Questions about prim limits in Olive

I'm sorry if my quip made any think that I thought Maxx's shot at critique was a bad idea; indeed I support his product and/or service and would likely agree with him.

For what it is worth, I'm a terrible builder, but at least (coming back to the main thread) I'm using less prims than my land would allow

Fallingwater - you see, you disqualified yourself because you are using transparency and curves. Sure, maybe alignment is tricky and the like, but I look at something like that and see creativity, no ass-backwards building.

Basically my criteria is I fly around at a good height, and if I hit it in mid air due to shock, or have a heart attack while looking upon it from the sky - then I have a candidate.

Thanks for the offer, though.

I have a pertinent Olive question I'm repeating here, in hopes of getting an official answer:

Under the new prim allocation system, are prim amounts tied directly to individual parcels, or is it just a basic amount that you (the landowner) have available to use anywhere in the sim?

I am hoping it is the second, as we move forward, because that will allow people to get their allowances together to work on a single big project, rather than being stuck building alone.
It's probably a lot easier to automate the checking process as well.

I say this as an interested observer for future sim openings, not a current landholder. (Flying around alone in the vehicle park makes me feel like there are six sims made just for me and my group, LOL).

Another comment - if the lottery process is repeated, try to make some smaller parcels available so people can get in on the ground floor. Even 1/32 of a sim is too much for a newbie to be buying.

P.S. Maxx, I just dare you to start an architectural critique and publish it. I double dare you!

This is an interesting idea. As it stands now, the rule is that we are limiting the number of objects that are on the parcels you own. So that means if you want to contribute objects to a group build, you'll need to deed land to the group.

So that officially shoots down the idea for trading prim rights between Olive residents. (So someone who is not going to use all of their prim allotment can NOT sell the remainder to a neighbor.)

This is sad, but I can understand why it is so... Unless the Olive Plan is incorporated into the system, a human will have to check the prim usage for each resident. There would need to be a formal system in place to transfer ownership of prim rights before the moderating human can tell it has been done and account for the transfer in the final calculations.

I really would like to see the Olive Plan formalized, even if only in one sim like it is now, so that a resident could see a current balance of remaining unused prims they have, and have the ability to sell some of them outright to another resident of the same sim. I think that would rock.

I was thinking about this earlier, thinking that a prim brokerage system would be cool, you buy and sell at the price set by supply/demand. Have extra prims you probably won't need anytime soon? Sell them on the market for that sim. Need just a few more prims to finish your project? Buy from the market.

However, the problem with any prim trading concepts is what to do when someone releases the land they own. You can't reset the prim entitlement. The next person that comes along to buy that plot will probably get fewer or more prims than the plot was originally given when the sim was created.

Even if a statistic is displayed with the land properties so that buyers know what they are getting if they purchase it, what is to keep a rich resident from buying up all the prim entitlements and sitting on them (as equity), making all the remaining land in the sim completely useless?

I really think it would be great to have a prim trading system if things like this won't be a problem. It would probably go a long way toward resolving the prim issue, and it would be kind of a fun way to share the limited resources.

Given that Olive has hard limits on prim usage, and given that not everyone in Olive is going to hit those limits ... might the prim limit be raised a bit for that sim, perhaps to 12,000? Or perhaps to an even 3 prims per plot, whatever that works out to? (I'm not an Olive resident myself, but I'm sure some of the builders there would like a little more breathing room.)

Another possibility, a variation on the Olive scheme that could actually be applied to other sims retroactively: if anyone exceeds their Olive-level limits, the taxes on the over-limit prims, rather than going into Governor Linden's slush fund , would be redistributed to all the landowners who are under the Olive-style limits.

Perhaps the dwell numbers should figure into how the cash is distributed, so as to reward attractive, but prim-cheap, builds. And the tax credit should be low enough that one can't actually make a net weekly profit by just buying land and letting it lie fallow. (This isn't the US Dept of Agriculture, after all. )

Comments? Suggestions? Should I put on my flame-proof suit?

It's my understanding that the 10,000 number is a fixed technical limit, not an arbitrary one. It's a limitation of the Havoc physics engine. Even if an object isn't set to be physical, avatars are physical so every prim has to be taken into account for collision detection. That number will go up (probably substantially) when Havoc2 is incorporated which is scheduled for SL 1.2

Andrew Linden had some good technical points on the prim limit in another thread: clicky

Judging by his comments, it seems there is more than just a new Havok that is needed in order to up prim limits.

Maybe I'm misreading what Andrew wrote, but it sounds like 10,000 is not so much a hard limit, as it is the point at which performance becomes unacceptable. And it's not an *absolute* limit; I've seen Hawthorne go to 102%. (How exactly does that happen, I wonder? Avatars bringing in attached objects? Temporary objects created by particle systems? Dunno.)

