Linden Lab and Megaphobia.

Now, I would define megaphobia as an irrational fear of megas. As we know it is inherent in some of the leading lights at Linden Lab, and I wanted to lay out a few ideas about the development of this syndrome.

The culture of an organisation is one that develops over time and has its basis in the collective history which that group experiences in its development. It can almost seem to seep into the walls of an institution as a widely held, accepted, “truth” even though it may bear no relationship at all to the facts, statistics or more objective data presented to the group.

It is widely held that a complete change of staff is the only way of combatting behaviour or beliefs that have been thus institutionalised. That obviously isn’t going to happen at the Lab, nor would I suggest it is necessary.

Sometimes, however, a clear presentation of the development of the syndrome is enough to awaken the sufferers to a realisation of their plight. ... this I will attempt.

Lalo Telling, in his very well researched series of articles on the history of the grid, tells us....

"Back before the land tier and prim limit systems were implemented, prims cost $L10 each. Any time a prim was rezzed, you "paid" for it. Conversely, when you took it back into inventory or deleted it, you earned $L10. It was also possible to delete full perm items and claim their prim value (possibly a permissions bug). During the first year of SL, some older builds, such as the mansion and the old Varney Boardwalk were being picked apart for quick Lindens."

Now, it may seem like that way of paying for your SL experience has long since disappeared but, in fact, anyone who pays tier still really, in essence, pays “per prim’. It’s just that with tier you pay for a block of prims...117 for a 512m2 etc etc.

So...there was, in the beginning, and still is a direct relationship between prim and LL income.

Take then the misguided idea that somehow a mega, say a 30x30, is robbing LL of the income they could generate from 9 x 10m prims....

The actual facts, however, are that if you own a 512m2 plot you are going to use all 117 prims anyway. ... and fairly fast in my experience, whether they are megas or standard prims.

This possible cultural dislike is enhanced, possibly, by the fact that the first megas were hacks, illegal, and therefore, basically, “Bad”.... like hackers.

The Myth of Lag is one that still remains even though I have used megas in large amounts on both SL and now InWorldz.... and originally I had a poor lappy to build with... I experienced no lag as a result of building with thousands of megas.

Recently we have been told repeatedly the following “Fact” about Mesh... it goes like this, basically,..... Mesh will reduce lag because... one mesh will replace many standard prims so there will be less work for the server. .. that is never paraphrased “one mega will replace many standard prims so there will be less work for the server.”

A simple blind spot in those suffering from this subtle disease. Selective logic.

There is also an idea which is a totally stupid one about megas, irresponsibly placed, overlapping a boundary line onto a neighbours property. In my experience a 10x10 poking through a neighbours wall is just as annoying, and more common, and it is usually resolved by the parties in question. This has to be one of the lamest excuses, and a poor attempt to hide a bad case of Megaphobia.

However, the irrationality of a phobia is not one that can necessarily be argued with, especially when institutionalised. Megas are bad, and the Lab has this as their standard “view”. [The use of the word ‘view’ in these situations is usually better described as “opinion unsupported by hard evidence”]

Now, none of these defense positions have any relevance to nanoprims. In InWorldz I can scale a prim down to 0.001 m, but not in SL; I can make a prim 99% hollow, but not in SL. There is no spurious ‘lag’ argument, or ‘overhanging prim’ argument, just pure neglect of your core content creators and builders. The code might be changed in a day, if there was the will to do so.... copy and paste from any of the OS sims. TPV’s would read it.


My major joy, however, with building in InWorldz is the ability to link a huge link-set sim-wide. The current SL restriction of 32 meters, for linking, is going to have to change in SL if meshes upto 64 meters are going to be allowed, or they will be unlinkable... a crap state of affairs, making mesh both expensive and useless in complex builds. Having to use Builders Buddy or similar every time you use a mesh will not sit well with builders, it’s a pain.

Now, back to megas ... I realise that my boycotting of SL8B and LEA is not going to change anyone’s mind, I’m just a D-rate creator and they will manage perfectly well without me...... but, the NPISL (Not Possible In SL) builds that I and others are working on in Iwz will, eventually, convince enough people that you can make better, richer, more complex stuff in Iwz ..... and that MAY get the Boys to realise that the mythical 100 Million Users will soon hear of a Better Grid if the gap between SL and Iwz continues to widen. If that doesn’t instigate some changes, some care of content creators and builders, some small advances in tools, then the Lab will continue to lose market share.

[heard this on the radio this morning.....You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone for the times they are a-changing...]

So, my argument is this.... if you Boys can spare the time to make wobbly thighs, you can sort out this too. SL’s attraction isn’t all about sex...Duh!!


:))