Info on low prim private islands

Ok, I know a few things about the low prim sims.

I understand there lower performance, lower prims, and lower avatar capacity. I also know that they must be bought in "four packs".

What I do not know is:

1) How much they cost. Both upfront cost and tier.

2) How do you go about buying them, and can anyone buy them (I know you must at least own one other regular private sim - but is there anything else?)

3) Are they resellable/transferable?

Lastly, I may be interested if anyone is selling, or even splitting off one or two for rentals (as long as they can be moved for co-location to my sims)

TIA.

1) Exactly the same as a regular sim, but I believe you have to own a sim already before you can get any 'voids' or open-space sims, whatever they're called these days. The price of course is for four as you've noticed already.

2) You buy them same place as you do when ordering a simulator, it's one of the options. As I say though you have to have a 'proper' simulator already though, I don't know of anyone who's managed to buy a pack of void sims on their own.

3) In a four probably. I don't know for sure.

Ok, so now I know the pricing is 4 void sims, for the price of one regular private sim, and I know how to buy them... thanks.

Now, can they be split? In other words, can i buy two, and place them aside my sims, and rent the other two off elsewhere to be placed next to someone else's sims? Or, conversely, can I rent one or two void sims from someone else and have them placed next to mine?

1) How much they cost. Both upfront cost and tier.

The cost for four OpenSpaces sims is the exact same price as for one normal sim. $1650 to get the set of four, and $295 per month to keep them. So your monthly maintenance cost per low-prim sim is $73.75.

You must already own at least one full-prim sim that the OpenSpaces sims will be "anchored" to. They don't have to directly touch your sim, as long as the collection touches your sim. (Look at Amarin Island and the other four sims with "Amarin" in their name as an example. Amarin Island is a full-prim sim, and three of the four low-prim sims directly touch it, while the fourth is on the far side of one of the low-prim sims.)

2) How do you go about buying them, and can anyone buy them (I know you must at least own one other regular private sim - but is there anything else?)

Anyone can buy them, provided you already own at least one full-prim sim, and have 4 available spaces near your sim.

3) Are they resellable/transferable?

Only as a set of four. But you can certainly rent them out.

Lastly, I may be interested if anyone is selling, or even splitting off one or two for rentals (as long as they can be moved for co-location to my sims)

You would have to buy it as a set of four.

Having helped to develop several low-prim sims, I can give you some other info of use.

Avatar Limit per sim is 10, instead of 40 as in a full-prim sim. As with a normal sim, this can be adjusted somewhat, but you take a big performance hit if you increase the limit and have more than 10 avatars in the sim at once.

Prim Limit is 1875 prims, or 1/8 that of a full-prim sim. That makes it about the same as an 8192 M2 parcel of land in a normal sim, for building purposes. Some developers will place a roughly 8192 M2 island in the middle of a body of water, and rent that out. You end up with a similar prim allowance as an 8192 M2 sim, but a nice privacy buffer of navigable water around your parcel.

The Lindens don't recommend renting out low-prim sims as places to live. I personally think they are dead wrong in that. Being in a low-prim sim is just the same as being in a normal sim, aside from the prim and avatar limits mentioned above. I've done extensive work in them, and you can't tell the difference in performance or any other aspect.

Ok, so this means that I can't just rent one from Joe Blow, with us both contacting LL asking for one of his Void sims to be relocated next to mine - right?

+VAT if applicable

/me ducks

Rent it, yes. But you can not move it.

For example, one of my clients is renting a single low-prim sim from a developer. It happened to already be right next to some of the other sims that she owns.

But she couldn't rent a sim that was halfway across the grid and have it moved somewhere else. It has to remain part of a contiguous group 'anchored' to the real owner's full-prim sim.

LOL!

So to clarify, at least one must be touching your regular sim, and the others must either be touching the regular one, or each other?

Yes, that is my understanding of how it works. Not sure if 'corner to corner only' counts. The arrangements I have seen all have at least one flat edge touching either a real sim that is owned by the sim owner, or other low-prim sims in the collection. This allows you to use a row of the low-prim sims to create a navigable sea-lane between a private sim and somewhere else.

And I would imagine the rules about them touching other peoples sims apply? (i.e. only with both parties permission)

Yes, rules of attaching to others apply (you won't be able to put your void sim smack up against one of mine without written permission for instance)

Is there actually a technical reason for this? Are void somehow registered differently from ordinary simulators, or this just a requirement that LL have set-down? I can imagine that with void sims being sold individually there would be a lot more private islands and a lot less interesting the main-land I suppose. But that could be solved by charging a little less for them and requiring an additional fee (bringing them back to correct price or slightly higher) to have them visible on the world-map.

ie - you can have a budget sim that doesn't appear on the world at all, only way to get to it would be to have a landmark/SLURL or do a search. It would not appear on the world-map (but have a mini-map as normal).

Void sims instance 'four to a core' as I understand it, and if a sim goes down one has to find a spot for it - I don't think there is good infrastructure for a restarting voidsim to seek out a random core to re-instance upon, it has to come back up on whatever core the other three are (just speculation on my part but I'm pretty sure).

"Budget" sims are something I doubt we'll see for a good while.

The reason is minimum business costs. Sort of the same reason there's no such thing as a 3000 USD new car. You'll see a lot of 'value added' options on cars because they make fiscal sense, but at some point the returns go low enough that to offer 'low budget' it's no longer a business but a charity.

Also consider that there *are* such things already - VRML is essentially free; or if you consider Activeworlds a stripped down version of Second Life, it's dirt cheap over there. Trouble is, it's Activeworlds. For instance, owning real land is good, but owning land in the Mojave Desert far from everyone and with no roads and a coupla cactus... is less than budget and verging on pointless.

Incidentally, I don't think server/bandwidth cost is the driving factor of pricing. I think it's got a lot more to do with keeping grid technology current and relevant, and not leaving the grid at the 2003 software level.