Temporarily rezzing a skybox

Please forgive a newbie question.

I'm still on the fence about buying or renting property, wanted to see whether it is worth it first. So I was thinking about buying a skybox and rezzing it in a sandbox (or any other area that alows rez and has low usage) temporarily, a few hours at a time, to hang out with friends...

- Is that allowed? Will I be breaking some rules?
- Are there technical problems that would prevent that?
- Would I be able to furnish the skybox, de-rez, and re-rez on will with things still being in their places?
- How different is it from buying a boat/plane/spaceship and traveling across sims, using it as a temporary home? I hear people do this as well...

Thanks in advance!

Sandboxes are for people to build things, and not for the use you described. In fact there is nowhere that is for the use you described.

Yes, it is against the rules to use resources that you are not paying for. Just the same as it would be "against the rules" to break into a hotel room in real life and use the room for a party. You can't justify it as OK "because no one was using it at the time".

If you rez a home or skybox anywhere that isn't your land, you are using resources that someone else is paying for. The 300 or so prims that you and your friends may be using for your furnished skybox (to pick a random representative number) are 300 less prims that someone can use in that sandbox for the intended purpose of building things there. Or in the parcel that they are paying for each month.

When someone flies a vehicle over someone else's land, the system is not supposed to count those vehicular prims as part of the limit for the parcel they happen to be over. As it happens, they DO count, and so if you try to fly over a parcel that is already completely full, you will not be able to cross into that parcel. But if it's a vehicle, and you keep moving, the prims that you may be using while in-flight don't have a prolonged effect on any one parcel. No one, however, could "live on" a vehicle that is moving about al the time. In practice, you have to rez it over some parcel, you fly it somewhere (or sail the boat or drive the car), and when you get to your destination, you de-rez the vehicle. For the most part, if you are piloting a vehicle or riding in it as a passenger, that is ALL you are doing. You can't get out of your seat and move about.

Got a source for that?

What the OP is suggesting may be against individual sandbox rules, and it's certainly bad form, but I'm pretty sure it's not a TOS violation. If using resources you're not paying for is against the rules, every non-paying member would be in violation simply by logging on.

Back when I hung out in sandboxes, before I got my own land, most of the sandboxes I hung out in were ones where that was pretty much the norm. You'd find people routinely rezzing structures in the sky they weren't really building, they'd just make a few mods sometimes, to satisfy the "building" side of things. I never heard of anyone getting in trouble for it.

But really, if you're not going to be modding and building on whatever you're going to put there, you're probably not going to find owning land is really all that much fun. At least, the people who just put down a generic house never seem to spend any time there, and tend to be the ones who give up the land after their annual sub runs out.

You could try renting a small parcel for just a week. Then if you like it you can go another week, and so on. There are many with no long term leases - most in fact.

Sometimes it's nice just to have a place to think of as home base and go change clothes or tweak your avatar or just sit and clean out your inventory listening to a music stream even if you don't have any friends over. Just being able to set your home location to your land seems a relief if your home has been set to some crowded infohub.

There are a lot of things that have been defined as "Against the rules" or "Against policy" that are not explicitly listed in the TOS. These things get spelled out in other areas, like the Blog, or in the form of catagories that L accepts for abuse reports.

Look up "Parcel Encroachment" in the Knowledge base. It is an abuse-reportable offense.

I don't think rezzing something in a sandbox counts as "parcel encroachment".

Actually if you frequent any of the large public sand boxes you will find lot's of folks doing exactly what the OP is asking about. Sometimes with really huge structures like space ships.

Also, I am aware of a handful of LL protected ocean sims that have 60 minute auto return set. I've seen some really incredible things rezzed there as well.

Finally, there are a fair number of parcels dotted about that have build on and auto return off, with little or no owner owned content. Often the owner is unaware, or simply doesn't care. Squatters are adept at finding such places.

On the other hand, if the sandbox owner warns you, kicks you out and returns your build, or bans you, you can't say you haven't been warned.

Ask *them* first, OK?

Ravenglass Rentals have newbie places for as little as 150L$ per week and 150 prims and they're all on a week-by-week rental basis. Currently in search there are six homes available in search at those prices. Just search all for 'Ravenglass Rentals'.

