[impdev] prim types

[Jacek Antonelli]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 5:01 AM, Adric R <hakushakukun at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been toying with the new prim type selections in the latest Emerald
> viewer, and realized that I just don't know enough about building to be a
> good judge of how useful any of this is, let alone the best way to present
> it to users (the names now are pretty bad).

Some of the prim types could be useful, but something's broken with
how they're implemented in Imprudence. Most of them disappear
completely if you tweak the parameters, and many of the others render
very differently than they do in Emerald (e.g. looking like a sphere
instead of a spring).

Here's what I'd want to see happen before I would feel comfortable
including them in Imprudence:

1. Fix the issues I mentioned above. They work okay in Emerald, so
there may be something that got lost or mangled in the transfer to
Imp.
2. Improve the names. The "33" ones could be "Spring" or "Spiral". I'm
not sure about the others, because I don't understand what they're
supposed to be.
3. Get rid of the ones that just duplicate shapes that are already
possible with the current types.
4. Make sure that they render correctly on other viewers, and don't
cause any crashes or other ill effects. We also need to consider how
they work with the object backup feature.

- Jacek