Building

This is a feature that's been missing since ever: the ability to backup the content of a whole sim externally.

For example, if you are a builder and building a whole sim from scratch (or with other stuff) and a forced to put the sim down, since you don't have the money anymore to sustain it - or your customer, whatever - taking down the sim means taking down all the labour cost, all the work. If you want to put the work up later, again, you've got to start more or less from scratch.

In this case it would be very nice to have the ability to backup a whole sim and store it somewhere for possible future use. At the moment this isn't possible, to this is a big, missing feature in the portfolio of Second Life.

The official Second Life blog has today an entry about so called megaprims (greater than 10m at one side at least). Megaprims where never intended to be, but they happened some while ago and they are in use in different buildings, you can either get them just so or buy them at stores.

They are rumored to have a negative impact on the physics engine and to cause lags and such, but none the less many builders have adopted them very fast and used them in their buildings.

So there's a discussion about it they should stay or not; at the moment they are only tolerated by Lindenlab, but they don't really like them.

So what's the sensible approach? Are they needed or not? I guess they are needed, because they fit into a gap. I mean, why would you use for example 9 prims (10x10m) to make a floor that's 30x30m wide when you just can use one prim? Because they are needed, they've been used and there's a market around it.

But of course too big megaprims are not right, so they should not be bigger than a whole sim, meaning 256x256x256m. In those parameters they could really enrich the building experience.