We want new prim capabilities! (Vote 1952)

1. An additional prim type...

A "pie slice" prim, that's an up-to-60-degree (PI/3) slice of a cylinder, with the "center" for the purpose of cutting and hollowing being the corner of the tw straight sides.

This would let you build up to 20-meter perfectly round floors and walls, without any prim passing the 10 meter limit.

2. An additional "twist" option...

This would turn the positive and negative "twists" around the Z axis into "bends" of the Z axis in the X or Y direction. This would let you create slightly curved walls that could again be used to create large perfectly-round buildings. It would also, when used with cones, allow people to use bent cones instead of truncated tapered toruses to create many "horn" or "hair" or "curved branch" objects... reducing the load on the rendering and physics engines from the deadly lag prim. It would also let you make permanently and consistently bent flexible prims for hair and clothing.


THe above two options are entered as Vote 1952

3. An additional "flex" option...

An option to have the "force" vector applied locally to the prim rather than globally, so flexy prims in attachments or moving objects would keep a local bend.

4. An additional "light" option...

Angle of effect, allowing a light to be "aimed". The angle could act like PATTERN_ANGLE or PATTERN_ANGLE_CONE in a particle emitter.

New prims which would allow one to work around the 10m limit are a possible idea. Even better would be a larger limit. It seems to me that if you want a 20m round object with few prims, the obvious solution would be a 20m limit on prim size. Of course, I am new to this discussion, so may be going over things that everyone else already knows are impossible.

This is a great idea, I'd like to further add the ability to create holes in more prim types, have multiple numbers of holes and be able to move where the hole is placed like textures.

Think about the times you've been building your prim-dream house with those rounded towers on to find you practically have to use your land prim limit to be able to stick in a window into the towers the way you want.

You can make a disc that's at most about 19m in diameter (and very thin) using a tube. Set the twist to 90 and 90.

I realized the other day that torus (and tube and ring) prims can only spiral in one direction through the use of the "revolutions" box. You can get a clockwise spiral, but not a counter-clockwise spiral. I tried messing with the other settings, but I couldn't find a way to reverse the spiral. A method to do that (negative revolutions?) would be nifty.

I`m pretty sure that i`ve done it at least once, by making one of the OTHER parameters negative, the one that controls how far the vertical offset of the "ends" is. Unfortunately, this brought on other problems with the prim for what I wanted to use it for.

Indeed. There are good reasons for the limit on prim size. Increasing it would increase the amount of communication that sims have to do with each other to make sure that large prims that overlap sim boundaries are accounted for. This would make sim handoff problems... like the way you find yourself sinking into the ground when you walk from one sim to another... even worse.

Yes, or a torus. And you can make a 14m x10m flat prim like the ones making up the road 700m above the SW corner of Noonkkot. But these prims all misbehave, one way or another, particularly near sim boundaries.

My second proposal would allow you to make a counterclockwise or clockwise flat spiral from a ring or torus.

Not to mention all the work put into occlusion culling would be thrown out the window when the safe culling distance has to become 30m at which point the stuff removed is unlikely to be worth the work at all since an even bigger area (9 times for a 3-fold increase) needs to be blocked before it gets removed, meaning many areas wouldn't be.

Oooh, that's a great point and one I hadn't thought of.

make your skew negative first then change your revolutions.

Aha! Thanks, I'll try that.

Bumping thread as mentioned in the lo-rez thread. If something like options 3 and 4 have votes up, link them here.

if I had a vote avaiable I woudl vote for this

What about body parts?

Why the 3 basic shapes to compose a body (Upper, Lower and Head) aren't avaliable in prim types?

It would help any Clothe, Skin, Hair, Animation or any other designer.

I dont know if it was proposed before, but i think it is a simple thing to be done.

If someone know something about it, pls let me know.

Anyway i just vote, and agree with the considerations

Hugs

Another simple but powerful prim type:

- Extrude/Revolve. Lay out connected 2D points on a flat drawing sheet, and revolve them around an axis to make one-piece fancy table lamps, glasses, bowls, cups, light fixtures, door knobs, etc.

Actually a slider could choose from an "inside curvature" (flat outside, detail inside) to flat extruson, to an "outside curvature" (flat inside, detail outside). So you could do an extruded object and a revolved object all in a single slider control.

To keep data usage down, restrict it to have no more data entry choices than your typical torus.

Position: X, Y, Z
Size: U, V, W
Rotation: a, b, c, d
Cut begin: 0.0 - 1.0 Cut end: 0.0 - 1.0
Curvature around Z: -10 to +10 (0 is flat extrusion)
Hollow: 0-100 Skew: -1.0 to 1.0
2D Profile Points: (-5m to + 5m)
x1,y1
x2,y2
x3,y3
x4,y4
x5,y5
x6,y6

As a general principle it would be nice to alter the size limits so that only the non-cut-away part of a prim needs to be max 10m by 10m, instead of the empty space where the cutaway section used to be counting towards the maximum size. After all there is no way anything could collide with the cutaway section of a prim

I have clockwise and counterclockwise Spiral prims in my home (though only 1/2 to 3/4 circles - I think increasing revolutions will work fine, though, didn't need to tweak that as much).

Come to Otter Valley, and travel south from the teleport hub to take a look. It's the big white house on the hill with the construction signs around. If Jar or myself are around, you can ask for the parameters on the prims, otherwise, just see to believe

It also makes use of two oversize prims (for the Salon part with the bar & the Sunroof).



What's missing for me in Prims is actually a "Plane Cut" and "Plane Offset" option that allows you to intersect the prim with an arbitrary plane. And a means to glom Prims together face-to-face and reducing T-junctions (the little gaps you get DESPITE it all mathematically matching up just fine).

Oh yeah, and can you say "Constructive Solid Geometry". I'm pretty sure that's what's the next step in Prim evolution for SL, and I'm sure it'll come one day. And boy will it rock the world. It's not a feature I'd request because it's what inevitably has to happen for SL sooner or later.

that coudl result on tortured prims with more than 10 meters in at least one dimension becomming invalid, either borderline ilegal rarities like the mega-prims or worse, they might be snapped back to dimensions where they would be 10 meters or less...

All prims are created this way already.

A SPRITE prim or option for prims would be very useful.

This would make one face of the prim always point towards all viewers making it a 2-dimensional object
You can achieve something similar using a long lasting particle, but a prim is much more versitile than a particle as for example you could use animations and all the texture options.

how so?

All prims are implemented by extruding a closed curve along a path. Play with the prim parameters for a while and you'll see whet I mean.

Yea, it took me far too long to work out that a Torus is a cylinder spun in a circle, a Tube is a Box spun in a circle and a Ring is a Prism spun in a circle.

/me thinks there are too many sharp edges in SL.. A way to round one edge of a cube would be great.