Exporting larger build woes

i am building a large sculpt structure spanning a footprint of 20x20 if not bigger and spend some time today trying to figure out why some prims were not being positioned correctly and thought to share the outcome of the day in hopes that the next who is scratching their head is going to save some time.

The build consits of larger sculpt parts like 10x3x4 boundingbox and smaller ones more in the range of 0.2x0.2x0.2

The Problem

Now what happened was that the larger prims were positioned just fine and some of those were 10 meters or more away from the root prim. When it came time to rez up the small sculpts the script would not fail but simply rez them at the root prim position.

Explanation

After some manual testing with the llSetLinkPrimitiveParams function i was able to reproduce the problem. Unfortunately llSetLinkPrimitiveParams does not give output when it fails it just does so silently. I was able to move default sized prims about 2.5 meters away but that was about it. After some research into the topic of maximum link distance i discovered that this is not a bug, however the way Linden does calculate the maximum link distance has changed dramatically from what i came to know years ago.

To briefly explain, the link distance that is allowable between two prims is not static like it used to be but very much dynamic depending heavily on the size bounding boxes of the two prims. For example two small prims have a link distance of a few meters, were as larger prims can have a link distance of up to 54 meters. The nasty details are here wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linkability_Rules

Solution

What worked for me was simply making the Primstar rez prim 10x10x10. All sculpts rezed rotated and positioned properly. By making the initial root prim, which is the primstar box, larger, it compensates for the difference with rezing large sculpts and small sculpts.

Now one would only run into this problem with a mix of sculpts that largly differ in size. Hope this is going to help the next who wonders what is going on

rup