Friday, June 6, 2008

Debunking a Huge Prim Myth


One of the tiresome things about second life is the screaming harpiedom of land barrons and barronesses. As a landlady, a gongzhu, and I see the numbers from the inside. Basically, they make their living reselling Second Life as a product, marking it up as much as they can, and dealing with the inter-resident drama. That's the life of land baron or baroness. You can see why dealing with renting full sims, they would hate huge prims. First, it means they can sell each resident fewer prims. Every prim you save, is one more prim that you can't be so boiling over in frustration to pay for another large plot with its fees and rent. The other problem is that in the rabbit warren of a full size sim, huge prims create inter-resident drama. They can block "views," create large walls, be used for pictures and advertisements, and generally control the environment.

So you can see why they spew things about "huge prims burn up sim resources!" They don't. We've run test after test. Huge prims use less resources than an equivalent structure in 10x10 prims. What they do do however, is reduce baron gross margins, and use baron time resources to manage inter-resident drama. Since barons make their living reselling SL at the lowest possible amount of trouble, you can see why they don't like it. But that doesn't mean what they say is true.

Another myth about huge prims is the so called, and I say so called, "LOD" problem. This one, promulgated by the steaming cauldron of slander herself Prokofy Neva, is that because huge prims are larger, they don't LOD out, that is, aren't wedded out. Sounds like a good theory. Except, as you can see from the above diagram, it's not true at all. 10x10 prims are far clipped before they are LODed out. In the background is a tower built of huge prims. The renderfarclip here is set at 1024, and that tower is just about at 1024 meters from the camera position. Just in front of it, at about 800M distant, is a quartet of towers built with 10x10 prims. As you can see, they are there, at a draw distance beyond what is available to the client. 10x10 prims aren't LODed out before they are far clipped. So there is no difference, at available draw distances, between a 10x10 prim, and a huge prim. Both are still drawn at 1000M, which is close to the maximum that thee far clip can be set at, and much higher than most residents can walk around with anyway.

The solution to these problems is to put the size of a huge prim as an estate manager tool. Huge prims larger than this should not be allowed to be rezzed or enter that sim. This way if a sim owner wants to block huge prims for their reasons on the build, they can. People should be shown, in "about land" what the prim limit is, and it should be visible in the buy box, so that an avatar knows what the rules of this particular sim are. This could also be an initial set up option in buying and flipping a mainland sim, with the first owner getting to set this number. Ideally it could be made the option of consensus voting, where if all the owners in a sim want the number to be raised or lowered, it will be raised or lowered.

Andrew and Sidewinder and others are working on anotehr essential tool, and that will be checking bounding boxes, so that huge prims will not overlap other parcels when rezzed or moved. Personally I think this can't come to soon.

However the reality from this picture is that ordinary prims are farclipped before they are LODed. There is no "LOD" problem at distances available to the client.

9 comments:

  1. Are you male in real life, Ms. Yifu?

    Does that explain the viciousness of your frequent attacks on me, and your malicious lies?

    I wouldn't know how to explain it otherwise.

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  2. I'm reminded of Bertrand Russell's writing that the only way to deal with a crank is to be even more outrageous than the crank, until he walks away.

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  3. Well at least it is an improvement from her calling me a paedophile.

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  4. Vicious frequent attacks and malicious lies are a male gender trait?

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  5. I'd like to think not, Margaret, but they're certainly Prokofy's stock in trade.

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  6. Since I don't read prokofy, barring the occasional appearance here, I don't have any basis for, well, anything.

    Having watched the use of huge prims filtered through Lillie's capable fingers and original mind, I am interested in how their use plays out in world.

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  7. I fail to see why um Yifu's "originality" is a justification for many people to be harassed by these prims on the mainland, and have sim performance deteriorate *as the Lindens will tell you*. It seems sufficient to allow them on private islands and be done with it.

    Re: "the only way to deal with a crank is to be even more outrageous than the crank, until he walks away." Yes, I hope that as I fight back these outrageously nasty attacks by Yifu, that eventually she'll go away.

    I find there is nothing more vicious than a male transvestite in the closet, about female transgenders not in the closet.

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  8. BTW, one of the nastier pieces of shit that Yifu promulgates is that I've allegedly "called her a pedophile". Of course I've never done such a thing.

    What I have done is called her arguments in defense of allowing "ageplay" in Second Life to be reprehrensible. They are. She's never been able to face the music on that, so she ducks and distracts with this other nonsense. Even the Lindens now have a policy against "ageplay," and that's a good thing, and it has nothing to do with "Mark Kirk". Yifu thinks she is showing some cunning wit by dodging the real charges with malicious lies, but she has yet to produce any record of these allegations, and I know exactly what I've written on this subject, here:

    http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/05/the_pedophiles_.html

    Yifu takes terrible exception to my very basic moral objections to "ageplay" here, and it's for that reason that she's mounted this jihad on me. It only discredits here.

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  9. It seems you've forgotten that the Lindens are divided on this issue Prokofy.

    Sorry, any evidence that points to the opposite of your opinion shows that thus far there is no concrete, irrefutable evidence of SIM performance degradation caused by the proper use of Mega Prims.

    When you get proper proof of your opinion, please make sure the whole world knows. No, Gene Replacement's set is not a valid testing kit.

    Get a newer set from SLX.

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