Prim modes "Circle2", "Test", and "33" - are they ever used?

[animats]

Anybody ever use any of those weird modes?

"Circle2" generates strange very jaggy objects. That's not accidental; there's code in the viewer to do that. I asked one of SL's major creators of plants and trees if that was used for something, but no. Is this just a debug feature that was accidentally exposed to users?

 

[ChinRey]

8 hours ago, animats said:

I asked one of SL's major creators of plants and trees if that was used for something

Funny, I can't remember that question.

But seriously:

8 hours ago, animats said:

 Is this just a debug feature that was accidentally exposed to users?

You already know - and didn't ask about - the first two but just in case:

• Line->HalfCircle is part of the regular prim system. It's just that this particular path/profile combination turned out to not be very useful so LL omitted it from the selection menu and lsl.
• Circle->HalfCircle is only a different name for the sphere.

 

The remaining 12 use alternative paths not properly defined and not officially supported by LL. I know the prim system originally was to have at least three paths and when they eventually reduced it down to two, they still kept some of the code for the others.

• Circle2 is the one that creates those weird jaggy volumes. It's probably the remains of a spiral path. (Edit: I had a chat with animats inworld after I posted this and he pointed out that there is no way Circle2 can have anything to do with spirals. What the diea behind it was, is anybody's guess.)
• Test is a variant of the line profile. Its main (possibly only) claim to fame is that it allows taper values as high as 2 which mean you can make them a lot bigger than the official 64 m size limit.
• 33 is a variant of the circle path.

They aren't very much used partly because so few people know about them, partly because twisting them can be a nightmare with parameters reverting to default when you change other ones, the numbers showing up in the editor not matching the actual values etc.

Even so, this pie tin can't be made with a regular prim and the streaming cost as mesh would have been rather high - at least if we want half decent LoD:

 

Same with this dog bowl:

This one really got me thinking. It's such a stereotypical CSG model yet it's generated with only a fraction of the computing cost and (of course) without resorting to bandwidth heavy polylists.

Here are some other shapes using Circle 2, Test and 33 paths.:

 

The one below were originally posted in https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/387492-hacked-prim-shapes/ but I'm reposting them here since that thread lost its images long ago. The third one could probably have been made with a regular prim too - I can't remember if there were some significant nuances or if I simply made a mistake posting it.

 

Edited January 19, 2021 by ChinRey
Typos

[RoxyCyn]

Interesting shapes. I haven't tortured prims in a long time and this makes me want to revisit them.

[ChinRey]

6 hours ago, RoxyCyn said:

I haven't tortured prims in a long time

Don't torture the poor prims, that's cruel and unneccessary! Give them a little bit of anesthetics and they won't feel a thing until they wake up with a new lovely shape.