Mainland Prim to Mesh Upgrade Project & Linden Labs Museum of Prims.
tracked
marxman1313 Resident
This is something I've been wanting to pitch for a long time but never really had the nerve to but here it goes.
SL has been around for a long time and is really old as far as the Internet is concerned. Because of this and due to it's nature as an ever growing/evolving creative sandbox has a lot of history as well as historical sites to it. One could even go so far as to say that there's a field of archeology to exploring it. But this creates a dilemma.
We're going on 20 plus years of evolution in 3d modeling, engine development, etc. And there are a lot of places with structures made of prims with many of them being very complicated and sophisticated builds and that's a LOT of land impact, plus rendering for anyone who wants to experience them or is just passing by. But on the other side of that same coin, it would be an absolute atrocity to just demolish them.
My proposed solution is that if possible, LDPW Moles take/are given a copy of these prim linksets (soft linked or hard) and using 3d modeling software clean the prims up before joining them to create a smaller number of mesh objects which are then used to create a new and near exact replica of the original that under most cases is lower land impact and easier to render. This can be done in Blender fairly easily although it is a tedious process and not as quick or efficient as creating an object from scratch inside said 3d modeling software, but it will retain effectively the same geometry with less vertices if not faces.
These linksets of mesh objects can then be used to replace the originals.This however would displace the originals, which is where the second step comes in: The Linden Labs Museum of Prims (Placeholder name).
This would be a series of sims if not a dedicated continent, be they full regions or homesteads that may or may not be a direct part of the mainland where the original prim creations would be moved to and displayed for their preservation and for their historical value to be retained.
Possible issues: Consent of the original creator of the objects or current owner of the land they reside on will likely be required. Ontop of this many of these people have likely left SL or are deceased.
Not every prim is going to be suitable for conversion, this is especially the case for "tortured" spheres, torus and similar. Likewise prims that have been tapered, path cut, hollowed, sheered etc will require some faces to be replace. And by nature of merging the prims into singular mesh objects the UVs will likely need to be redone. Physics models for these new mesh objects or linksets may also be problematic.
I know that this is not a small request and will raise some debates but I believe that it is something that should at the very least be taken into consideration if not possibly implemented in the future in some way shape or form for the continued optimization of Second Life for it's residences to further enjoy without completely disregarding the preservation of it's history.
Log In
Oatmeal Linden
Merged in a post:
Proposal: Modernizing Mainland Infrastructure with Mesh Roads & Cloud Optimization
rottweiler Lednev
Proposal: Modernizing Mainland Infrastructure with Mesh Roads & Cloud Optimization
Our current Mainland road system relies heavily on ancient, prim-based geometry. A typical legacy prim road segment eats up anywhere from 15 to 24 Land Impact (LI) (averaging about 19.5 LI).
If Linden Lab replaces these obsolete prim roads with highly optimized, modular 1-prim mesh roads, the grid-wide resource reclamation is staggering.
The Infrastructure Math
There are over 9,300 Linden-owned regions on the grid, with thousands dedicated to Mainland infrastructure and roadways. If we conservatively estimate an average of 15 road segments per roadside region:
Current Prim Road Total: ~2,340,000 LI
Optimized Mesh Road Total: ~120,000 LI
Total Grid Capacity Saved: 2,220,000 Land Impact points.
Why Doing Nothing Costs More Than Fixing It
- The Silent AWS Cloud Leak (The Physics Overhead)
In an AWS cloud hosting environment, Linden Lab pays directly for compute cycles, memory tracking, and physical server overhead. Legacy prim roads use complex, outdated bounding physics boxes that the simulation physics engine must calculate constantly. Multiplying this unoptimized physics lag across the entire Mainland translates into a silent, ongoing premium on the Lab's monthly AWS hosting bill.
- The Cost of Fixing It (Hiring One Mole/Contractor)
Updating this does not require a massive team. Linden Lab can hire a single contract developer or assign one LDPW (Linden Department of Public Works) mole for a short-term, 3-month project.
