How are mega prims made?

Just curious -

How are mega prims made?
What tools are used?
Are they sculpties?

They aren't made any more. There were two very brief periods when it was possible to exploit a bug in SL's design tools and get around the 10m limits on prim size. During those periods, several enterprising builders produced a mountain of megaprims in a wide range of sizes. You can find them all over SL and on XStreetSL. Since then, LL has closed the loophole that made it possible to create megaprims. Although they tolerate the existence of megaprims, they do not allow new ones to be created now.

Exactly but with the small tweak that "can't create new ones" doesn't mean you can't make all the copies you want of existing ones...

/me is sure Rolig knew that - just being uberclear for the OP.

LOL, I guess I won't be making any then. And I'll treat my collection with a little more respect.

Thanks so much for your speedy reply!

Ty, Meade

Quite true, Meade. Thanks. I should have made that clear. You can do all sorts of things to a megaprim too, like change its shape (cube to cylinder or sphere, for example), cut it, or put a hole in it. That means you can make loads of copies of a megaprim in your inventory and make them all look different. The one thing you cannot do is to change its size. If you try, it snaps back permanently to 10m maximum dimension.
BTW, don't get suckered into buying megaprims. There are many free packages floating around out there.

Thanks again, Rolig. I went over to Xstreet. Holy Megaprim! I had no idea that there are thousands of them.

Now I'm starting to think of applications, such as building bases, malls, shops, apartment buildings, etc. Are there any other caveats besides re-sizing (and the obvious careful attention to textures) that I should consider?

Many, but so long as you understand their sometime-quirky behavior you'll find megaprims very handy for the kinds of projects you're mentioning. Rather than try to list all of the things you should watch out for, I suggest that you spend a little time searching past threads in this forum to discover them for yourself. Find the "Search This Forum" button at the top of this forum (not at the top of this thread, and not the "Search" tab that lets you search all the forums together). Type in the word "megaprim", hit the button, and stand back to bask in the riches of the archives.

The biggest caveat is that the more you have to use things like path cuts, dimples, and other tricks to alter the apparent size of a megaprim, the more likely it is to cause problems near the altered surface. And this is true with all sizes of prims, for that matter.

For example, I made a 70 x 70 x 10 megaprim as part of the 300+ that I created on the second oppourtunity to make them. (I had to use a slightly hacked client at the time, as well.) But it didn't occur to me, before time ran out and LL closed that loophole in the server code, to make a 70 x 70 x 1 megaprim for a platform.

You can take that 70 x 70 x 10 megaprim, make it a sphere, dimple begin 90%, make it back into a box, and you'll have what looks like a 70 x 70 x 1 Megaprim.

But there is a 70 x 70 x 9 area right under that platform that is still within the bounding box of the actual megaprim. When you try to do things inside the bounding box of a prim, things don't always work as you would expect. On the top surface of that platform, you can walk normally, rez prims normally, and it acts prety much like any other prim. But turn it over so you are trying to walk or rez on the other face. You probably can't rez a prim on its surface now, and if you can, it may appear 9M above the visible surface!

There are other issues, but they all relate to the fact that the game engine and physics engine that runs SL doesn't anticipate such things as megaprims existing, and treats any cut, dimpled or otherwise "tortured" prims as odd exceptions to normal behavior.

I was just about to start a thread about an aspect of Megaprims but here seems as good a place as any.

It's about the "Creator" name.

Now, perhaps it's just me being daft, but if I (in the future) make a sculptie and use a megaprim as it's base shape, then the whole thing looks like it's not made by me, despite me doing all the sculptie design and the texures etc.

I suppose there's no way to actually change the creator name of the megaprim, other than (as normal) use another prim I have made and link it to the megaprim as the root.

No, you can't change the creator name.

Yeah, I didn't think you could

Or course, changing the owner of any other object would seem wrong, it just seems a shame that a basic "starting point" building block can't be a blank/default name.

Never mind

And what is worse, Piggie, is that the Megaprim creators routinely get accused by all manner fo folk when someone *misuses* megaprims. I've lost track of how many angry IM's I have dreceived in the last year, demanding that I remove megaprims from a sim I heve never even heard of. Simply because the resident making the complaint does not realize they should be complaining to or abuse reporting the "owner" of the megaprim, and not its "Creator".

I also routinely get queries from people, asking where they can buy dance floors, trees, an Eifel Tower, and many other things that others have made with the megaprims that I created and gave away for free. I have to tell them to ask the owner of the megaprims if they made the item, or who they bought it from.

True. However, I think Ceera and others who were skilled enough to create the megaprims we now enjoy would be more than a little peeved to lose credit for their creative work. It's one thing to make something and give it away, as they have, but another thing to give away the one reminder that megaprims were, after all, created -- not part of SL's native building set.

ETA: Seeing Ceera's note .... maybe not.

/me has been meaning to IM you and complain. Why do you hate my sim so much??

Hm, lots to think about. At least the creator of each part of a build shows up in "inspect".

Thanks for all your input, gang.

I would be MORE than happy to relieve myself of any "credit" for being the creator of some mega prims...and all other manners of mega prim usage/creations that I have nothing to do with.

I do wish bigger than 10s but smaller than 100's would be available some day. When not used for griefing (do people still do that?) they are a great cost savings to any builder or participant of the grid. Even tortured megas are relatively safe as long as they are made phantom, its when you expect them to act like untortured prims that you run into issues, but as stated by others this is true with any size. I also wish I had had the foresight to know I would want odd ratio sizes like 1.58/10 lol *sigh*

A useful tool. It accesses somebody's datastore of mega prims, and delivers to you the ones you ask for.