[sldev] Optimus Prim vs. Megatrim: "The Big Prim Problem"

[Dzonatas]

Argent Stonecutter wrote:
> On 17-Oct-2007, at 09:15, Dzonatas wrote:
>> What to do with the megaprims?
>
> Keep them, let people create and rez new megaprims up to 256 meters, 
> don't make it a complex operation to do so, don't magically convert 
> prims into linksets, just ignore them in the physics engine.

My post was not about to create linksets, but that would be a similar 
idea if the basic prims did not *transform* or *optimize* as suggested 
in my post. Linksets, therefore, would be a different topic.


> When you rez a prim larger than 10 meters, it gets ignored by the 
> physics engine.

That would break content. On the rez event, instead, is where parts of 
the system can use the original untranformed/unoptimized version (hence 
"protoform") and decide if it can work well with the physics at that 
point or if it has to force phantom.

> The whole business of automatically generating sets of new prims that 
> behave like a single prim seems unworkable to me. The shape of a 
> component prim that results from resizing a truncated skewed twisted 
> profile-cut torus is just too complex to describe compactly... the 
> server and the client both will have to completely ignore the 
> component prims, and perform all the same calculations for rendering 
> and physics as if it was a single megaprim, and in addition generate 
> magic linksets. Where are the savings?

Given both versions of transformed and protoforms, each process (client 
or server) can decide what is the best version to use. All the 
calculations to render either version can be done ahead of time instead 
of on each event.

> For structural pieces? Just embed transparent non-phantom prims inside 
> the megaprim.

You asked "where are the savings?" Here is one answer. That embedded 
suggestion is very similar to have the protoform and the 
optimized/transformed version stored as one object. The entire object 
does not need to be seen by each process, but each process decides on 
which parts of the object it retrieves and computes.

-- 
Power to Change the Void