The Task: Create a modern, low-impact 1-prim mesh road system, write a background deployment script to pull coordinates, and swap out the old geometry grid-wide.
The Investment: A minor, one-time project expense.
- The Direct Financial Payoff
Immediate Server Cost Reductions: Slashing the grid infrastructure load by 94.9% slashes simulator memory bloat and lowers AWS compute costs instantly. The project pays for itself in infrastructure savings.
Unlocking New Revenue: By freeing up over 2.2 million prims previously wasted on legacy asphalt, the Lab can redistribute that capacity. Adding a minor "Infrastructure Prim Bonus" to paying Premium or Premium Plus tiers would give basic accounts a massive, tangible reason to upgrade—driving new Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR).
Leaving the old prim infrastructure in place is a permanent drain on server resources and cloud budgets. Spending a small amount upfront to deploy highly optimized mesh roads fixes physics lag, lowers hosting costs, and cleans up the grid for everyone.
Photo Viewer
View photos in a modal
AlettaMondragon Resident
Wow that's nice, while scrolling down I managed to delete my earlier comment and the whole thread of comments with it. This platform makes so much sense. Now I'll have to write the same thing again. At least without the questions this time.
All in all this wouldn't be a bad idea for builds that would be gone forever otherwise. However, turning ancient prim builds into mesh is not necessarily better at all. If it is not optimized properly, it won't save LI and won't be "easier to render" either. It also wouldn't be much of a museum and preservation if it had mesh replicas on display and not the original builds.
There are a lot of ancient builds by the LDPW that are not going anywhere from their current locations, so those shouldn't be tucked away in museums anyway.
As for residents' builds, if they contribute their creations to a museum, it makes sense to preserve them, but if the creator didn't want it, it is probably best if they are gone when it comes to that.
The museum is a good idea, even though there are several museums in SL doing the same thing anyway, but turning prim builds into mesh is not a good idea, and moving well-placed old landmarks to a museum instead of their original locations would be a bad idea too.
marxman1313 Resident
AlettaMondragon Resident The idea is to put the original prim builds in the museum, not the prim converted to mesh builds. The prim converted to mesh builds, which under most cases should be better optimized if they follow a certain procedure will go in the place of their original mainland locations.
In effect the builds would still be in the exact same location and look exactly or almost exactly as they do now, but if done right should be easier on people's computers and the sims they are on. The whole idea is to keep the actual historical builds preserved in a way that they aren't causing as much of a performance issue on the mainland itself while putting a better optimized mesh replica in their original locations so that people can still admire them in a state that brings them closer to the modern mesh era of Second Life /and/ their original prim format.
Nothing will be demolished, as few toes will be stepped on as possible and everything will be preserved and brought up to speed as much as possible, or if the build in question is not suitable, or the people in question do not consent the build will be left alone. I am well aware that this is all speaking in ideal circumstances, and what Linden Labs and the Linden Department of Public Works does is beyond my control, but I did my level best to cover as many bases as possible so that nobody and nothing was hurt or disrespected or at least as little as humanly possible. If you have ideas that might help make mine better, by all means feel free to share.
AlettaMondragon Resident
marxman1313 Resident (I'm still rolling my eyes that I deleted our whole thread by accident, we had covered everything already.) Preferring mesh over prim is finicky, actually I just got a new point, sculpted landscaping objects could be really replaced with mesh, that would be more efficient for rendering as well as visually pleasing. Still, if you look at everything in Bellisseria closely, you will notice the optimization issue I've explained originally. I don't want to put all that detail here again, but the Chippewa Town Hall in Chippewa Junction is one of the best examples. Too high LI, bad LOD, bad collision physics shapes so the whole thing is supported by an invisible physics frame (I think that's mesh too but maybe it's prim), texture work is not great, the overall visual quality could be better. This is because they didn't separate the models into units with convex geometry, instead they uploaded complex, concave mesh objects that skyrockets LI and causes collision physics issues. With such examples of the Lab's mesh creations I wouldn't want to replace any old prim structures with their mesh replicas, they are clearly not good at optimizing large, complex mesh builds.
