Newbie thoughts on filling up Lusk

So I just signed up for a paid SL account. I've been having a lot of fun here so far, and spending more RL time here than I should. Unfortunately, I've hit my first snag, once I decided to build my house. I flew around, found this awesome plot of land on a small island, and set up shop. Things were going well, if slowly, as I experimented with building, until last night.

For any of you who live in Lusk, and have noticed the server object count has hit 100% again... well, I was the straw that broke the camel's back. I really was just unaware of the server prim limit problem when I picked my home base. Now I've got a house missing some external walls, and I'm not sure what my course of action should be.

I don't know how to get an exact count, but I flew around my house and did a quick audit, and my house is using just under 65 prims. This is out of proportion of my lot size, but I don't think 65 is unreasonable, either. (Is it?)

I made two chess pieces out of prims earlier, to play around with creation, so I still have a dozen or so prims I can salvage into house pieces. Also, if I abandon the idea of a two story house (almost certainly a good idea in such a resource-starved sim) I can get 11 prims from my staircase (staircases are such hogs!). With those, I can finish up a more modest version of my home.

This is a little disappointing, though. I'm not sure what to do. I liked my location when I first found it, but had I picked a more remote sim, this wouldn't have been a problem, at least for a while. I'm just building a house, which I wasn't going to keep people out of, but perhaps it gives less value to the world than, say, a store or a public meeting place of some sort.

Moving would be a hassle, and will mean I have wasted some L$. Also, it's just a stopgap solution. If I move somewhere else, and build more elaborate things with hundreds of prims, aren't I just part of tomorrow's problem? But if I stay where I am, I have to scale back my plans, and what's worse, I can't use my house as a home base for building new things. I came here to build and script. If I can't do those things in my SL home, what's the point of having it?

I guess my concern is that I don't know if I'm using my fair share. I'm not sure what my fair share is. I'm pretty sure I don't like the current free-for-all system, and I feel a bad about "hoarding" prims... that is, keeping objects I created alive that I know will eventually go away, because I need the prims for something else. (I will delete my excess prims when I'm done building, if I have any left.)

Thoughts?

Try this method. A sim contains 65,536 square meters (256x256m), so find out how many square meters of land you own (right click your land and choose "About Land" then divide 65,536 by the amount of land you own. Take that number and multiply 10,000 (the object limit) by it. That's how many prims you're allowed based on the percentage of the sim you own.

Example:

I own a 64x64m plot (4,096 square meters).

4,096 / 65,536 = 0.0625

I own 0.0625% of the sim.

0.0625 x 10,000 = 625

My fair share is 625 prims.

This is the method used currently in Olive and it may be the wave of the future.

For your current situation: I can't think of a way you would waste money by moving. When you release your land you'll get back the full purchase price and you would pay the same tax if you spent half the week in Lusk and the other half in another sim owning a similar plot. When you delete or pick up your house you will get back the $10 per prim you spent to rez the objects. Don't worry about losing money.

That's good! You should feel bad about it. Hopefully the Olive method will do away with the need for hoarding and guarantee no one will move in and fill up the sim before you can finish your modest house.

On the large map there's a pulldown menu at the top where you can view all land that is currently for sale. A rule of thumb is that sims with lots of land for sale will probably have more headroom before they hit their object limit. There's lots of land available still. Good luck out there.

If you're only using about 65 prims you're not even using 1% of the resources in Lusk. I do understand where you're coming from though, I have a build there.. but didn't realize it had gotten up to 100% again. There are a couple builds in Lusk that are using somewhere around 30-40% of the prims last I checked.

It's an interesting situation there, as half of the sim is Lusk Court (or Estates?) which is zoned housing with less restriction than Boardman type, and the other half is open use. Both types seem to have different expectations on prim usage, it seems, so it creates an interesting dynamic, with probably more people living there than a completely open sim, but with the same build freedom expected.

what i'd really like to know is *why* the Lindens can't up the prim limit per sim. is it a limitation on the server? too much disk space? what is it? *and* how can it be fixed? 10,000 prims per sim seems to be pretty low, and I would love to see it raised!

