Object Clones

This post appeared originally on the old blog. The original comments attached to the post are listed at the bottom. -J 09/03/06

Suppose for a moment that you are a builder of detailed houses within Second Life. In a typical house, you might have ten window fixtures, eight decorative columns, four doors, and two statues in the garden. Each of these items is identical to the others of its type, and is constructed of, perhaps, ten prims each, with the exception of the statues which are 100 prims each.

You've just spent 420 prims of your parcel budget to make twenty-four objects, and we haven't even added furniture! That's 420 prims which must be saved to the sim, and 420 prims which must be sent to every Second Life client which wants to view your magnificent houses.

What a waste, when each item is exactly the same as the others of its type, with only a different position, rotation, and possibly scale!

With object clones, which I am herein proposing, you could build the exact same house, but the above-mentioned 420-prim figure would be reduced to a mere 130 prims.

At this point, some of you will think I have gone insane, but the clever among you will have deduced how this could be possible and are now bubbling over with glee at the prospect. For the benefit of those who don't yet see it, I will explain.

An "object clone" would be a special object which has no prims of its own; instead, it inherits prims from the original object. This means that instead of storing the details of ten window fixtures, you store the details of one window fixture, and then create nine clones, saying, "These nine objects are constructed exactly like the first one."

From a technical perspective, object clones are a simple form of lossless data compression. Rather than storing n identical sets of data, we store one set and n-1 additional references to that set. The compression rate becomes more dramatic as the number of duplicates increases. (I think object clones would constitute a type of dictionary coding, but I may be wrong on that.)

Because a clone only has to store a reference (the UUID of the original) and a transformation matrix (position, rotation, and scale), it takes considerably less data storage space than even a single prim (which must also store such things as texture information and prim parameters).

But, even if Linden Lab counted each reference as equivalent to one prim for the purposes of parcel limits, we could still reduce our example of 420 prims to 130 prims + 20 clones = 150 'prims'.

Clearly, this feature would be of incredible importance to builders of all types! Frankly, it is such a simple concept with such extraordinarily far-reaching benefit that I find it hard to believe that Linden Lab hasn't already thought to implement it.

I have in mind several extensions to this concept which would further revolutionize the way we build in Second Life, but this post is already lengthy, so I will save them for another day.

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Comments from the original post:

Alexander Lapointe said...

Mindgasmic!

Wow, what a wonderful idea! I'm not a regular builder at the moment, but even with the making of Trav Doll/Trav Hat this would have been useful and would have cut down the prims to 8 from 11, which isn't that big of a difference, but still....

Plus, it would be nice for owners of small parcels with low prim limits, *cough* *cough*, by allowing for the little extras that make home-owning wonderful. Or the possiblity of having a house and a skybox that one could use.

8/24/2006 8:48 PM

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