The Big Prim Problem

The following comment is from The Big Prim Problem Post on the SL Blog. One should read the whole blog entry and all the comments to see this comment in context. I highlight this one since I believe the author of many of the most used Mega Prims is the commenter himself.

Blog Comment 52 By Gene Replacement - October 12th, 2007 at 2:03 PM PDT

Seriously though Michael have you even talked to a developer at LL about this? They would explain to you how easy it would be for them to fix a lot of these issues.

– 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. Easy fix: force prims over a certain size (I think ~50-100m is fair) to be phantom.

– 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. I’m not sure where you heard this but the new physics engine (Havok 4) has a much improved physics simulation for objects >10m. Though again, an easy fix is to never allow large prims to become physical. The server already checks if an object is flexi and disallows physics in that case, just add another clause.

– the graphics engine does not work well with prims over 256 meters in any dimension. This is because the graphics engine was coded to occlude objects which have their root position located further than your draw distance. A much smarter approach would be to use the objects bounding box rather than the root position. Again a very easy fix, one that your developers would have probably fixed out of annoyance if they weren’t deathly afraid of implementing anything that might reveal their support for those evil big prims.