Are Mega/Huge prims "dangerous?"

More recently, someone attempted a JIRA feature request to have them removed from the world entirely. LL's response was to file the request into "WONTFIX-Breaks existing content".

Some shapes, notably curves, if on a megaprim, will have a collission zone that behaves as if the shape was actually a cuboid. This has serious ramifications if you want to create, say, a marquee.

Most people have found the 20x20 one to be quite stable. I've used it in private builds and it's been fine, but I wouldn't use it in any merchandise I sell, because if LL someday decides to outlaw them, or if they get "deleted on sight and without notice" by a Linden who suspects they're causing problems, I'd have a lot of angry customers to deal with.

Some shapes, notably curves, if on a megaprim, will have a collission zone that behaves as if the shape was actually a cuboid. This has serious ramifications if you want to create, say, a marquee.

The 20x20x5 seems to be great for floors and walls - but I would use them only in private building. The large sphere can cause AVs to randonly begin to float - so be careful with that one. Also know - most of them are not editable. If you hollow out a mega prim - it will appear hollow but its actually still solid until you phantom it.

Oh my God!!


THE MONOLITHS ARE COMING!!!!!

I just saw a pretty bad use of them on a new mountainous sim.. the builder bought a bunch of lower leverl land, and used a bunch of them to bring the whole area up to a flat plane, blocking all the other lower land around him.

(I'd say he brought his land up well over 50 meters, and on probably 20 2048m land plots)

Won't this add a hell of a lot of lag to the sim?

If this is on the mainland, an abuse report will likely see the problem resolved by a Linden.

Yep it's on mainland.. my only recourse from being buried by them, is use some myself to raise my home above he garbage, and I'd rather not use them if I don;t have to.. I'm seeing really bad issues there now, and the sim seemed pristine and lagless yesterday, before he rezzed them.

I aksed him again about him, and he doesn;t care, since it's not his home sim, and he's just going to rent houses there.

sigh

Another reason sims should be zoned for private residence or commercial.

I'll consider filing an abuse report.

From what I've heard the mega prims don't add to lag and may actually help the sim run better because they lessen the number of prims used. That being said the only one I feel comfortable using is the 20x20x.5 which makes awesome sky build platforms.

Also the huge prims add grandeur to some beautiful builds like the Cathedral at Wyrms.

This probably is a stupid question but why does making a megaprim phantom cause less problems?

This is probably also a stupid question... but why buy land on a slope and then try to pretend that it isn't? Why not buy flat land? Or just build a skybox?

I've got a hillside property and loved the challenge of building on it....

Your question and comment are kind of contradicting each other?

There's a lot of FUD about megaprims out there, mainly because they are sometimes abused and cause unexpected effects. The truth is that megaprims may be larger than normal prims and have a default solid cube collision shape regardless of rendered shape, but they behave _consistently_ and do not create any sort of lag beyond a normal prim of comparative size. I use them all the time in builds or just play around with them because they are very useful.

Also, since the hollow/cut/etc float values of primitive params has increased in precision since the last update, megas are even more useful because of the "convert to sphere, dimple, and convert back" trick.

Maybe some people don't love the challenge of building on a slope?

(Personally, I think those are some of the people responsible (though not the main offendors by a long stretch) for uglifying the mainland. If you want a flat-based building, get flat land. Don't make half your house float improbably off the ground, unless it is obviously designed to be a piece of fantastical architecture.)

Isn't that what I said?!

i can vouch that super/mega/ultra/huge prims are ok in private sims. Their quite fun too. Giant mushrooms are cool. My private home has a sky forest which the grouns and the mountain are mega prims. They may have a issue with being totally solid even if hollow, but they still make nice caves if used correctly.

I'm using exactly two megaprims in my shop. One part of the floor and another part of the tent wall, so both are of the 20X20X.5 sizes. Hadn't had problems with them that I've noticed. The sim did have problems when some idiot dropped about 10 or 15 of the huge spheres, probably to grief. THAT lagged it down and crashed it a few times.

Yeah, but I think the whole point is if there are 8 people in your sim using megaprims, then the server can crash...right?

This explains much to me - I have a workshop/skybox of huge prims and every now and then I get REALLY weird stuff happening - like prims suddenly are phantom when they are not checked as phantom, or every prim I rez is phantom... or they suddenly become physical and fly into the atmosphere or another sim. Wow. I'm going to go delete EVERY one of my huge prims. I know another land owner on my sim uses them to level out his rental land - he has LOTS of them, hopefully he might be willing to reduce them too, or just get rid of them. (right... keep dreaming.)

I had a couple go phantom when installed and wouldn't switch back, but I just deleted them and replaced them and everything was sweet, used around 20 of the 20x20x.5 to build a apartment building some were alpha textured too one side

I use mega prims for my 700m tall phantom tree. (100x1x1)

I don't like to see skyboxes floating for no reason.

The tree is phantom since I don't want people to fly into it and crash.

Some notes.
1. Look at the BBox (object culling) view in debug and you will see that you need to switch back to regular prims near a building since they enlarge the BBox and mess up object culling.
The result is some people don't see things that are there.

2. Prims are drawn based on your draw distance to it's center. Thus you won't see it if you set your draw distance to 64m and then fly by a 1000m cube.

3. A prim's center must be in the sim you are in in order for the physics engine to process it. This means that you must overlap two prims from each sim to make a walkway across a sim boundry.

So it's spheres that cause problems? Is this because of the cuboid collision problem, and the draw distance??

What if it's a hollowed and cut sphere?

I had a design which I had worked on for ages on paper... got around to building it in a sandbox... and was disappointed when I found that I couldn't resize it above 10x10x10 without some kind of trick (what is the trick for getting giant prims?)...

It involved a few hollow/cut spheres to build a sphere with an opening, and a flat floor inside... which was going to be the shell for the building... then a whole lot of prims inside (probably not mega)... was going to be educational... *sigh*

I currently use the 50 meter moon sphere, hollowed, set to phantom, and a very, very slow rotation. Textured the inside of the sphere with a space texture I made, and set up sort of a space station inside of it.

It's been up there (around 650 meters) for well over 6 months so far, and I have had no problems at all.

Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this, but you guys look like you know what your are talking about and I can't find info elsewhere on this.

I got myself some huge prim last night. All I wanna do with them is reduce the number of prim some of my building are using, like my building bunker. So I figure if I could use a hollow huge 50x50x50m prim, I would only need two more to close it.

Problem is, I can't get go thru the inside hollowed part. Is there a way around this or better huge prim I can use or are prim bigger then 10m impossible to go thru?

Thanks