One interesting side effect of the Olive method is that, were it in effect in Lusk, I would end up buying all the underwater land around me to increase my object count, with no intention of actually building anything there.

This is certainly not the worst outcome in the world, but I think it's an interesting point. Personally, I'd like to see a system where you buy the right to a certain prim count in the same way you buy the rights to land. The sim could even dole them out using the Olive method (it would only sell you 2.44 prims per square of land you own -- yikes, that doesn't sound like much), but people could sell their prim count excess to other people. Maybe free-market forces could handle the problem.

Or maybe this suggestion just makes things too complicated.

On another note, I didn't realize releasing land refunds money. Now I'm much more likely to move.

veloso, thats what is so great. you can buy up some land, and, if you dont like the 'hood.. you just release it and get all of your money back (save for the amount you paid in land tax).

if you're looking for a low-prim simple home, i placed an 'alpine cabin' in a box at the Bazaar in Stillman. only 20 prims. nice and clean and vaulted ceilings (ohhhh, ahhhh).

its free too, like everything else in the bazaar

I think this would end up in the same scenario you mentioned where you buy land for prims with no intention of using the land. The difference in this case would be empty land no one buys because all the prims are already "rented". Maybe that's not a bad thing.

For me 10,000 prims per server sounds like a lot. I'm not pointing fingers at anyone but I think in general people tend to build very inefficiently.

As an exercise for the reader: How big a cube could you make from 10,000 default 0.5x0.5x0.5 meter wooden blocks? What would be the weekly tax, takin into consideration the graduated height of the layers?

I think it would be 50 meters to a side and just cost $10,000 a week in taxes if you started it and ground level, since they would all be under 90 meters. (I think 90 is the first quantum jump... of is that the third? I forget, so I'm probably wrong on the tax. )

I don't have any hard and fast information but the height tax kicks in a lot lower than 90m if I'm not mistaken. I want to say it goes up in 10m or 20m increments. Scrape up $100,000 and let us know how it turns out.

I'm inclined to think that a limit OR GUARANTEE of prims per section of land owned would indeed be a GOOD thing.

I'm commenting as a land owner in Lusk - I've been there since Beta, and one of the reasons I stayed was the low lag and low prim counts (well, until now anyway). I own a reasonably large tract of land with a relatively small number of prims on it, and to be quite honest I'm highly displeased that the sim has been reporting as full. I'd be shocked if I had anything close to a pro-rated portion of the available prims in use... I think I'm under 100 prims total, and that's with a game prototype in rez, on the several dozen squares of land I own... the prim shortage has forced me to leave the game prototype in rez, even though I'm not crazy about paying the taxes on it, because I can't assume the prims will be around for me to rez even a single ball at any time. Meanwhile, I don't even have a house built - I removed it , and its replacement consists of a dozen floor and wall prims thus far...

I'm not pointing fingers or assigning blame, simply asking that folks respect their neghbors and use a fair portion of the available prims. And to the Lindens, a request that we have SOME control over the number of prims we have access to, whether its a per-av, per-plot, graduated-tax or whatever system... the current economic structure causes too much prim contention without any recourse for the players OTHER than prim hogging.

I'd gladly pay a reasonable tax that guaranteed me access to X number of prims. In a heartbeat. A "prim license" - perhaps akin to a stadium personal seat license?

I'd be EQUALLY glad to buy up adjacent - and otherwise useless - land if it enabled me access to more prims in the sim. Just think about how many tiny parcels of land, scattered throughout the sims, currently go unbought because they are too small to be useful. If they had a prim-value associated with them, their usefulness becomes more evident.

(edit/note: I hadn't been following the Olive prim-limit saga closely until just now, after I initially posted this... Sign me up - change the Lusk sim to the Olive model anytime you want...)

Prim-license and Prim-land trading exchange, anyone?

Meanwhile, abandoned builds sit nourished by the stipend and consuming prims for interminable lengths of time, while their fly-by-night users are never to be seen or heard from again... That base stipend of $1000 supports for a long time a whole lot of little prims... like, say, a thousand...? On any old 4x4 tract of land you care to place...? But the stipend/tax discussion belongs in another thread...

