Many thanks to Qarl Linden who - in comments to my previous post regarding the 2nd anniversary of the Big Prim Problem - suggested that Linden Lab might compromise and consider making scalable megaprims available on Estate land. To that end, I asked my JIRA-savvy friend Dirk Talamasca to create such a proposal for us, thereby enabling everyone to have their say on this potential new feature... and HERE it is. Please go vote!
To vote on a JIRA issue, log in with your first and last Second Life names, enter your Second Life password - don't worry, the JIRA belongs to Second Life - and then look in the left hand column for voting options.
Two years ago today, the Not Possible IRL group read Michael Linden's post, The Big Prim Problem, in dismay. Be sure to read that post if you have no idea what I am talking about.
A great deal has happened in two years, including a tiny window during which a number of creators were able to take advantage of a wee exploit and make many huge prims in different sizes, but none of them scalable.
While we would still like to have scalable megas with which to create, our priorities have moved to other areas, with the top one being better IP protection of virtual creations.
In any event, since that fateful day, October 12, 2007, this blog has kept a vigil of sorts. We published many posts about great content that would not exist were it not for megas, and we still care. And we still want scalable megas. In fact, I cannot imagine most of my favorite content in Second Life without them. What creations never existed because we don't have scalable prims? I suppose we will never know.
In the meantime, scalable huge prims are not a problem on OpenSims, and hardly an issue on Blue Mars were prims don't even exist. Why hasn't Linden Lab allowed them? Why?
I thought you might enjoy reading an old post that Douglas Story prepared for you, many many moons ago, and below you'll find links to just some of our old posts. This blogpost was published long before we'd figured out how to resize pics on Blogger. Sadly, ignore the slurls for the Man Angel at Black Swan and DanCoyote Antonelli's Hyperformalism, as this content is no longer on the grid.
Also, Juria Yoshikawa's Liquid Light is currently located at the "new" Chakryn Forest, the old Chakryn Forest is still there, Sabine Stonebender's Zero Point was returned to her one day by mistake and she has since had to rebuild or recreate it, prim by prim, and the FlowerBall has been relocated to Cetus Island. I'll post slurls to these things shortly.
How time flies!
~*~
Without Megaprims...
Originally published October 20, 2007
this post by Douglas Story
Without megaprims...Light Waves' Man Angel would have disappeared. photo by Finny Yates. slurl
Ah, the power of them three little dots! I refer to the ellipse... Useful in this case because we were all ready to write a scorching propaganda piece with the theme, "Without Megaprims... All This Great Shit Will Go Away!" But now with things looking up on that front (latest word is that the all-powerful Lindens are leaning toward keeping megaprims) I only have to change the part after the ellipse to "...All This Great Shit WOULD Have Gone Away! And What A Damned Shame That Would Have Been!!!" Hmmmm...the first title was snappier though, you have to admit.
Without megaprims...DanCoyote Antonelli's Hyperformalism would have disappeared. slurl
Without megaprims...Rezzable's Greenies' Home would have disappeared. slurl
Without megaprims...the irritatingly prolificJuria Yoshikawa's Liquid Light would have disappeared.
I make something new about every seven months. With Juria, it's about every two minutes. I find this annoying. slurl
Without megaprims...Sabine Stonebender's Zero Point would have disappeared. slurl
You'll find a lot of shots here that include Bettina's booty in them. The author wishes to point out that most of the pictures here were taken by Bettina herself. Any booty issues should be taken up with the management.
Without megaprims...The International Spaceflight Museum would have disappeared. slurl
The thing is...the artists and builders who use megaprims tend to be the most creative, charming, and well-dressed avatars who bring us joy in SL. How lucky we are to have them!
Without megaprims...Douglas Story, Aldomanutio Abruzzo & Desdemona Enfield's FlowerBall would have disappeared. slurl
Without megaprims...Artoo Magneto's anyMOTIONwould have disappeared. slurl
Without megaprims...Gazira Babeli's 'Gaz of the Desert' would not have been possible.
