If you have ever shopped around for a vehicle in Second Life, you may have noticed vehicles aren’t particularly detailed. They are generally simple shapes that rely on textures to add detail.
Why is that, you may ask? All Second Life objects are composed of linked primitives, or “prims” as they’re known to builders. Primitives are the basic building block of the virtual world. Builders will take cubes, spheres, cones, cylinders, and other prim types, and size, cut, hollow, twist, and generally torture them into various shapes before linking them to form the object they’re building. Everything you see in SL is made of them.
To make a vehicle move, SL needs to make the object become “physical” — it will have mass and velocity, and will be affected by gravity and collisions. Due to a limitation in the SL physics engine, no object that’s composed of more than 31 prims can use physics.
As if that wasn’t restrictive enough for vehicle makers, that limit includes any avatars that happen to be seated on the object, where each avatar counts as one prim. A vehicle with two seats, for example, can be made of no more than 29 prims, or it will exceed the prim limit. An eight-seat passenger plane can be made of no more than 23 prims. As a result, the prim limit is the bane of vehicle designers: it’s extremely difficult to achieve an attractive vehicle and stay under the prim limit.
Well, I say to heck with the prim limit. That’s right, I said to heck with it! And I mean it. I apologize if that offends some of my readers.
In development now is my replica of the Airco DH.2 — a British World War I warplane. The model itself is over 240 prims. And in total defiance of the prim limit, this baby flies.
That’s right… it flies. I have done an end-run around the prim limit. The DH.2 not only flies, but flies better than any plane in my inventory and is packed with features. It comes with a control panel HUD attachment with altimeter, speed indicator, and artificial horizon. The plane carries a Lewis gun that can be used in air-to-air combat with any other Cubey Terra aircraft. In flight, it’s responsive and agile, with enough realism in the flight model to perform stunts like rolls, loops, stalls, and more. Easy enough for a novice to fly, yet engaging even for a pro pilot.
In only a few days, you’ll find the Airco DH.2 with my collection of airplanes beside the runway at Abbotts Aerodrome, and you can expect more high-prim planes to emerge from my lab over the coming months.
