Why Is There a Size Limit on Prims?

I'm still only a few months into SL, but I have a burning question from my Lightwave experience.

Some structures are incredibly hard to build in SL, such as very large spheres. Others are easy but require lots of prims, like skyscrapers. I would like to build both structures, but at the largest I can only create a 10mx10mx10m prim. Seeing as many cities could truly benefit by much much larger prims which would then use a simple texture to make them nice, why is this limitation in SL?

After all, a polygon is a polygon.

My theory is that it has to do with the way SL renders object using prims, the database or the need to dimple certain prims, but I really don't know. I simply hate making a building out of 20 or 30 prims when 10 would do for all walls and floors!

Thank you!

its been asked before (and even debated by me) but it basicly boils down to SL half baked physics

which still makes no sence to me, why does my castle HAVE to have a mass ect, seems like more stress for stupid crap, seems like its either physical, phantom or solid, but theres no solid thought in sl so your staircase gets a mass for the car traveling at 60mph to totally ignore (instead of crashing)

what?
exactly

not so!

In SL the polygons are procedural, not vector based.

Also the limit has to do with preventing too much overlap between land and limitations with the physics engine (havok1)

The meaning of this is slightly eluding me...

I would think a box would be six polygons. Can you explain this to me?

From the OpenGL (SL is OpenGL) site...

The limitation on prim size has more to do with practicality than technicalities. Basically, they don't want people to build things overly large and grossly out of proportions. If you want to build things really big, just pretend you are much smaller, and pretend that 1m is 100m. That way, a regular prim would be 1km tall. Judging from some of the so called cities in SL, slapping a repeated texture on a surface does not make a nice city. It still needs details.

There is no mass calculation for a non-physics castle, Osgeld. Only collision is calculated for other physics objects whacking onto its sides.

A box is 12 polygons because of the tessellation. Every polygon you see in SL needs to be made into triangles. All the prims in SL are procedural, or parametric. It has nothing to do with OpenGL limitations. When you lay a box prim down, it is defined by its position, size and rotation, along with the other modifiers like twist, shear, etc. There is no information about the location of the 8 vertices. This helps reduce the ammount of information that needs to be sent through the net. If it were to use non-parametric objects, for example, a twisted torus would have many many vertices, and consequently, much more information to send across. But with the system in SL, the info of a complex torus is the same as a cube.

Normally a box would be 8 points connected to have 6 faces.

so the storage of such box would be 6 vectors of XYZ coordinates plus the way the various faces mesh.

Put in SL it's more like "but a box here, of this size" so instead of

<20,20,20><20,0,20><0,20,20><0,0,20>.... plus 4 more

it's just [box][at loc][size] represented in numbers like [3][15,15,15][10,10,10]

it's not QUITE that simple but the idea is to convey very little info (for bandwidth conservation) and let your computer "figure out" where the cube is rather than giving the exact location of each point.

This is also why the actual building in SL is limited, like a taper only being on 1 axis and immoble.

The primary reasons have to do with sim-to-sim object transfers and physics. Large prims, as I understand it, WERE once able to be created (albeit through a bug) and these tended to be unstable at sim borders and tended to cause problems with the physics engine. (Keep in mind that even if a prim is not designated as physical, it still interacts with the physics engine insofar as physical objects can collide with it.)

Yeah I've seen that a couple of times now. From what I'm reading here it's only phyisics problems and sim edges where huge prims are a bad idea. I think huge non phyisics prims could work because it's just a bigger number, not extra parameters.