While perusing the Modeling Certification wiki page I noticed an interesting requirement being proposed ... "over-sized prims," specifically, megaprims. The fact that these essential building tools would be mentioned as a must-know for all professional content creators comes as no surprise to me. I use them constantly as do most of my peers. But would Linden Lab actually make them a requirement for certification? That would really surprise me because of the somewhat uncomfortable history the lab has with megaprims.
Folks have requested larger sized prims for as long as I can remember. I personally made a request almost two years ago on the official Second Life forum, but to no avail. Then along came a guy named Plastic Duck.
Plastic Duck, A.K.A. Gene Replacement is a name as familiar as John Gotti, Kevin Mitnick, and Lee Harvey Oswald to the average Second Life resident. He's Linden Lab's public enemy number one. When Plastic Duck was invited to speak on CBC Radio, Linden Lab's director of Marketing, Catherine Smith, personally wrote to the station warning of Plastic's "griefing and generally anti-social behavior, harassing the furry community, and spamming with penis images."
True to his nature, Plastic Duck's megaprims are actually the result of a wanton disregard for Linden Lab's TOS. Exploiting the fact that prim size limitations were enforced by Second Life's client software, Plastic simply created his own makeshift client which allowed him to log on and create prims of any size he damn well felt like. Sadly, he only felt like creating a small handful of megaprims before Linden Lab repaired the exploit by placing prim size enforcement in the server software. This ended the potential for oversized prims forever.
Since then, Plastic's small handful of megaprims is worth their weight in gold to professional content creators. They've appeared as an essential part of many popular builds and are frequently used by many of the big content creation companies.
Used properly, megaprims can reduce prim counts by eliminating the need to construct large shapes out of numerous smaller prims. For example, if you wanted to create a flat roof for an enormous building measuring 100m x 100m without using megaprims, you would have to construct it out of 10x10 prims for a total of 100 prims. Not only does this consume prims needlessly, but it also results in the presence of unnecessary geometry data for all the hidden surfaces between adjoining prims. In our example we would have four surfaces per prim which is 400 surfaces minus the 40 surfaces that face outward. That's 360 surfaces that serve no purpose at all and are not even seen.
Megaprims also make certain larger shapes possible such as large cylinders and spheres. If you want to create a sphere with a diameter of 10m or smaller, then you simply rez one. If you want to make a sphere that is 11m in diameter, you have to write or obtain a script that will calculate the shapes and positions of dozens or even hundreds of smaller prims to form your sphere.
Megaprims are also helpful for creating large unified texture animations. Say you wanted to create a vast sea of rolling waves, a sky of looming clouds that roll by, or the magical waves of the northern lights. Since there's no way to coordinate texture animations from prim to prim, using hundreds of little 10 meter prims wouldn't work. Each prim would show its own sequence of the animation causing the scene to be disjointed like a broken mirror. With megaprims you can animate a huge texture seamlessly.
Here's another tid-bit you may not have known ... you can turn a megaprim into an oversized sculpted prim! Handy, huh?
So here is the dichotomy, one of the most reviled villains in Second Life is responsible for creating a feature that has been requested for years and is now so useful and so ubiquitous that developers may eventually be required to learn about it for official Linden Lab certification. You aren't allowed to create megaprims, but you are allowed to use them for legitimate purposes ... in fact you may be required to.
It's like double parking in New York City. It's illegal, but if law enforcement actually put an end to it, the city would grind to a screeching halt because it would be impossible for goods and materials to come and go. Many delivery companies simply factor the inevitable parking tickets into their cost of doing business and the city gives them a nod and a wink because the violations are considered a valuable source of revenue.
I say it's time to stop the nodding and winking. Megaprims are here to stay, but in their current form they are needlessly limited. Thanks to Plastic Duck, we have 20x20x.5 meter prims. Thanks to Linden Lab we don't have 30x30x.5 meter prims. It's time for Linden Lab to be the hero and allow unlimited prim sizes as part of the standard user interface. Even if prims larger than 10 meters are forced to be phantom, the benefits to the community and the beauty of builds will be worth that minor limitation.
Sadly, until Linden Lab gives us this long overdue feature, Plastic Duck (you know ... that evil guy) will always have an important and legitimate place Second Life's history.
1. so what is the reason why they DONT allow bigger prims?
Posted at 6:28PM on Aug 22nd 2007 by Loki Eliot