I don't like most of the machinima I've seen. This is 23 minutes of spell-binding, slow-cut magic. See it. slurl
Without megaprims... Cube Inada's Alien Flying Circuswould have disappeared. slurl
Without megaprims...Earth Primbee's Inspire Space Park would have disappeared. slurl
Yes, it's true that I took this shot myself. But you'll notice - there's no booty. My pictures are entirely booty-free.
(photo by Wellington Bahram) slurl Without megaprims we would not have Bettina's forest home - Chakryn - by Andrek Lowell,
I'm sure we've missed many wonderful items (I'm sure you'll point them out, gentle readers) but I think we made our point here. The loss of megaprims would be a cheapening, deadening blow to the fields of imagination and creativity that Second Life opens up to people. We hope that this wonderful creative tool remains open to us, for both our creative impulses and for those who appreciate same.
Yoo hoo! Linden Labs? Paging Mr. Michael Linden... Please give the waiting (second) world a favorable answer, and soon!
In every culture around the globe, the tree is weighted with heavy symbolism. For some, it is the synthesis of heaven, earth and water. For others, it can symbolize life, the feminine principle, the matrix and knowledge.
AM Radio continues to confound us with his radio-driven mysteries, but the centerpiece this time is yet another tree, albeit a dead one. His "Beneath the tree that died" installation was created using traditional prims (teleport directly from here).
This photo of the telegram than can be found on the table, by AM Radio. Please click to see large
Thanks to sculpties and megaprims, trees and most botanicals in Second Life® resemble their Real Life counterparts more while costing just a few prims.
Cel Edelman's 48 prim trees (each) are still very much alive (teleport directly from here)
Strawberry Holiday's trees that use particle systems for leaves have been delighting us for several months now, but none has come closer to the organic beauty of her new 26 prim Oakey Tree, available here.
Says Strawberry, "Trees and other natural objects offer a portal from the place in your brain that requires the concrete, reality of every day life to a virtual reality where anything can happen. Words can fall like leaves and headlines can wave in the wind like grass."
It happened right smack in the middle of the holidays. I myself was traveling with family and thinking about Christmas Day menus and last minute shopping. The point is, most of us had our radars fixed on other topics. Nevertheless, on December 22, 2007, Tateru Nino, an Aussie and long-time reporter on the state of the grid and other important matters as they relate to Second Life®, blogged on Massively that Andrew Linden had attended a Volunteer Island meeting that day to talk about Havok 4, and had ended up disclosing what he calls the "Megaprim Liberation Plan," which he outlined (and Tateru wrote up) as follows:
* Allow parcel owners/managers to move (or maybe just return) objects that overlap their parcels * Provide some UI feedback to the resident when moving their objects, indicating whether they overlap neighboring parcels * Maybe... provide real-time enforcement of parcel permissions. That is, allow parcel owners to set a paranoid bit "I don't want anyone, or these specific people, from putting stuff on my parcel" * Once that is done... then perhaps we will allow you to make prims/objects as large as you want... as long as they fit on your parcel.
That's all well and good (I'm serious and really not trying to be derisive here). I do feel a wee bit like Oliver Twist asking for "more"... but we would appreciate some new features, please Sir:
(It will suffice to watch the first 30 seconds of this trailer to get my point)
That said, I turned to my good friend and one of the most entertaining, clever and talented builders I know, Douglas Story, to share his thoughts (and those of most NPIRLers) on this topic. Thank you, Douglas.
by Douglas Story all photography by Douglas Story except as noted
Exactly 200 days ago today, Michael Linden posted “The Big Prim” problem on the oh-fish-all Second Life® blog in which he invited residents' comments on the idea of doing away with megaprims. “Megaprims” are particular varieties of Second Life’s basic building blocks that are… well… they’re big. Huge. Mega. Gigantic.
