Monday 10 November 2008

Diary: 10th November 2008

Megaprim Mayhem
This weekend I had a play with megaprims. I built a 250m x 250m platform at 1000m, and placed a 100m dome on it, with a 150m spiral tube around the dome. I stood back to admire my work (not near the edge of the region) when suddenly, blackness, and I then appeared at 2950m in a neighbouring region!

Over the next hour this happened several times, with me appearing suddenly at various heights in various neighbouring regions. Was this because of the megaprims? Or because of the height at which I was working (1000m)? A strange one indeed. Let me know your experiences of working with megaprims.

Changing a Region Name
I agreed for a friend to take over one of my void regions at the weekend. Her art galleries were to be installed at 1000m, so they would not affect the views or the Ancient World theme on the ground.

Before I renamed the Red Sea 4 region to Gala (the name she wanted for her region), I paused to think of the consequences. I had assumed that changing a region's name would be as simple as renaming the region in the Regions folder, then opening it and changing the sim name inside too.

However, would changing a region's name have any negative impact on prims already on that region? After all, they must be referenced to a location in the database.

The answer is that it was simple. Objects ARE referenced in terms of location within the database, but not by the region name, or the region coordinates, but by the region's UUID. Providing this stays unchanged then you are free to rename a region, or even move its coordinates. I would still backup any objects using save-oar anyway, as it is always a good idea to be safe rather than sorry when making any changes.

Hmmm, I think we need another tutorial, on database and object backups. Watch this space..

Rock