As Skell and Weston suggested, check out renting a little place on a week to week basis. If you were planning to buy your own skybox to rez, use that money for an inexpensive week's rental. Maybe even plan to rent in a new place every week for awhile so you can try out different locations.

Good Luck!

Thanks everyone for your suggestions, I'm glad I decided to ask first. Renting on a weekely basis sounds like a good way to start out.

One more question though, something is still not clear. When you read descriptions of various vehicles (yachts, spaceships, whatever) for sale on xstreetsl, for example, it sounds like all of them are suited to behave like "temporary homes" - with furniture, beds, pools, you name it. It sounds strange (and that's the part that's not clear to me) that you would only use them for "hanging out" only when you are docked at the piece of land that you own, and at all other times, as you travel in them, you remain seated and just drive. Is that really how it works?

Please understand that I'm not asking this to wiggle out of paying for the resources that I use, I do want to pay my share. It's just the idea of having something that I can move around in freely (where allowed, of course) and use as my home base sounds much more appealing than being tied to a piece of land. This is SL after all... But maybe I'm dreaming...

In general, any vehicle complex enough to be lived in is not going to be drivable... it's just a building shaped like a boat or rocket or whatever. A prop, in short.

For a vehicle to be drivable, it needs to have fewer than 31 prims, because you can't have a physical object with more than 31 prims, and the driver counts as one of the prims. As you can imagine, that puts a bit of a damper on the number of pools, chairs, and what have you that can be included.

I guess there are ways to get around that restriction:

http://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=1006500
http://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=270101

I would have to question the ethics of someone doing this. Having a place of your own is nice and I am lucky enough to have that. However there is hundreds of places to go in-world setup for people to use for free. No reason to rez your own stuff on someone else's land when you can find plenty of places pre-built, and probably better setup than what you have, that are free to use and fairly private.

Those aren't real vehicles. They use non-physical movement, moving a bunch of separate objects together to fake being a single large object. They're not really practical, and I wouldn't expect them to hold together over sim crossings.

Edit: the second link confirms this: it only works in the sim it was rezzed in. It's not a vehicle, it's a scripted prop: it "comes apart" as it moves and can't cross a sim boundary.

Yeah; these objects work because they come in two parts - on part is the "vehicle" that you click-sit to board, and the other part is a 200(or however many)-prim attachment that your avatar wears, which then animates your avatar so that both the parts are always lined up to look like a single thing. I have a square-rigged sailing ship like this - the "vehicle" is merely the hull; the deck, sails, etc are a fixed prop - as soon as you right-click and "Sail!" the ship, all that stuff disappears and "reappears" as a copy of them is attached to your avatar. When you want to stop sailing, you "stand up", and the ship parts are "detached" from your avatar, and the original prop is re-rezzed on the hull. My ship manages to cross sim borders, multiple times, with very little trouble at all.

The PROBLEM is, if you happen to stop over a no-build parcel, when you "stand up" your attachment will disappear like normal, but the vehicle will be unable to re-rez the fixed-prop parts when you do. So (in the case of my ship) I'm left hovering over a big, empty hull, which doesn't look cool.

As for temporarily rezzing your pad over a sandbox? People do it all the time. But there is suckage:

1) It's a sandbox, so other people can come into your skybox, rez items in it, and generally screw with you, and you will be able to do absolutely nothing about it;

2) Some of the coolest things about owning an actual land plot, like being able to control your music or video streams (and listen/watch stuff with your peeps), cannot be obtained by squatting on another's land, or over a sandbox;

3) It's the kind of abuse that discourages people from creating sandbox land for public use. That means less sandbox space for us people who want to go there and use the sandbox for what sandboxes are supposed to be used for.

I don't think that's an attachment "vehicle", those don't "come apart" and can cross sim boundaries, but are even less "livable" than non-physical ones.

Yes I agree, I seen parties at sandboxes.... why i dunno... so many griefers there... people wanting you to loan em money.... I go to the education sandboxes now though and am usually left alone...

(sometimes I just want to be around people when I build so I leave my skybox platform)