SarahKB7 Koskinen
There are already two large museums in Ritch region, one for general SL history, the other for notable SL objects.
I am also strongly against replacing original prim builds with meshed copies. The original prim builds should always be retained in situe to give the build and it's surroundings the same shared context and history.
Jim Crisp
"Possible issues: Consent of the original creator of the objects or current owner of the land they reside on will likely be required. Ontop of this many of these people have likely left SL or are deceased."
Non-issues. According to the TOS, LL receives an unlimited, non-exclusive license to use all uploaded content.
marxman1313 Resident
Jim Crisp Consent would still be preferable. I'm not fond of the idea of taking 20 year old prim homes away from residents that have built them and used them for 20 years. That's just not right and would make the project extremely unpopular. I would absolutely hate it myself if they did that to people.
Jennifer Boyle
marxman1313 Resident I agree that consent is preferable where possible, but, as you pointed out, it may not be feasible in many cases.
Wicked Nightfall
There are large parts of the mainland that have been long forgotten and neglected by Linden Labs - their usual MO. We have a museum that dates back to 2010 and has never been updated - just wastes space. Parcels that were once used for employee homes sitting empty and unused. Huge Island parcels of empty land sitting unused with terrible prim trees.
Linden Labs should put those parcels up for auction so they can be used by the community rather than sitting abandoned and outdated.
Not everyone wants to pay LL to live in cookie cutter generic homes that look identical to your neighbors. Many of us appreciate creativity and individuality.
marxman1313 Resident
Wicked Nightfall The idea is to preserve that creativity from a time gone by while optimizing the mainland to be easier on users who wish to experience it without removing the option to experience the original creations themselves or lose the knowledge that these things were made prim by prim in world.
Oatmeal Linden
marked this post as
tracked
Hello marxman1313! Thank you for the suggestion. The Content Creation team is currently engaged with other projects at the moment, but perhaps at some future point older Linden-owned builds may be updated and or preserved. We are already doing so with some of the legacy Linden Homes content and public areas, such as Cape Ekim.
Other public areas such as the original infohub at Ahern are maintained and repaired as needed, but are not likely to be altered significantly, as they do hold historical weight for our virtual world.
Thanks again for the suggestion!
marxman1313 Resident
Oatmeal Linden Thanks! And glad ya'll are already doing some things to preserve stuff. Hopefully things lighten up for ya'll soon.
AlettaMondragon Resident
Oatmeal Linden Will Shareta Osumai be reopened somewhere as well? Currently the original two regions and all of their copies are gone along with all the other original LH infohubs. Cape Ekim and some of the other regions involved in the quest are still running indeed. For now.
Oatmeal Linden
AlettaMondragon Resident and others: The preservation of the legacy Linden Home features has been discussed during the Land & Support User Group during the last couple of sessions. We are planning something specific for these builds, to be released in the future. Other Linden owned builds could be certainly be considered as well!
rottweiler Lednev
Oatmeal Linden, I never expected users' replies over old roads like the mainland roads to be so sentimental. Does this mean we will take all the old roads that look like a Windows 95 game and put 2,340,000 LI worth of roads into a museum or heritage site? Why can't we just make roads that look the same but use fewer prims? Are the prims on them legacy too?
I have learned a lot about your jobs at Second Life. I've learned that change is extremely difficult, and the hardest part is public relations. It's almost like you're the president at this point.
I think the only solution is creating some land in-game for users to purchase that has lower tier rates, and we call this place "Idea Island." It would be a place where we take all bad and good ideas and apply them constantly to see what happens. If things are actually better for the residents of Idea Island—who know they are part of a beta project to test ideas and community on that island—then who knows what could happen. Idea island comes with mountains and nature tho no palm trees make it look more like Jasper National park with residents haha and big skyscrapers and some humble cabin forest community. Get funky with it mhahahah. Dont forget to cap resell prices on Idea island or itl be super expensive special island owned by realtors island.