prim usage : a newb view

i've been in game for about two weeks. i've bought four plots of land and hardly built anything before the prims hit 100%. flying around i've seen that sims are either wholly owned by a few people so the prim counts are low; or they're packed with hundreds of the gaudiest, primiest things i've ever seen.

i'm not gonna argue people's right to build or even bank. i AM wondering if there's a conservative group in linden that makes a point of building and scripting as efficiently as possible. if so, do y'all "own" a sim and could i join your ranks and have some space to set up shop.

i want to practice landscaping, and build some seasonal plants and gardening features. then i will construct a park that can be used for landscaping workshops and whatever other gatherings the group wishes to host. the park will be decorative and open to the general public.

i don't need a house and seven-thousand pieces of furniture. i have that in real life. i want to do something in linden that i don't have time to do out here. i promise to be efficient. i know how. i grew up programming on IBM mainframes with very limited memory and disk resources. we even had to queue print jobs overnight and...well enough said.

Queue print jobs... Ug, please don't remind me of those dark ages!! Yeah, it's pretty tough to find a place that has land that isn't jam packed with crap builds. I almost bought a plot in one of the planned subdivision areas that the Lindens set up, but only a quarter of the Sim was plotted out like that and the rest was private owned... And the prim usage was at 100%. The subdivision area was almost totally empty.

It seems to me that the Lindens need to look around the sims and clean up the planned areas and such. There are large areas where they have neat ideas set aside that are not utilized due to over-building of nearby private lands. I'd love to see a subdivision like setup that consumes the entire sim so this can't happen.

Phoenix - check out Boardman and Brown.

yes check out the prim usage on boardman and brown. i had a boardman plot last week. the same thing happened there.

restrictions on building heights and land editing dont' keep people from stocking their homes and shops with overly primmed items. i know they pay the taxes and that's okay. i'm just looking for a group that's large enough to occupy a sim and that (how can i say this nicely) sincerely does everything they can to keep the prim ratio down.

from what i've seen, the lindens have provided plenty of prims per sim. they're just being used carelessly in some places and horded in others. live and let live. but surely there are enough of us to band together and pounce on a sim or two and manage the prims well between us.

i find it hard to believe that no such groups exist now. but i could be wrong.

I think a group called the "efficient use of prims" might work nicely.

Most folks try to be as frugal as possible, but sometimes, it's just not possible. I know I try.

Buying up an entire sim is a very expensive undertaking. Most attempts at themed sims eventually collapsed due to the taxes.

Hmm. Hey Lindens... If I donate a fully functional and ready to go Linux box to the Labs, can you hook it up and let me controll the Sim?

Or have you guys considered farming out Sims to the players? With your server architecture like it is, it shouldn't be to hard, I know I've got 2 boxes sitting here collecting dust that are about equal to your server boxes...

Now THAT would be a weird idea huh? What would I do with my very own Sim?? I'd probably build a game in it. Like a Darklife type thing but encompassing the entire Sim. Heh, damn it, now I've gotten all moon eyed.

'Owning' a sim is a heady idea, but other than the hardware, there is the cost of colocation coverage and the data pipes you'll be connected to... I wonder what those costs are. (Dare I ask.)

Dare! Dare!

:: sorry, I couldnt pass up that oppertunaty to use a blazing saddles line. ::

I never did find out what the co-lo costs were in my old job. (I used to work for a Tier 1 ISP) I would say off hand that it's probably a couple hundred a month for a cabinet, plus network usage fees. For something like SL, that can be quite expensive.

One place I've looked at charges $1500 a month for 750 GB of xferred data.

Yeah I was thinking that the physical costs being at the colo wasn't the breaker, it would be all the data.

*sigh*

Well, I'm thankful for what the Lindens have set up, but I do like to dream all wild-eyed about possibilities. (Like having a 10,000 primitive build budget. Heheh.)

Mmmm... Yeah. I could dig that. Have Linden Labs ever stated what a Sim box's specs are?

At the very least, it would be cool if they gave us a "backyard" client/server where we could experiment tax-free -- a concept like the houses in Uru and Toon Town come to mind. Then they could charge for uploading what we built, like they do now with textures.

I answer to your question, about a sim that takes pains to build efficiently, check out Slate.

Actually, I'd REALLY, really, really, really would like (rilly? heh) a 'sandbox' that I could run on my craptastic laptop during commutes to work that would allow me to do scripting experiments. I understand the Linden motivation of keeping people in-world while creating, but I would just love to get things worked out on the morning train commute, then get online with a polished script to implement. (Or nearly polished, heh.)

Who knows, maybe people seeing me mess around would be interested in the game, and it would be more word-of-mouth for the Secondlife revenue stream.

Pretty please?

I've seen hints that off-line tools are very low on the priority list for the Labs... Though this doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I think a lot of the poorly built and ugly things that are in the world would be aliieviated if folks could tweak around on them offline. No offense to the Lindens, but things aren't exactly always stable with SL. At least if something crashes when using an offline tool, you can isolate the causes.

I think offline tools would promote a whole range of new builds too. Different things. I'm not always sure I wanna build something that I know will take a long time in game just because I hate leaving half complete stuff around. Sure, I can de-rez into inventory... But that is more a kludge than a fix.

I would just like a simple GUI that has a text editor on the left, and a small OpenGL window on the right, maybe a alert or compile status window on the bottom. As long as I could just verify that the scripts would work, I wouldn't need to see anything outside the few objects I would create for scripting, etc..

Ideally you'd like to have the existing SL client connect to the local loopback that is running the stand-alone environment, etc... I don't know, just throwing it out there. Just seems I have more time when I am mobile than I do when I'm sitting at the computer for some reason.

I too would love to see an offline tool so I can test some of my ideas. I've had very little time to sit infront of the only computer I have that is beefy enough to hookup with SL. If there was some sort of offline tool or such, I might feel more at ease paying each month and not really using the service.

S.Weber