They were created by virtue of an exploit in the Second Life code, and although megaprims were never banned outright, they have been frowned upon generally by the Linden Lab gods. Despite that, these king-size building blocks have been widely used all over the grid, and have been especially effective in art builds. Michael Linden’s original blog post stirred up a huge storm of protest and comment, including a piece on this blog that Evil Slavedriver Bettina (that’s her official title, you know) forced me to write. I listed a number of the great builds that would disappear if megaprims were to vanish from our virtual world.
At that time we begged the Powers That Be to preserve megaprims, but now we’ll add another non-negotiable demand… er, I mean, request: please give us megaprims that are resizable and fully editable. You see, currently if one attempts to change the size of a megaprim by even 1 centimeter, the prim will snap back to the normal maximum size of ten meters. Most annoying. Making megaprims resizable will produce a new wave of wonderful creativity, says I.
One of the chief concerns that Linden Lab had with the use of megaprims was the fear that they would not work well with the new Havok 4 physics engine that had yet to be rolled out. But, as AM Radio commented earlier today, it’s a very good sign that Havok 4 is now active over much of the grid and that the Lindens have not banned megaprims outright. So, we repeat our call for Linden Labs to 1) make megaprims officially sanctioned, and 2) make them fully editable.
What follows is a series of pictures of just some of the splendid builds using megaprims that have risen up since the original controversy arose 200 days ago. This list is by no means complete or authoritative, but is rather meant as an indication of the richness that would be lost without these now-essential building elements.
DynaFleur - Teleport directly from here. Photograph by Harper Beresford Because my ego is the size of any artist’s (that is, roughly as big as All Outdoors) we’ll start with one of the pieces I created together with a motley crew of all-stars. If you visit, use the damned dance balls!
Syncretia by Alpha Auer - Teleport directly from here. As you can see, I muffed the landing. Again.
Tunnel of Light by Spiral Walcher - Teleport directly from here. Spiral also makes top hats with stuff in ‘em. Stuff besides your head, that is. I’d show you a picture of one, but the hats don’t involve megaprims – which is amazing considering the fact that a lot of artists wear them.
David Rumsey Maps by Nathan Babcock - Teleport directly from here. This remarkable place is a tour-de-force of megaprim usage. Although I elected to photograph something else for this piece, the four sim complex features scores and scores of sculpted megaprims with real world terrain data mapped into them; all this forms the shape of Yosemite Valley. Remarkable.
Space Colony Necronom by Oni Horan - Teleport directly from here. If you visit here, you really, really want to make sure you’re wearing underwear. Get me drunk enough and I’ll tell you how I know.
Kaleidoscope by Juria Yoshikawa - Teleport directly from here. I wanted to include one of Juria’s pieces here. The poor woman is painfully shy, and is so reluctant to get her name out there that I wanted to help her along a bit. 0.0
The Far Away by AM Radio - Teleport directly from here. And lastly…..this much-loved, much-photographed and much-visited marvel of spare beauty. One of the few places in Second Life I return to again and again.
"trippin'! It's when everything is the most important thing in the world"
Bostonian Tuna Oddfellow (rez: 8/15/2005) is a magician in Real Life, and a really pleasant fellow, too. Known as "Fish the Magish," he has performed at all manner of events for the past 30 years, and is the recipient of the "Best of Boston" award by the Society of American Magicians.
In Second Life, his biggest claim to fame is that he was the winner of last June's $3,750 US prize (then $1 million Lindens) for his participation in NBC’s "America’s Got Talent" in-world contest.
Tuna Oddfellow, working a screenfull of HUDs.
Shava Nerad, his Real Life fiance and Second Life wife - their February 9th wedding was featured in last week's online edition of Businessweek - handles his bookings and public relations in both worlds. She also works as a consultant and does avatar makeovers.
Shava's butterfly outfit was a knockout, especially in the setting.
So, why am I telling you all this? The textures, man. Tuna's textures. A couple of days ago Impossible IRL'er Truthseeker Young TP'ed me to a location in the sky that took forever to rez, but when it did, the only word I could utter was "whoa!"