=Sinclair

Oh, and Veloso - welcome to SL, and sorry that you ran into this issue so soon... I don't think it's your fault by any means... though I confess I haven't checked people's builds in Lusk lately... like I said, no fingers are being pointed...

We'll get through it - in the meantime, drop on by any old time.

=Sinclair

I'm doing my part in Teal! I've had 1032 sq meters or so and I've built absolutely NOTHING on it! TADA!

- - Keeping the world pristine and prim free since 2003!

Just imagine the money you could make if you could rent out your prim allocation...

And then you could use all that money to build... um... oh... never mind.

Way to go, Bob, taking one for the sim... remember, only you can prevent prim littering...

=SV

Thanks to everyone who offered thoughs on this. I bought a little more land around me, and did the math, and by the Olive standard, I'm entitled to 83 prims. Even better, this morning I discovered an optimization that let me shave off 20 prims (!!!) from my original design. Also, I'm giving up on a staircase but will have elevator access to the roof, which I think I like better anyway.

The end result of this is that my house will probably use about 50 prims, giving me enough elbow room for a little furniture, which I'll slowly rez in as the system lets me. Ultimately I decided I don't want to move -- this location is just too nice. Whatta view! But the Olive rule makes me feel good about staying; I know I'm taking nothing more than my fair share from my Lusk neighborshbors unduly, and there are a lot of them.

I only wish I would have internet access where I was going for Thanksgiving. I want to get this done now.

Precisely why I'm using an elevator as well. I will also be going back over the design and optimizing. Just hard to do when you're trying to rough in all the major parts of a structure. In a way, segmenting things keeps it flexible until you're sure what you want.

As for being in SL for Thanksgiving - you bet I'll be on, drinking my holiday avatar's butt off. Or just building...heh.

what is the olive method? who are these olives? do they need a nice park in their hood?

Olive is a sim along the northern edge of the SL world. Currently the Lindens are conducting an experiment there, where the number of prims a player can rez is directly tied to the amount of land the player owns.

Right now I believe there is no land available in Olive, but some of the current residents have built parks on their land.

oh. thanks for the info neighbor. i wonder how the experiment is going? do they need any testers *wave hands* *jump up and down* "over here!"

Sorry for quoting it as a whole, but this ensures people know exactly what i'm responding to, and it's such a quick, concise post I don't think people will mind reading yours twice. =)

It sounds like, indeed, people bought up all the land when they knew it determined their total allotment of objects, but I really don't think that's a bad thing. If someone buys a nearby lake or field and leaves it empty, because they want more prims for their project, then I'd have to say that's potentially very scenic, and as there is a lot of public land available in otherwise very full zones, I don't know if there's really be a difference.

Though I wonder how many prims a 'guest' is allowed to rez? They may want to rez things simply to see what they have purchased at a store within the zone, or to extract contents from an object they own. Of course not allowing them to rez a single prim might stop griefing, but it seems to me teleporting griefer's objects to 450 meters is already an excellent solution to that. There's pros and cons either way, i'm just curious about this project.

Also, I hope the experiment goes well, and if they decide to extend this, if they might consider a new Mature zone? They seem to be in high demand of a solution, but honestly I'm eager to move into any simulator that follows the Olive model. I'm tired of prim entitlement being a big crisis, even in PG-rated sims.

I realize in the Olive sim that prim use is tied to land, but here a market scenario would work - allow those with excess capacity to auction them in a market, and buyers in the sim to pay what they deem fair prices to extend their projects.

It won't work the way it is structured now, but it could be an interesting economic addition. It would keep the total sim allotment capped, but the conditions and desire to complete projects would dictate prices.

i would eagerly purchase land in an olive-like area too. i think having a choice is best though. people that want to take their chances with open prim usage should have areas to purchase too.

the olive model is perfect for my project where i won't have dozens of prims out all the time but will need to use several when conducting landscaping workshops. is there a thread where the testers and/or post their opinions of the experiment?

i don't like the idea of selling prim rights. that'll just create another buggy feature. if you want to give someone rights to your prims, you can sell them some of your land or add them to a group.

i don't mean to imply that sl is full of bugs. i just think the idea of giving someone prim rights already exists in the olive model using one of the two methods stated above.