More Prims!

We need more prim allowance. Period.

My land is nowhere near 'cluttered' but to add any sense of detail or realism beyond the very basic stuff is just impossible due to the prim limit.

We either need to raise the prim limit (not sure what the restriction is due to, anyway), or give us a one-off payment opportunity to add another 100 prims (up to, say, 500) to our land totals.

I don't want to have to buy more land, and in fact can't as all around me is purchased anyway so I don't want to have to move just to be able to buy more land.

The concept that your 'prim allocation' is totalled overall on your land does not work - because I have plenty of spare prims overall but my main parcel is full and I get problems.

This game encourages creativity. Unfortunately my creativity is stifled due to this limit.

Lewis

1) Go to a sandbox.

2) Rez a hollow, cut, twisted torus.

3) Clone it 15,000 times, keeping them within the camera angle.

If the majority of people's computers don't choke and die, it's time to raise the prim limits.

My computer locks up at about 2000.

I own 2528 sq m.

I have on it 477 out of 541 possible prims.

I don't see many typical applications that would need 15,000 hollow cut twisted torus on the land.

Care to give a more typical example to support your thought that it's unnecessary to raise prims?

Lewis

The 15,000 is the total number of prims that a sim can support.
Your prim allocation is proportional to what percentage of the sim you own.

The torus is the most complex form - the system needs to be able to support 15,000 of them per sim to guarantee that everything will continue working.

Lordfly is saying that most people's machines (and possibly the sims themselves) cannot handle even the specs we have now without problems. Raising prim allocation will just cause more crashes, more often.

We're gonna have be patient and wait until technology (both HW and LL's SW) improve sufficiently before we get more.

Right.

Linden has been pretty consistant with this... The prim limits used to be lower way back when, as I recall, but I could be wrong. But, basicly, the client/server combined entity is effectively at its maximum at 15,000 right now.

Nor can they sell just /you/ 500 more prims, or even 100... Because then everyone could buy 500 more prims. If everyone could buy more prims, and, say, even 10 people owned land in the sim... That's 5000 more prims right there. That's a signifigant increase, that at this time, we aren't ready for. As much as we may want it.

As for linking prims to land, as opposed to paying for prims... Trust me. The other way was worse.

Presumably the extra money from this 'premium service' would go towards the relevant upgrades though?

I'm just frustrated because I can't even buy more land around me, as it's all bought up, and I don't want to have to move to a different area.

These limits are restricting my enjoyment of the game, and it seems that there is nothing I can do about it.

Lewis

The money does go towards upgrades; R&D, more sims, more estate sims, more developers, and so on.

I don't think there's a computer around right now that would be able to handle an entire sim's display all at once.

give it three years.

There is something you can do about it. Buy more land. That's the same thing as buying more prims, as long as it's in the same sim. Doesn't have to connect to your old land.

It's not just a question of upgrades for LL. The servers are pretty good all ready. First, it's the software that needs to be made better, and that's not something that can be fixed by simply throwing money at it... You need time and effort. They are working on it, slowly. Second, it's end-user computers that need to be made better. LL doesn't want to impliment a feature that will make the game unplayable except for the 2% of the people who have the latest Falcon Northwest monster-rig, it would be corporate suicide.

The system can't guarantee that your client will keep working of all 15,000 prims in the sim are inside your draw distance, no matter WHAT they are. That doesn't mean the prim limit should be lowered, it means that if you do stupid stuff your computer WILL be unhappy.

I was under the impression that the prim limit was there because of *server* issue, not *client* load. If it's a client problem, let's start by limiting the number of prims in avatar hair first. I'd happily accept a smaller link limit for attachments in exchange for more prims in builds.

The server can easily handle more prims; I *think* it's just a matter of swapping in more ram or something else trivial.

The real problem is that yours/mine/his computer would die a fiery death if forced to render 30k prims.

a) the relevant upgrades include the computers of anyone who might see your land.
b) the relevant upgrades for the server hardware would cost "a lot" (read several thousands at least) how much are you willing to pay per month for this upgrade? (If they really only do need more memory I think that would have been done, memory is relatively cheap).
c) the relevant upgrades for server software can not be bought instantaneously but require development that you are already paying for, and time which can only be given at a fixed rate . Would you like to start paying more? I'm sure LL would take donations in some form you would have to work out with them.

