This is a work in progress at Alchemy on InWorldz grid.... Isle Paracelsus.
Now, the thing with InWorldz is, many of the 8778 residents are not really noobs... many have years of experience in SL before, for one reason or another, migrating to friendlier climes.
Zauber Paracelsus, for example, my neighbour at Alchemy.
This gives rise to a very interesting situation which is a bit akin to giving an old tree a shot of horse manure... the roots and trunk are mature but the sudden influx of fertilizer, in this case ..cheap prims, can give an unexpected growth....OK...I know thats a bit of a fancy way of putting it, but the cost of prims in SL is definitely holding some people back, and it will be interesting to see how quickly this world matures under favourable circumstances...
...and while I'm on the subject of prims.. Lalo's post.. details the early days of how the Lab made you pay for prims, (amongst other insights). It seems you were charged according to size and height...now....this may have left the Lab with a psychological block on Megas.... as I mentioned in my comment. This, enhanced by the idea that a 50x50 slab as one prim costs me around 13 cents (I pay sales tax), but thats 25 prims if you dont use megas =31x25...namely US$3.25, obviously 25 times as much ......
Bettina walked out of the LEA because of their continued refusal to allow Megas, and it has certainly contributed to my love of InWorldz, that and the sim-wide linking distance which negates the need for Rezz-Faux which is, lets face it, a pain in the bottom...... so...the few Boys left in the Lab are slaving away 18 hours a day so that Fast Easy Fun is what we have to look forward to...... (without scalable prims)...
.... but still damn expensive....
:))
Posts
I had heard a lot of stories as why no megaprims. One was that since centerline determined where the prim count was called it would cause a lot of conflict from object intrusion on other parcels. I've also heard megaprims were a byproduct of a code bug that has long been fixed. There has been talk for three years that megas may someday be outlawed on mainland SL. I suspect any real reason may have long since been forgotten...{I've always hated that, " I don't know, that's how we've always done it".}
ReplyDeleteZauber's builds are incredible and are-- as the author points out, a result of his existing skill suddenly finding an expanded palette. There can be no doubt that the freedoms of Inworldz are strongly contributing to the expansion of creativity we see there.
ReplyDeleteWhat freedoms? Those specifically pointed out in this article: megaprims, low cost, sim-wide link range.
Like Brinda, I have heard all kinds of claims from Linden Lab why megaprims exist. They are generally:
* Megaprims lag (bogus)
* Megaprims cause physics problems (and other prims don't?)
* Griefers use megaprims (so what, we should remove from SL everything griefers use?)
The most accurate of these statements is the griefer issue... because in the past LL has crippled other valuable tools because of griefers (for example, so drastically limiting push that popular "human cannons" and related games now fail to work). LL has long overreacted (and under-reacted) to griefing, attacking the symptoms instead of the disease. I learned the "griefer" claim from a fairly reliable source... but as Brinda says, it is likely that very few people (Philip perhaps) really know why megaprims are not allowed on SL.
Now me, I'm a bit more paranoid, and I have my own opinions. :D I believe LL limited megaprims because they believe (wrongly) that megaprims will require people to need less land in order to build what they want, and they mistakenly believe this will hurt their sales. Not to be jaded, but LL has long failed to understand what motivates and drives their customers... and how customers think.
Inworldz doesn't. Inworldz was founded BY users, and they know what drives, fuels and tickles customer fancy. So they allow megaprims, have reasonable prices, and enable sim-wide linking. The result: builds like Zaubers... one of the most interesting Steampunk towns I've seen.
if you have ever played with megas, there are at least two kinds. old school megas were the result of exploiting a code bug. you could tell, there was obviously something wrong with them. the center of balance was not where it was supposed to be. then there were the megas that were larger than 256 meters, spanning across sim lines. obviously those might cause performance problems. then about a year and a half ago, Nicholaz "The Mad Patcher" Beresford discovered an oversight in the server code that allowed the default prim size to be changed. he allowed that option in his nikolaz viewer and a bunch of folks went to town making megas (up to 100 meters in size) until the lindens hurriedly fixed the server code. those new school megas are NOT unstable. there's nothing that i can see about those that would cause any harm. nonetheless, i love being able to make prims up to 256 meters in size on the open sims. what that does is allow the builder to scale the size of their objects up. (my E8 Polytope on Reaction Grid is 200 meters in diameter because of the use of megaprim struts.) the other advantages to the builder on the open sim is that the 255 prim limit for a linked object no longer applies. objects can be rezzed far away from a rezzer. and there is no limit to the size of a linked object. (i have a 200 meter diameter linked object made up of 240 prims rotating on my Wizzy region in Reaction Grid.)
ReplyDeleteFor me, perhaps the best part of the expanded pallet has that it has really opened my mind to learning. I have learned a huge number of new things while building techniques in the 7 months I've been active on InWorldz. And I'm still learning!
ReplyDeleteI have no doubt that these few extra tools that we are given in InWorldz are so valuable that SL will suffer as a result of their dragging their feet on this. Just today I was foiled in an attempt to link a simple build because prims were more than 32 meters apart, that is pure nonsense.
ReplyDeleteSince sculpties arrived over 3 years ago I can think of no major improvements in tools. That is lax, and it will cost them.