Recent Comments:
Hello???
Second Life Insider
Nov 1st 2007 10:41PM CURSE YOU TREKKIES with your crazy ears and such! Catherine Omega already poked fun at me for that goof.
I'm personally proud I don't know much about the show :p
Second Life Avatars Controlled by the Human Brain
Second Life Insider
Oct 16th 2007 2:23AM Pretty much, TigroSpottystripes (best name evah!) In fact my BBC link supporting the fact that this is nothing new is from 1999.
It's it's just cool when tech is applied to our world.
Second Life Avatars Controlled by the Human Brain
Second Life Insider
Oct 15th 2007 9:22PM Kendra, when you and I are married, *I* am doing the cooking!
What to do with Megaprims
Second Life Insider
Oct 14th 2007 12:27AM Again, mentioned earlier on this very page, the culling formula should be calculated from the bounding box rather than the prim center.
If that's not doable for LL, then the most likely scenario for legal megaprims will be an adjustment to the culling algorithm to find the performance sweet spot to make them usable without being problematic. I suspect this will give megaprims greater visibility than 10m prims without being rude to neighboring sims.
But if they can't do this, and they have to give all megaprims the same culling priority as 10m prims, then so be it. It's a much better solution than doing away with them. I just don't think it has to come to that.
What to do with Megaprims
Second Life Insider
Oct 13th 2007 11:07PM Rikin, I addressed the culling issue twice on this very page. I'll do it one more time ... You solve the megaprim culling issue with a simple clause in the rendering engine that says if the prim is > 10m, simply treat it like a 10m prim with respect to culling no matter how large it is. It's trivial to implement and it would solve the problem you described.
What to do with Megaprims
Second Life Insider
Oct 13th 2007 8:49PM Some prim types certainly use more client side resources than others. This performance largely comes from the number of polygons used to create the shape. One good exercise I describe in my upcoming SL Content Creation Guide (http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Your-World-Official-Advanced/dp/0470171146) is to view different prims in wire-frame mode so that you can actually SEE the polygons used to form them.
This reveals that certain prims like prisms and cubes use far fewer polygons than tori or spheres. That is to say, using a tori prim will use more than your allotment of a region's "fair share of resources" than using a cube. This is pretty much a fact of Second Life that we all accept.
Viewing megaprims in wireframe mode, however, shows that there are NO additional polygons used to form them. In this example you can see this 256x256 meter megaprim floor at this distance and graphics setting use only two polygons per side:
http://www.aimeeweber.com/files/OneMegaPrim.jpg
Compare it to a floor of roughly the same size (a little smaller actually because I got tired of creating it) at the same distance and graphic settings, and you can see the exact same shape is dreadfully and needlessly wasteful of a region's resources, not only because it requires many many MANY more polygons to create the exact same surface, but there are also even more polygons hidden in the side faces that only face each other. These faces are never seen and are not used. They use region resources for no reason at all:
http://www.aimeeweber.com/files/ManySmallPrims.jpg
To reiterate, rezzing a megaprim does not consume more resources than rezzing a 10m prim. It's about the polygons, not the prim size.
Now there are some issues regarding occlusion and physics, but the suggestions to limit occlusion so it assumes all prims bigger than 10m are handled as a 10m prim (regardless of the actual size) and the suggestion of turning megaprims phantom when they exceed a size where physics become a problem pretty much solve these issues.
What to do with Megaprims
Second Life Insider
Oct 13th 2007 12:34PM Megaprims larger than sims actually DO have uses. For example you can change the texture of the whole sky into your own rolling clouds, overcast, an arora borealis, or something artistically surreal. If you want to transform your island sim into an endless desert, you can use a larger-than-sim prim to create the illusion of desert that spans to the horizon.
Of course these are limited uses and larger-than-sim prims are very rude when deployed on the main grid. It would be nice if they were banned from the main grid but still permitted by island estate owners.
Guess what will get you banned...
Second Life Insider
Oct 5th 2007 4:03PM Hah! Tragically hilarious! I actually got a taste of this mentality from a Linden who asked me to remove a trademark violation from *PREEN*. I quite honestly thought all TMs were cleaned up from my stores, so I was literally baffled as to the location of the remaining offense.
The Linden initially wouldn't give me any specific information, just as Tateru described above, but I managed to wiggle it out of them by playing dumb. I deliberately removed one of my own shoe creations and said "OK, I removed the shoes, just as you requested! Thanks for the heads up! It wont happen again!"
And they came back with "UH...It wasn't the shoes." to which I replied "Huh...OH! OK I just deleted the green shirt. Sorry again for the problem and thanks again for spotting that for me!" I think she eventually got frustrated with me and pasted the name of the offending item to me. I hope she didn't get in trouble for doing that.
For the life of me I can't think of any analogous situation where the details of an infraction are withheld from a violator, nor can I think of any reason it would benefit Linden Lab to have this policy!
Second Citizen No More!
Second Life Insider
Sep 18th 2007 11:17PM I have always been a big SC supporter and participant. I miss the place already :( I'm sure Mother has great reasons for closing it, so that is no my concern. Only the loss.
Peugeot's in Flux in SL
Second Life Insider
Sep 13th 2007 2:55PM It's a lot of fun. I wanted to point out that while we did the concept car, the SIM with the fun race track for Peugeot was created by SL Dimensions.
