Megaprims on the loose again

At one of Linden Lab's recent Second Life server updates, it appears that they have disabled (or expanded) the constraints on prim sizes. As a part of the Havok-4 project, there was considerable discussion about bringing large prims back into the picture again, so we think this is an intentional change, rather than an accidental one.

Whether or not Second Life users were supposed to find out about this or not at this stage, they certainly have. Simple packet-injection gimmicks have spawned whole new packages of the so-called megaprims in the last 36 hours, many of which are freely available. Indeed, we've been sent lots of them.

At present the Second Life viewer itself forces a maximum ten-metres-on-any-axis constraint, as is traditional, and does not honor increases of the maximum in the floater_tools.xml file that controls a chunk of the building tools. It appears that the ten metre constraint is still wired into the viewer source-code.

That shouldn't be difficult to change, however. Though we lack experimental verification (we're hoping to get some within the next day or so), it is suggested that if the viewer constraints were removed with a simple source-code alteration, arbitrary prim sizes would become readily available.

Update:

• There still seem to be some server-side checks in place (thanks Jacek Antonelli for digging deeper)

• Zwagoth Klaar's megaprim pack. (thanks Jamma Newt)

• We have asked Linden Lab if they are (a) still exercising account sanctions against users who rez megaprims on mainland parcels, and (b) if this change to prim creation constraints is intentional or unintentional.