[sldev] Sculpties: Vacuum-Forming, Skittering, Zone Linking

[Dale Mahalko]

On 9/28/07, Kent Quirk (Q Linden) <q at lindenlab.com> wrote:
> The architect in me wants to preserve the freedom to change the
> implementation of sculpties in the future as we learn more about ways to
> improve and design the implementation. If people start depending on
> implementation details to do things like drill holes in sculpties by
> abusing the way rendering works, it constrains our ability to extend the
> feature in the future.

I fail to see what the problem is here. Define one type of sculptie
that permits seaming via the alpha channel, and then when you come up
with something better, define another separate prim type for that new
method which doesn't use seaming.

Voila, no need to worry about alpha-seaming messing with your next new
sculptie implementation, and meanwhile alpha-seaming can remain as a
feature of the client, in addition to whatever else you eventually
come up with. It's not like SL is just overflowing with basic prim
types.

-Scalar Tardis / Dale Mahalko