Sep
2008
The final version of Prim Composer 1.0 has just been released!
Preferences Dialog
The major new feature in 1.0f is a preferences dialog that allows you to control many aspects of Prim Composer including the min/max size of prims and the default size of baked textures. There’s a lot to love there and I’ll be describing the new dialog in detail in a future post.
Bugfix: Baked Texture Seams
The texture seam issue that occured when baking across multiple prims has also been fixed. For a full description of the problem, see my previous post.
Bugfix: Exporting instanced prims
There was also a problem in previous versions regarding instanced copies of prims. When they were exported, their size information was not imported into SL correctly. That has also been fixed in 1.0f.
OpenSim and SQLite
The last big change has to do with OpenSim and the SQLite database. SQLite makes it easy to get started with OpenSim without a lot of configuration. And in many cases, it performs quite well. However, it is much slower than MySQL when linking a large group of prims (> 50).
In preparation for the 1.0f release, I performed import tests with linksets containing between 2 and 100 prims and with scenes containing between 2 and 400 prims. To get large linksets to work with SQLite, I had to add a lot of pauses in the importer. With a linkset of 100 prims, it was downright painful.
So, in 1.0f, a new option has been added to maxport “–delay”. If you are using SQLite as your OpenSim database and you have linksets in your import, you will need to start using this new option. Type your maxport command as before and put something like “–delay 10″ at the end. Note: there are two dashes before “delay”. A delay of 10 seems to work well for a SQLite database but you can adjust the value up or down to fit your needs. Delay defaults to 1 and increasing its value causes the import to slow down.
If you don’t add the delay, then OpenSim+SQLite will probably work fine with maxport as long as you don’t have many or large linksets. If you start having problems, add or increase the delay.
The delay is not needed for importing to SL or to OpenSim when OpenSim is using MySQL as its database.
Conclusion
Well, those are the major points regarding the 1.0 Final release of Prim Composer. Be sure to check out the release notes on the Prim Composer Download Page for full details about what has been changed.
In the next couple of days, I’ll be posting additional information, including a full description of the new preferences dialog.
Thanks for your fantastic job, Shack. I was beginning to write a tutorial in Spanish on the handling of the Prim Composer, now I’m going to try the new v 1.0 before continuing.
Again, thank you very much for your work.
Dear friend, first of all my congrast for that amazing job, i was trying Prim Composer from some previous version and i was user of SLpims before. i just to let you know about my experience building with your tool, and i note that Max get me an error constantly when i use array tool with your prims, simple BOX, 10,1,0.3 to do a rotational stairs, i use Array beacuse is a easy and powefull tool to calculate locations for my prims, but i got error when i try move the spinners. and the previe even in a Box mode is so Slow. I try again with SLprim plugin for max, and i dotn have any problems, my work arround to solve that es install SlPrims and work with array tool on that prims, them align one of Prim Composer Prim with the firs SLPrim of the array and copy the values, if i dotn move the spiners with prim Composer prim i get the array perfectly and dont get any error but is i play with the values, before or after i get an error.
Thanks for reporting the problem. I’ve created a thread to discuss it. I’ll reply there.