functionality. It can only "cause lag" when someone attempts to return something, which is an infrequent event, and the land owners right under any reasonable set of rules.

Please don't destroy any more content. The asset server does a fine job of that without any help, something I got to experience myself.

I /do/ hope that you've learned what "assertions" are and have at least started putting them at the entry and exit points of your procedures... Here's hoping for a stable grid ... someday.

Also, don't use this as an attempt to milk customers for more money (I heard someone suggest charging for large prims). It's hard enough to justify buying *anything* in world what with the asset server randomly losing it, and support basically telling us that it's our fault or they can't do anything... despite 'certain people' having gotten thousands of items back, because they're good buddies with some Lindens. I remember my nice experience being hung up on the first time I mentioned my inventory loss. "Support" like this is what costs you premium accounts.