QuantumChaos Portal

i think your wasting your money buying an alienware computer you could buy a prebuilt pc by another company with similar specs,a kit pc, or buy all the components yourself and save a significant amount od cash for the same exact product(minus the alienware case) i bought an alienware computer close to 9 years ago it was my 1st super charged computer and cost me about 3 grand. since then i had a few cheap ones useful for only internet purposes and more recently about a year and 1/2 ago i knew my alienware was well past due to be replaced and i spent several months looking for the components i wanted most to build my own replacement and about 2 weeks before i was ready to order them i found a dell with 90% of the components i had wanted for even cheaper than i could have built it and it was still brand new in the box. i wound up paying about $420 for a pc with intel i5 2500 quadcore and 16 gb of ram i waited close to 6 months before i bought a new videocard for it and a 24 inch monitor but my total inventment when it was done was only about $800 and i can run sl on it in ultra settings all day long and play games like portal 2 and other games at max settings w/o missing a beat. that was a year ago i bought it and i also can do high end 3d modeling on it for 1/4th the price i paid for my alienware. i'll never go back to the pc equivalent of apple hyped/priced computers lol. go to websites like newegg and tiger direct or directly on the store sections of namebrand pc's like dell asus and toshiba get a feel for the components prices on the alienware computer by looking up each of the main pieces ram,cpu,and videocard on newegg and tirger direct then once you have a better idea how much it would cost to piece it together yourself look for prebuilt computers with similar specs and try and find the best deal if your not willing to build it yourself. alienware is all about customizing a computer for its customers but unfortunately they price that like apple does through the roof just to plug some memory sticks and video cards into slots on a motherboard.

ive read alot of comments on these forums about meshes. what people hoped they would be theirs costs and prim upkeeps in the sl grid and how it went from a hopeful advancement to sculpties to just another accessory creation system for clothes and items worn on the body because of the prim counts these meshes produced vs sculpties were off the charts. what if we had a simplified alternative for importing meshes. a boolean in 3d modeling softwares have 3 states of being additive,subtractive,and intercecting. they rely on multiple objects primative or complex to create a mesh like structure. if you had a sphere and a cube and placed the sphere inside the cube with 1/2 sticking out if both objects were set to additive when grouped together their boolean state would look the same from the outside however the pieces that intercected would be gone and you would be left with a hollow mesh joining. if 1 was additive and 1 subtractive then grouped the subtractive would cut itself out of the additive piece you would either see a dipped bowl inside the cube or a sawed off 1/2 sphere depending on which 1 is subtrative if they were both grouped together as intercecting then what remains is where they touch and nothing else which would be the bottom slice of that sphere. so how would this be as good/better than meshes? well by itself using nothing but prims if you didnt have the cash for sculpties or meshes it could open up a world of modeling techniques previously unobtainable in sl w/o outside software or expensive in world software. but for those that have sculpty experience it could also provide alteratives to meshes because a sculpty is nothing more than a prim with sculpt texture therefore booleans could produce very detailed addative,subtractive,and intercecting combinations and if done smartly they would cost a fraction of the prim counts as mesh calculated prim worth. the pricing for creating meshes this way could be just the cost of x number of prims used + sculpty costs=total cost of mesh created (if this is to simple of an equation for what it produces im sure the lindens could find a way to calculate it more to their liking w/o sacraficing the intentions of the system to reduce upload costs and reduce prim counts of mesh like structures. obviously all of the above is not possible in sl currently however if people liked the idea of using booleans as the prim count to meshes it could produce rather effecient mesh alternatives if added to sl. ie a mesh tree being worth 55 prims inworld might be created using 3 sculpties and booleaned together with an additive boolean calculation. think about it.