Is it ok to use Mega prims or not?

Untill recently I have lived on a private island my family owned as there it was ok to use the one mega prim we did to create the floor of our sky living area. It didnt cause any simulator problems and we were told it was ok.

Recently we have moved back to the mainland and I am kinda in the dark as to the final rulings on the use of non physical, non phantom mega prims.

Specifically I want to use the 100x100 prim completely on our own land (with quite a marign to spare on all sides) as a floor for a sky living/building area.

Was there ever a final ruling on these things? Can I use this prim legally or not?

Read the FAQ.

Oh Simil that's cruel, the discussion after you posted the FAQ was so techie, have mercy!

My takeaway from the megaprim thread is that Darkness' 100m floor would be fine as long as it isn't physical, which being in the air of course it isn't, duh! In fact, I believe it could cover the entire sim without an issue.

Tho I'm not sure about how a nonphysical prim that covers an entire sim would be seen by others who are looking in from adjacent sims.

Correct, Simil?

Darkness.. make sure its really, really high. And out of your neighbors view... trust me.

The FAQ was made so that people don't have to ask or answer the same questions again.
There's no need to read all the discussion, everything is summarized in the first post.

Rules are the same all over SL, HDM prims are unsupported and only tolerated, they are removed without notice if they cause trouble while rezzed.

I'm not sure that that's what was said. I think it's physical = bad; phantom = no worries; neither = hey, that's a good question..

The thread where Andrew Linden stopped by: http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=208385

There's a link in the first post of that thread to an office-hour transcript where Zero Linden seems to say that megaprims near sim boundaries can cause a lot of extra sim-sim communication costs but I don't think any of us quite got why he said that and Andrew said he didn't know any reason they would add to comms cost.

As a matter of fact I did. It did not answer the question. Since apparently there is no new information post the making of the FAQ then the answer to my questions is no, there is NOT a final ruling on them.

Jessy Anne why would my neighbors be more upset by 1 100m square prim floor at 200m high than they would by 100 10m prims making the same floor at 200m high?

This is exactly the kind of thing I am trying to understand as I have not lived on the mainland in 2 years.

There can't be a final ruling because they are not supported.

All I'm saying... is be considerate and don't subject your neighbors to this:

/327/fd/209766/1.html

If you're going to have such a large skyplatform, I'd suggest that you place it well high above the clouds, so it's not easily visible from the ground. Try 500m or more, that way it won't be visible in the large Map. Mega prims are ok to use, but will be removed by the Lindens if they are a nuissance or are causing lag problems in your sim AND someone ARs you.
The most common negative side effect of using such a large prim in such a large area though, is that it makes the minimap all black and thus, unuseable.

With more than 1/4 sim of land, why worry about using 100 prims? I personally don't like the megaprims because they are easily abused and misused.

My build platform is 90m x 90m - 81 prims total all stuck inside 1 prim that rezzes the platform when I need it and removes it when nobody is around. I still have about 2000 free prims on 40K sqm parcel, so obviously the main reason I don't show the platform all the time is cosmetic.

Mostly because I am juggling 60 people and condensing the businesses and homes from a full PI into half a sim. Every Prim counts. If it was just me I would probably do what you are doing. But with this many a permanent worklevel is pretty much a necessity and prims can get pretty tight even at the half a sim level.

Well, the physical/phantom/neither issue relates to how Havoc does collision detection. I believe that is only an issue for physical objects.

The more I re-read Zero's conversation the more I am convinced the s/he meant that the sim-sim communication costs are a barrier to fully supporting megaprims, but that currently (BECAUSE they are not fully supported), there is no additional cost. That is, currently there is special sim-sim communication required to "see" objects correctly across sim boundaries, and this code doesn't handle megaprims at all now. Extending that code to handle megaprims, particularly if they are within the 10m (or whatever) border, appears to have communication costs. But that is nika's personal take

I'm reviving this because my neighbor and I got a notice from another neighbor about lag issues in a nearby Sim to mine, which said something to the effect that the Lindens were going to come to "sweep" the area, possibly to investigate and remove mega prims causing the lag. (Sorry, the reason I'm so sketchy about it is because she had disposed of the notecard, and all of my IMs and group invitations got borked by that new TOS agreement when I tried to log in.)

So, I've got phantom Dolly Heart mountains all over the place. My first question is, are those okay since they are all phantom? I realize they're not supported, but they also shouldn't be causing problems, right? Has anyone ever had these removed?

My next question is, could I be causing other problems since I maybe have 50 to 100 scripts running around the place? -- you know, tiki torches, butterflies, rain, the usual eye candy you see everywhere. I've never noticed any significant lag in my own sim, at least any worse than anyplace else. I've never seen any guidelines as to how to manage these, how to be a good neighbor and not lag everybody else, how many are too many. I don't even know how to tell how much resources these are taking up.

The complaining sim is "Strawberry Wild." My neighbor is in "Quietly Red." I occupy "Quietly Red," "Sleepover," and most of "Devolin Mal," in case any smart person feels like checking it out, and seeing if all my junk moves the spectre detector needle into the red.

Thanks for any help or insight!
-Avion

Somebody in the sim next to my home, somebody with a 1024m2 right on the sim border, recently built a place with a whole bunch of phantom mega prims. Sortofa jungle scene with giant walls. When he first built it, I didn't notice any difference in our performance. When he added the textures - at least five or six 1024x1024 textures - I noticed that my sim seemed to be more laggy..

So.. I think phantom ones are ok but it'll be up to the Linden that looks at it to decide if your stuff is ok. I doubt they have tools that can measure the impact of a megaprim - they have to look at it and how it's setup (phantom or not) and decide on a case-by-case basis.

The class 4 mainland sim I live in usually has +5,000 scripts running. It's not the fastest sim around, not by a long shot, but it's usually ok unless a bunch of people show up at once and (all at once) start hitting the sim up for all our textures.

What really matters is how well the scripts are written. Turn on Show Updates (in the Client menu or ctrl-alt-shift-d) and wander around some. Objects being deleted will show grean beacon thingies; objects doing partial updates (position/rotation change) will show blue beacon thingies; objects doing full updates (expensive) will show red beacon thingies. I've seen tiki torches that show no updates (good) and ones that show full updates every second or so (not so good).

Then there's scripts that don't really have visual aspects. Like, for example, ones that might be trying to scan every object in the sim, every second. These can put a big load on the system but I have no idea how to track them down on the mainland...