My point is that if the overall sim limit for Olive were set at (wild guess) 12,000, and some of the residents don't push it to the limit, and those that do face a *hard* limit, then the actual number of prims should be around 10,000 (and thus within the technical limits described by Andrew), while allowing the more prim-hungry builders a little more flexibility.

Great ideas here - possibly will see them reflected soon.

I'm afraid I don't understand what the purpose of this would be. I thought the point of the Olive experiment was to tie prim usage to land ownership. If you want to see what happens when those two aren't tied together, visit any other sim.

First of all, I don't think upping prim limits would help anything, if there isn't a system or desire to restrict the consumption of them. There is less and less point to efficiency the more prims there are, therefore it doesn't matter if it's 10,000 or 20,000, it will be filled.

Also, each simulator is a separate server, as I understand it. Therefore if one sim is using much less than the maximum prims, it doesn't 'free up' a little extra for the other simulators.

Though, do you mean that those who have a great deal of prims would maybe be unable to rez more at 8,000, and people with not very many prims could keep rezzing until it reaches 10,000 ??? That'd be kinda interesting.

As for 'trading' prim quota in that system, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If you want more prims, buy more land. Make it into a park or something. Heck, trees are only one prim, lakes cost nothing, it could be beautiful. Then, with the extra land that consumes so little prims, you can move onto your project.

Trading primitive creation capacity does make sense, if you can't:

A) Buy land, because it is all owned

B) Need just a few more primitives to finish something beyond your allotment.

Again, I realize that the Olive experiment is tied to land use, but indulge me here.

I'm talking about the capacity of the sim being 10,000 objects. Lets say that not everyone is a big builder, or they just want to make a park with a few things in it, and not really do much else - owning the land is enough for their needs.

This translates into 'lost' capacity - where the utilization of the entire simulator is kept lower, of course, but from a building perspective there is capacity that can be utilized.

The market system I propose would be based on the available capacity of the entire simulator, with primitive creation rights freely transferrable to other olive residents for a price. This price would be determined by normal factores, the desire of the builder to complete their project, the overall capacity of the simulator, the supplies liberated by someone deleting a build, etc..

This wouldn't be automatic - the transfer of the 'right' to create a primitive would, but the market itself would be driven by the residents in that simulator only.

Hopefully that makes more sense. Without it, you just have capacity potentially sitting idle - a more passive form of 'banking' without the social stigma, since all participants are capped.

I understand that. That's not what I meant. I am talking about making the best use of Olive's resources, by builders in Olive alone.

I'm sorry, this has been misunderstood so much, I'm apparently doing a lousy job of explaining myself. One more try.

By analogy, think of how the airlines manage passenger-carrying capacity. They know in advance that a certain, fairly predictable, percentage of passengers will buy tickets, but will miss the flight or cancel at the last minute; so if they sell exactly as many tickets as they have seats, a certain amount of capacity will go unused. So what do they do? They overbook. Cancellations and overbookings more or less cancel each other out, and their capacity is fully utilized.

Olive has hard limits on prim usage. Some builders in Olive will use fewer than their maximum prim allocation, so if the limits are strictly enforced as is, some of Olive's 10,000 prim capacity will go unused. But some builders in Olive will surely want to use a little more than the limits allow. I'm suggesting that the prim allocations on Olive be "overbooked" slightly, so that the more prim-hungry builders in Olive can make use of the prim capacity that others in Olive have chosen not to use.

(I'm actually more interested in feedback on my second -- and entirely separate -- suggestion, which would basically automate the prim-exchange system some have been advocating, by rewarding low-prim builders with the taxes paid by high-prim builders.)

Kex makes a good point there, lets see if we can find a solution for it.

The top-of-head answer would be, if the prim rights buyer was willing to pay X more for additional prims, then when the prim seller releases their land, the prim buyer can be given a pick (order determined by total number of p-rights bought from that player) of land units to buy to replace the p-rights with actual owner rights.

Hmmm... That may have been hard to follow. I'll have to do a full write-up on it offline and see if I can make it hold water and be easy to use.

I understood what you meant about overbooking, Liberty. I wonder, though, if it would work out the same as with plane reservations. Once a flight is missed, that's a resource that's gone forever.

Since extra prim rights aren't time-sensitive like that, we might all eventually 'need' those prims. I know that for me the temptation to use my extras would be pretty strong. Then what would happen is, we'd hit the technical limit on the sim and we'd back in a first come, first served situation. The builders who use their extras the fastest would have the advantage.

Your tax reward idea is interesting but I don't actually have anything intelligent to say about it at the moment.