I sympathise with the frusteration but if you want more prims you are going to have to spend a lot more and/or you are going to have to move. It's not only you who can do nothing about it, nobody can do anything about it, including LL.

Now if the limit is client side, then I think LL should look into something like only rendering a limited number of triangles per second based on the interest list. A setting that would be configurable in the client. I don't know if it's technically possible but it would allow for something along the lines of dynamic draw distance. But this falls into that dev catagory and as such requires time as well as money.

Hmmm... I wonder if they could bump up the prim limits, but balance it by having the different prim types having different values. For example, boxes and prisms take up 1; cylinders, tubes and rings, 2; and spheres and torii, 4. Gives everyone a little more room to work with and forces builders to be more conservative with tri counts.

That's how it works in Sims Online with property and object limits.

Each 'lot' has a maximum of, I think, 950 'object spaces'. The game is arranged in a grid format so you can only place items in squares rather than at actual X/Y/Z co-ordinates.

A large dining table, for example, takes up six squares, which you can fit 10 chairs around making 16 squares needed to feed 10 people at the same time.

Or you can use small square 'diner' style tables which take up one square and seat four. So you can use 3 tables and 12 chairs, making 15 squares to feed 12 people at the same time, depending on which objects you wish to use.

I can definitely see advantages in this, in the same way that the imaginative property owner in TSO can use certain tricks like the one I mention above to increase the design of their lot.

I shouldn't have to decide between putting a roof on my store or planting some flowers in my garden. My lot is far from cluttered, and my lot is quite 'simple' partly due to my lack of complicated prim manipulation skills - yet there is a lot I can't have in the way of 'prettyness' simply due to the limit.

Lewis

The server needs to be able to compute the collisions between avatars (or physical objects) and other objects. Hence the limit on prim size and count. It's not only a memory issue, the physics plays a role too. Yes, the mythical havok upgrade would probably allow to somewhat increase the prim limits.

The last prim quantity upgrade was around or before 2004 summer, about when I joined SL. It has been promised that when machines get faster, the will consider and raise the prim limits.

Well, it's past 1.5 years now. I think at least SOME prim quantity upgrade would be warranted! Maybe not 100%, but 30 or 50% at least!

In 1.5 years, machine performance has about doubled, not including video cards. This would warrant 100%, but maybe overall the effect is less.

Havok 2 has been promised since 2004 summer (or even before). Don't expect to see it anytime soon.

HTML is due 'in a few weeks', though it should've arrived 2005 summer or fall. So we'll see

So? It'd have the same problem for 15k prims.

Increased prim limits are actually being tested on some of the private sims at the moment. LL have said that they can't guarantee the stability of a sim with extra prims yet.

There's a couple of things that could be done to increase the number of prims though, by changing the way prims are counted:

1. An unmodified cube will cause a lot less work to be done, both by server and client than a twisted torus - why not have a value generated by what the prim is like (1 for a basic cube, 10 for a twisted torus for instance) instead of just 1 for everything.
2. Phantom prims cause much less work to be done by the server since it doesn't have to calculate any physics for it, thus phantom prims could be discounted.
3. Not all prims require complex collision detection, why not have a checkbox that makes a prim use a basic cuboid for collision detection, which would again discount it.

If you're having prim-count issues, yet haven't mastered complex prim torturing skills, it may be time to learn them. When I was doing the basics, I found that it took a lot more basic prims to do the job of one well thought out 'tortured' one.

But according to messages in this thread, that tortured prim gives the physics engine a much harder job to do.

When I build stuff using hollow boxes for rooms or doors, then, is that actually going to cause more server load than if I just laid down a bunch of solid bricks?

Perhaps the limit shouldn't be prims, it should be faces. Flat surfaces might cost one point, curved faces four, hollow faces ten...?

I'm all for more prims - if possible it would be nice.

However - when you buy land in a sim - you are getting X percentage of that sim's 'area' AND that percentage of prim resources, and that's fair. I hope that system never changes.

'500 bucks and I get more prims' is like 1.0 when you just rezzed prims till the sim could give no more... and trust me, that utterly sucked.. to own 1/4 of a sim and not be able to rez a single cube.

I'm sure TSO had its myriad of tricks n tips to get more out of the available resources - so does Second Life... Learning those tricks and being economical with your prims will let you get more out of your land/prim allocation.

This isn't even taking into consideration a 16 x 16m plot with say --- 1000 spinning blue Impeach Bush signs.