I was inside a hypercube that was pulsing with the most insanely beautiful - and busy - textures, and in the company of many friendly but extra exotic and strange avatars. It was Tuna who was responsible for this.
A harlequin'ed megaprim, spooling out some wicked effects.
Tuna Oddfellow: I really feel like we're doing something native to Second Life and groundbreaking, just with immersion... and I like playing with the art, and widgets!
Bettina Tizzy: In what way do you think it is ground breaking?
Tuna Oddfellow: The megaprims are loaded into a wearable Hypercube. I layer them, I use transparency and partial transparency and glow to produce layered effects. I basically torture the prims! ;) It's like a fully surrounding kaleidoscope.
Tuna Oddfellow: Shava turned to me one day when I was playing with stuff, and she said, "OMG, we've got something here, this is giving me vertigo." And that was last year sometime, maybe fall. Since then we've been working to make the show more and more *effecting*.
Thanks for that TP, Truthseeker!
Tuna Oddfellow: People come and they forget they are in a chair behind a computer. They forget the boundaries. We destroy the "fourth wall" of the computer screen and pull people into the reality. To me this is what virtual reality is supposed to be like, right? Not a chat client with graphics, but something that makes you *feel* different. People don't just get dizzy, they get happy. They feel stoned. They are exhilarated.
Bettina Tizzy: The textures are gorgeous. Are they very high resolution?
Tuna Oddfellow: I love fractals. And I love playing with the GIMP to mashup images. They are generally between 512 and 1024, and then seamlessly tiled.
Bettina Tizzy: So you are wearing this hypercube?
Tuna Oddfellow: When I'm on my own land, yes, like last night, I leave the cube on the floor, as it were. But when people hire me to do a show at a sim, I can either set it up there, or it's all set up to be wearable. Like a one-man band! My screen is completely covered by HUDs.
The funky music was streamed from a radio station in Louisiana.
Tuna does a weekly party on Monday nights from 7pm to 9pm SLT on his own land (teleport directly from here.) Occasionally he'll do a Saturday event for the European time-zone-challenged crowd. You can check out his upcoming gigs here.
I've spoken before about prolific artists in Second Life, but none that I know of produces a steadier stream of new creations than the Basque sculptor and writer elros Tuominen (aka Antonio Alza).
Every morning when I log in, there is a notecard waiting for me from elros containing a brief and beautiful piece of prose, always written in first person to a woman he unquestionably adores (not me, mind you :). Here is one example:
Good morning, new morning day, such a beautiful and almost perfect day. Time's stopped, time's over, time's far far far, time's a painting, an invention to organize our little walking through life, time belongs to the old days, time's a beast, it keeps on eating human minds, but time's days are falling down, it's turning into a hurt black bird, still looking for meat, fresh and bloody meat.... but time is hurt, it won't last too much..... time, just like a dying star, it will just eat itself, faster and faster and faster, they will be hard days I know, but time will leave us alone, at least, alone; of course, we will walk like lost children through the ruins of time, with no direction, it won't last, we won't remember what it was, and time will be just dust floating on the sky, pieces of dark feathers going up and down, little and dirty feathers, time... who will remember then... Good morning, new morning day, good morning heart, are you feeling alright? the world is going round and round, good morning heart, isn't it sweet, isn't it amazing, life's making sense, life's giving us jewels... no more black birds...
Good morning elros Tuominen
elros also creates a new piece of interactive art or jewelry about every two days. 2D photography does not do justice to 3D interactive art, but I hope the following snaps will entice you enough to go and have a peek at his work. Two good places are Tayzia Abattoir's Crescent Moon Museum (teleport directly from here) and Morris Vig's Oyster Bay Gallery (teleport directly from here). You can actually purchase his work at elros' store, the Tubular Gallery (teleport directly from here), or online.
"Multiple planar perspectives" switches from blue to pink to aqua to purple.
