In a post on the Second Life blog, Michael Linden has asked the community what to do about megaprims, they want to get rid of them, but are asking residents what are the good uses, what are the bad uses, should they remove them all, or should they just remove the ones down to a certain level, he even mentions that there is one megaprim that is 65,000 meters wide, and says that one is gone. He lists some of the ways that the megaprims are a pain inworld.

Some of these objects have now been recognized as being nuisances in several ways:

• 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.

• 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.
• The graphics engine does not work well with prims over 256 meters in any dimension.

Source: The Big Prim Problem

In a nice response to this blog post, Aimee Weber says she loves and needs em, if there was one thing she wouldn’t want to do without, it’s megaprims!

Parcel Encroachment - Michael is (rightfully) concerned about the abusive uses of megaprims. However, features such as llPushObject and the self-replication enabling combo of llGiveInventory and llRezObject open the door for potential abuse, indeed they are the foundation of most scripted griefing today. But these functions are never removed because of the compelling legitimate uses for them. It would therefore be inconsistent for Linden Lab to use this excuse to justify the removal of megaprims. Abusers should be punished, not people who need these tools.

Megaprims cause problems for Physics engines - If this is true, force prims over a certain size to become phantom. Problem solved.

Graphic engine problems with prims over 256m - Well there are two problems. Render distance is calculated from the center of a prim to the user. So if your draw distance is set to 64 meters, and you are 65 meters from the center of the megaprim, you could be standing on it without ever seeing it. Gene Replacement suggests on the Linden Blog that Second Life should calculate draw distance from the bounding box rather than the center of the prim. This seems like a reasonable fix.

Arbitrarily Large Radii - One solution is to allow arbitrary radii when calculating the curved surfaces of prims. The prim size itself need never exceed 10m, but curved part of, say, the slice of a cylinder can be made shallower and shallower as the imaginary radius moves further and further away. Source: What to do with Megaprims

The consensus seems to be to keep them, but get rid of the larger ones, as one commenter noted, if you get rid of megprims, you can say goodbye to the Greenies Home Rezzable sim, as well as making many structures impossible without the addition of the tools and objects to use in the building of objects. Some suggest you should only be allowed to use them on private builds. Quite a few commenter’s say limit the megaprims to 100 meters or less, some say prims larger than 10×10x10 could be made more functional, one user mentions why subject my sim to keeping track of 1000+ objects when I can do the same job in 4. Many thoughtful comments and reasons to keep them have been posted, but some are afraid the Lindens have already made up their minds and are going to remove them anyway, disable lots and lots of stuff. And besides I distinctly remember reading that the Lindens were using megaprims to build stuff too, just can’t remember where.

The blog post has already reached 150 comments, so Michael Linden created a forum post to allow residents to express their opinion for and against megaprims. Read the blog post, read Aimee Weber’s reply, then go to the forum post and tell them your opinion. Do it, do it now!

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