Tag: Linden Research Inc.

The official Linden blog has a post on The Big Prim Problem:

For quite a while now Second Life has been home to a variety of jumbo-sized prims, megaprims, and other larger than the usual ten-meters-maximum prims. The original “megaprims” were produced by Residents’ manipulation of the client last year; “new” ones cannot be made, but the existing supply can be (and are) copied and distributed. Linden Lab doesn’t support or encourage the use of these prims, but our policy up until now has been ‘live and let live’.

They are inviting responses in the comments. If you use big prims, or products made with them, you’ll probably want to go say so.

Update:

I went to add a comment, but they have maxed out at 151 comments. Original post: Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 1:33 PM PDT by: Michael Linden. Comment 151: October 12th, 2007 at 2:51 PM PDT

So, just in case Michael Linden is reading this:

Good: Trees (just go take a look at Heart, and then see how many of their trees are making SL a beautiful place); buildings; roads and sidewalks; sculptie mountains (take a look at Lovelace or Caledon Primverness)

Bad: I’ve never encountered any griefing or inconvenience from others. I have, however, had a couple of scary moments when I took a megaprim out of inventory without understanding exactly what it was. (I knew it was a megaprim; I did not know exactly what shape it would be. One item in a collection of megaprims was actually scripted to create a layer of megaprims over the whole sim.) The only downside I’ve ever encountered would be eliminated if I could simply create my own prim larger than 10 meters. In other words, the only negative experience I’ve ever had with a megaprim was created when Linden Lab drove them underground but did not eliminate them in the first place.

Ideas: Allow legitimate creation of prims larger than 10m, with documentation on their use. (Oh, right! Linden Lab can hardly do documentation! Well, allow them with hearsay and rumors about how to use them.) I think 20 or 30 meters would be an acceptable size limit, although I’ve used larger and I’ve seen exceptional builds that depend upon larger (especially larger spheres). Make the existing ones no copy/no trans, no matter what their size.

– the larger ones, when used on the mainland, often produce annoying “parcel encroachment” situations. The megaprims are difficult to interact with, and are often not recognized by Residents as being an object at all — “I couldn’t go past some kind of invisible barrier.” Abusive Residents take advantage of these problems.

This is not about megaprims at all. This is about abusive residents. Do something about that problem, why don’t you?

– the presence of megaprims will interfere with the improvements planned for the physics engine. The bigger the megaprims, the more trouble they will cause for physics simulation in a Region.

How big? How much “trouble”? Why would an improved physics engine handle them worse than the current physics engine? This sounds like a bogus excuse.

– the graphics engine does not work well with prims over 256 meters in any dimension.

Okay, finally something specific. Prohibit prims over 256 meters. (I think the limit can be substantially lower. I can think of only a few uses for truly enormous prims.)