Are there restrictions on oversized (mega prims) and undersized (tiny prims)? What are they?

[Faubio Alter]

Are these, so to speak legal in SL? I'd like to actually read the policy (links please) if there is one. Do these cause lag?

 

[Chic Aeon]

If you use the megaprims made during the loophole in the code several years ago, the largest size I have seen is 1024 x 1024 x 1. That covers four (FOUR! ) sims. Edit: Boy did I do the math wrong on that one. 16!   I can't imagine actually working with that size. Sim sized ones are difficult enough *wink*. Long ago (4 years) there was talk about banning those megaprims, but that never happened and as their usefulness became obvious and their applications more mainstream, it seemed that Linden Labs gave up the fight against them.

You can NOW (with the right viewer - the new official 3, I believe) make your own megaprim up to 64 meters. You can also insert a script into a rezzed cube and make that cube up to 64 meters by changing the code (this if you don't have the correct viewer installed). Eventually the third party viewers will include this feature, but the important part is that the ability to make megaprims is now part of the SERVER code. So even if you err on the side of caution, you could certainly say that megaprim up to 64 meters are now "legal" .

I haven't heard anything about changes to microprims, but it may just be that I have talked to builders and not jewelry designers. Of course OpenSim platforms have had megaprims all along and microprims, the last time I visited were .001 instead of .01 and THAT is a huge advantage in jewelry.

I can't really comment with any authority on the lag issue. When megaprims first came on the scene there was lots of talk about lag. That was before sculpties though. The LAG, I believe, is a visual lag on the individual viewer. If you look at megaprims in wireframe view, you can see that they have lots of "lines", just like sculpties. I have never noted a problem with megaprims rezzing slower than a regular prim, but I have a very fast connection as well as a stellar graphics card.

Hope that was a bit of insight and that you get even more.

 

 

[Rolig Loon]

There are no legal restrictions, only practical and political ones.  If you build something that laps onto your neightbor's land, you can get in trouble.  The larger the prim, the more likely it is that you will do that by mistake, so avoid political problems with your neighbors by using megaprims that are no larger than your own land, and being very careful when you position them.

From a practical perspective, large megaprims have large bounding boxes and are therefore difficult to stand or sit on convincingly.  They are also larger than many people's draw distances, so may disappear for them.  Also (very serious) the larger the prim, the more energy it takes to lift it, if it is physical.  For that reason, LL will very possibly delete any physical megaprim they find, because it will be a major drain on sim resources.  Other than that, megaprims, in themselves, do not create lag.

There are no restrictions on microprims, other than the practical limits of how small you can make a prim appear to be by slicing, dimpling, and path cutting it.  There are, of course, always the rendering lag issues associated with the total number of different textures within an avatar's field of view.  It doesn't make any difference how tiny a prim is.  If it has a texture on it, your graphics card still has to render it.  You can put a whale of a lot of textures in a small space full of microprims.