1/2 sim, but only 1800 prims, how is this possible??

hi, i've been searching for land for quite some time now and kept noticing, that lots of lands for sale don't offer the amount of prims they were suppose to have.
like half a sim, which is supposed to have 7.500 prims, but is only sold with 937 or 1.800 prims. i wonder why this is done and how to find land with the correct amount of prims offered or even more ...
does anyone have an explanation please?
thanx so much in advance

If you are looking at Islands they are more then likely Openspace sims. Land owners get them because they are much cheaper (but have less prims) and they can rent them out pretty quickly.

https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417&task=knowledge&questionID=4235

Openspace sims come with one-quarter of the normal prim limits on "Class 5" sims.

Also, some people still have land for sale on sims that are older than "Class 5" sims. (Or at least I have seen that before.) The older sim versions have lower prim limits.

Sounds like it's land for sale on an openspace sim:

https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=4235

--Hugsy

Openspace.

Total 4000 prims

Half an island 2000 and as a renter you get 1800.

Next question?

Teena,

A private estate owner may allocate her prims among her parcels as she sees fit. Possibly she has reserved some for "common area" builds.

The other explanation is that you are looking at an Open Space sim. These are private estates that cost 1/4 the price of a "full" private island, but only have 1/4 the prims. They were originally intended to be used as navigable water spaces around and between private islands, but they also are a good deal for people who want a lot of territory but don't need all those prims.

You can only buy Open Space sims from Linden Lab if you already own at least one "regular" private island. Many estate owners, however, are buying these up and renting them out at reasonable prices to their tenants.

hooo ... thanx so much for the quick answers ...
i understand the open sim thing, but what do i have to think about sims that are being sold with more than the regular amount of prims? is this possible as well? i had seens it a few times, but was always very sceptical about the sincerity of those offers.

be careful if someone is telling you they are "selling" half a openspace sim to you... at best it should be considered a "lease"

also know you have zero recourse if the actual owner wants to take back the land and keep all your money.....something he can do it with the click of a button.

Yes, a sim owner can offer double prim or even triple prim land if they configure their sim properly. They need to allocate a lot of empty buffer space to accomdate the shift of prim resources. Make sure they are reputable before renting.

kyllie, but isn't it always a lease if i buy land from someone else than linden labs?
how else would i be able to "buy" half a sim if i wasn't able to pay for a whole sim?
and what would i have to consider to not fall into a ditch and get screwed?

this is news to me, I thought all sims, even pre class 5 had the full 15000 (not including the openspace ones of course)

unless you are refering to the openspace sims on the pre class 5 yes I think they did have less than the new openspace, however they might have fixed all those, not sure

one way you can tell is to look in the land info and the part that shows how many objects there are will show prim count for the entire sim as well

Class is not related to the number of prims. It might have been earlier on in SL's history, before my time, but not now. If it's not an openspace region, it's got 15k prims.

It's a lease if you buy land from Linden Lab too, you're just leasing direct rather than via a third party.

You can rent parcels with more prims than a standard parcel on estate land, estates can have a prim bonus but overall they still only have the same amount of prims available.

A full sim has 15,000 prims, they could offer you double prims on their parcels but they'd only be able to setup half the amount of parcels as someone whose island offers the standard prim limits.

What we are seeing is entirely predictable.

Openspace sims were specifically sold as basically 1/4 resource sims to tack on to private islands as parkland or open water. They were explicitly described as unsuitable for use as normal sims.

Then LL went on a sales push.
Now parcels in Openspace sims are being resold/leased to the unknowing as if they were normal sims.

Leasing space on an Openspace sim is a lottery.
The sim is sharing the same server host with 15 other sims.
Get one 2048 parcel on one of those 16 sims dragging 30 avatars into a heavily-scripted dance parlour, and kiss goodbye to performance in 16 sims.

With normal sims, your chances of someone in another unknown sim killing performance are only 1 in 4.

- ish
very - ish

I don't think you can use the region object bonus factor to trick people into thinking they would get more than the 15,000 prims since About Land seems to always cap at 15,000, but it could be used to disguise an openspace sim as a full sim (the bonus is public under About Land / Options but quite a few people likely wouldn't notice or know what it means) at least until they'd actually try to rez a prim past 3,750 existing ones.

There recently was/still is a bug where the bonus could actually be used to push an openspace beyond 3,750 prims and a full sim beyond 15,000 though. Of course anyone using that loophole is on borrowed time since any rolling restart could delete the excess prims. In the case of rentals, it's yet another way unsuspecting tenants can be scammed.

/me wonders if this'd be a good time for a JIRA suggestion that the Buy Land dialog state the type of sim it is (normal/full or openspace). The server class'd be nice too.

Has anyone ever actually tested that hypothesis, or is that just supposition? While I will agree that normal sims run one per CPU core, and OpenSpace Sims run 4 per CPU Core, do we actually know how those system resources are allocated? On a 4-CPU core server, with either 4 Normal sims or 16 OpenSpaces sims running on it, just how much resource drag can be actually proven to exist from one core to another? I'd be very interedsted to see any actual documented tests that showed that your assertation is correct. It would be a very serious design flaw not to partition the server resources at least to the CPU Core level, and preferably to the sim level.

There's no way you can use the bonus to make a sim appear to have 15,000 prims

The bonus only lets you adjust the allocation per parcel. So you could give a parcel that would normally receive say 100 prims 200 prims. But the information on the total number of prims in the sim is still clearly shown.

Check out the conversation starting with Simon Linden's question at 17:06..

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Andrew_Linden/Office_Hours/2008_06_19

Divide an openspace into 4 16k m² parcels (or more smaller parcels for that matter), set the region object bonus factor to 4.0 and have each parcel owned by a different avie and each parcel will show that it has 3750 prims available (or whatever else would be normal for a full sim if you use smaller sized parcels).

Without spotting and knowing what the bonus factor is there would be no way to tell you're dealing with an openspace and not a full sim at the time of purchase from the available prim count alone.

What we do know from LL's own description of Opensims is that an Opensim is a crippled sim - and not intended to be used as would be a normal sim.

Unless they snuck another generation of Server in, a "class 5" Linden Labs server is only a low energy 65mn Xeon Core 2 duo with 4 gigs of Ram and a single SATA hard drive.... they have never used Quad Cores on thier servers.

They are getting rather long in the tooth (speaking in computer terms)... my home computer would far outstrip it as far as processing power.

We prefer the term "CPU Challenged," tyvm.

P2

found the "official" discription of a Class 5 cerver from a post by Ian Linden dated Oct 16th - 2006:

So, here’s what’s different under the hood: we’ve been all-AMD for years, but are moving from the Opteron 270 to the Intel Xeon 5148 - a low-power version of Intel’s new Core 2 Duo based server CPUs. This gives us better performance for fewer watts, while supporting our standard 64-bit OS image. We’ve also doubled the RAM per machine from 2GB to 4GB and moved to a faster SATA disk, which usually won’t make much of a difference, but should reduce the stalls sometimes seen by heavy regions during autosaves. Finally, there are fewer, bigger system fans, and power supply efficiency goes from 67% to 84%; power usage while running the sim process is about 175 watts, vs. 230 for a Class 4.

Yes, you can do that on a regular sim too, but the point is, it still shows the TOTAL prims as being 3750 for the sim. if you only have 1/4 the sim, and it says you have 3750 of the 3750 prims in the sim, that would be a pretty big red flag.