Just before the holidays, elros generously offered two of his gorgeous kinetic sculptures to NPIRLers as gifts. I asked him if he wanted to issue a notecard as well, and he replied, "yes, but first I need some Floyd." After further inquiries, I came to understand that he was going to listen to some Pink Floyd for inspiration. I wish music had such a powerful effect on me!
This swirly thing is called "Dancers," and spins very gently on its axis.
Yesterday, elros sent me an unannounced landmark. I don't usually receive landmarks from him, so I immediately popped in for a look (see below).
His newest, very large piece is called "inside road to ovetum" and is made up of megaprims. It is rezzed in the sky. There's another large piece just above it. Simply fly directly up.
Most of elros' sculptures are low prim, and every single one of them is in constant, fluid motion. One can only imagine what elros' reaction was when he first realized that he could add movement scripts to his art work.
This piece is quite large and a good example of a running theme that elros has been exploring that I am simply wild about. Stop by his shop (teleport directly from here) to see his "teardrops in the rain" in-world. I can almost guarantee that you will be wowed.
Several of his sculptures gracefully "fade in/fade out," such as this fan-like piece called "Playing Harp."
Finally, I discovered this Machinima interview of elros by Magellan Egoyan, which makes it much easier for those who are not in-world to grasp what we are talking about when we refer to elros' interactive art.
A few weeks ago, artist and creator Gaynor Gritzi caught an article in The Times of London about Antony Garrett Lisi, a 39 year old surfer and physicist who has linked the Theory of Everything, or ToE, to a complex 248-dimensional shape known as E8.
Update: Gaynor had rezzed an E8 in Second Life, but it is no longer there. You might contact Gaynor directly for an opportunity to view this.
Join us in our quest to discover the best of Virtual Worlds
Experience - first-hand - the creations, ideas and innovations that are pushing the boundaries of what is real. No, we're not in Kansas anymore! Virtual worlds are where all the disciplines of art and technology combine to make for the most compelling and exciting adventure imaginable.
Blogger Bettina Tizzy
NPIRL founder - Madly, wildly embracing the impossible made possible in Virtual Worlds.
Blogger Alpha Auer
"I need a new clockwork brain!... Indeed, maybe two?"
Show me, I'll show you...
A central goal for us is to collect and distill what's really happening out there and pare down your options to the essence of what's cool, trendsetting and even groundbreaking, always within the context of Not Possible IRL. This is not intended as a calendar of events and our selections are, by necessity, subjective and opinionated. To learn more about the criteria for what is NPIRL, click here. If you'd like to share a landmark, notecard or hot tip of any nature with us, kindly share it with us in-world. We try to always credit the finder, too.
A great place to rez your art and have it critiqued by art critics.
A Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations Commonly Used in this Blog
Cam - The act of zooming and panning one's viewer (camera)
FLART - Flat art in a 3D world (more often than not, imported Real Life paintings and still photography)
HUD (Heads-Up Display) - A visual display of preset options as part of the user interface (UI)
In-world - Being inside or "online" in a virtual world
IRL - In real life
Landmark (LM) - An "address" and shortcut that enables a Second Life® resident to teleport to another place
Linden - An employee of Linden Lab™, the company that owns Second Life®
Linden Lab (LL) - The company that owns Second Life®
Linden or $L - Currency in Second Life®
Mega prim - A very large and useful prim that is not endorsed by Linden Lab, and not scaleable
NPIRL - Not possible in real life
NPISL - Not possible in Second Life®
PIRL - Possible in real life
Prim or Primitive - A 3D object that is manipulated and used as a basic building and creation material
Rez - The action of creation in a virtual world; also the birthdate of an avatar/account
Sim - A simulator and virtual region hosted by a single server CPU
SLT (Second Life® Time) - Local time within Second Life®, which also happens to be Pacific Standard Time because Linden Lab is located in San Francisco, CA
TP or Teleport - Moving from one location to another in a virtual world
Windlight - Sky, water and atmospheric lighting effects in Second Life®
