Mini and Mega Prims: What are they?

I attended a class on making jewellery today and could not believe how tiny they could be made. As someone said, they are twisted and cut in such a way as to make them miniscule. Take edit off and you have problems re-editing the item so I found.

there are mini prims out there. for example, i have one that is also resizeable, its max size is 10x10x1 and its smallest size is .01x.01x.001, if you would like to see it, contact me in game.

It's amazing to me what some of the pros can do with mini prims. A friend of mine made a scale ladybug, it can't be more than 0.005 in size, and yet it's very detailed and realistic. The smallest thing I've done is a mini squirrel, that stands about 0.020 tall.

Re. the megaprims, I use a few of them on my island for my mall. It'd be possible of course to do without them, but that would cost me probably another two dozen prims or more. I use the 20x20x.5 ones, to make up the floors. Each level is 40x40 overall, so it's significant savings with three floors and a roof. There's also some walls that use the 40x7x1 (I think those are the dimensions) which again are handy.

I'd be sure though to never use megaprims in a product that I was selling - the lindens have said that they will delete megaprims on sight if they are suspected to be causing a problem. Last thing you want would be angry customers who've had some product summarily deleted, so best to stick with the 'official' prims for resale work.

For what its worth the only problem I have had with the megaprims is (as someone mentioned upthread) rezzing stuff ontop of them. For the 20x20 ones, you can't rezz things near the edges. I'd say that the inner 10x10 is ok though for rezzing ontop of.

Mind you, the last week or two, it's a lottery trying to rez anything anywhere, megaprim or not.

-Atashi

I wish you would differentiate between "regular" mega-prims (20x20, 50x50, etc) and "giant" mega-prims (sim-sized cubes and larger) when you make this statement.

I suppose you could say the giant mega-prims are predictable if you are already familiar with their effects, but many people find sudden anti-gravity (av floats upward out of control) and the suddenly messed-up sky appearance to be strange and mysterious, especially when the prim causing it is completely invisible to them.

In fact, my experience with the 65,536x65,536 is that it does not behave like a normal prim at all. Its effects seem to reach out about half a sim from the center, and from outside that area, it even disappears from the mini-map (and then reappears on the mini-map when you fly back into range). Since a prim this size would cover most of the mainland if not the entire grid, this obviously is not the expected behavior.

I've used a few megaprims in my buildings and nothing funky has happened...even with 30+ people in said buildings running the usual scripts that people have!

They aren't any bigger than 20x20x.1 with one phantom 45x45x45 sphere. I used them sparingly because I had heard legends of them causing problems, but have yet to actually see any of these problems happen.

They're a real prim saver!

Yeah, a lot of my sim neighbors are using the smaller mega-prims, and even non-phantom, they seem to be causing no problems and are not contributing significantly to lag.

It's only the sim-sized or larger ones that I have seen cause the immediately obvious strange effects, which all seem to stem from being inside the prim. The anti-grav effect is not predictable to me, though... sometimes it happens when someone dumps a sim-sized cube on me, sometimes it doesn't.

I have heard that the 256x256x0.1 mega-prim is usable in non-phantom form, but I haven't actually seen one of those (well, that I noticed).

ETA: I keep forgetting about the mega-prim skyscraper one of my neighbors built. It was over a hundred non-phantom 50x50 and 100x100 cut and/or hollowed mega-prims. Our sim started experiencing a very high rate of ghost prims when this was built, and that rate dropped to zero immediately when the build was removed. Could be a total coincidence... the only way to know for sure would be to experiment with it, but my neighbors who lost expensive no-copy items probably wouldn't like that idea!

Those giant trees are supposed to be phantom and were created/distributed that way. They should never be non-phantom.

did i forget to thank you for sending me those trees the other week?
if so, thanks mate. they did the trick just great.

AFAIK, the grid was designed to allow a cross-sim overlap of objects by about 5 meters. If you are at the corner of four sims and you place an object at 0,0 in one sim, the physical collision boundary of that object is also present in the other three sims where that object "overhangs" into those sims.

This means that even though a sim has a fixed number of objects it can support on its own, it must also be able to accept objects from neighboring sims which overhang into it and which it must also simulate in order for the collision boundaries to work properly between objects IN the sim and OUTSIDE objects overhanging into the sim.

A huge prim that can span many sims therefore imposes a high physics loading on all of them, effectively adding an extra prim to all of them to calculate, regardless of how full the sim already is.

(It would be interesting to see if a sim surrounded by other sims can be "overloaded" with prims by placing 10,000 objects overhanging into it along its east boundary, and 10,000 more overhanging into it from the west boundary, then 10,000 from the north and south boundaries. Theoretically this sim would have to be dealing with a physics-loading of 40,000 prims overshadowing it from the other sims even before considering its own internal capacity for prims.)

-Scalar