Prefab Builders: Where are the stairs?

I spent several thousand L$ over the weekend while looking for suitable houses for our lot in Bay City. I was shopping via SLExchange, and none of the prefab builders I bought from had demo models rezzed at their shops, so I purchased solely based on the photos and descriptions on SLExchange.

I found one or two that approached the aesthetic I was going for, but I was kind of confounded by the fact that not one of the four houses I purchased had stairs. One of them came with self-configuring teleporters (it's the one we have rezzed now), but the others didn't even bother with that. The only way you could get upstairs in any of them was to install your own teleporters. At this point I've resolved to design our own house, with stairs, based on my RL childhood home. (We'll build it in a private sandbox to spare our neighbors the plywood.)

I've seen many other structures like this in Second Life, and I just don't get it. Why can't we have stairs? I'm not the kind of SLer who needs a kitchen or a bathroom in my house, but I personally find it more immersive, dramatic, and convenient to be able to ascend a ramp than to fiddle with teleporters.

I also wanted to complain about the gratuitous use of alpha textures in many prefabs but I'm too tired to think of a way to reword that into a question.

Prim limits and space conservation on small parcels.

I thnk because stairs are pretty much a PITA in SL. they use a huge number of prims, and take up valuable space. Sure, you can use the sculptie ones now, but everyone knows how sculpties er.. suck, since the maps often take months to download. I prefer TPs myself.

you can make a 2 prim spiral staircase and pretty much anything with 4 prims, but its usually just a waste of space.

/me shudders, the only thing worst than stairs in an SL building are...

...shuddering more violently...

...spiral stairs.

/me waves to Wilde

I've seen some nice ones done with textures versus sculpties... a ramp but textured nicely for stairs

Perhaps I should have worded it "stairs." I'm quite happy with just a straight ramp. I've noticed that houses in other videogames tend to use ramps too, and it works just fine. I just want a way to walk where I'm going without the contrivances of teleportation.

If there is more than one level in a build I'm doing, and it's not specifically disallowed (As in someone wants me to build for them and they say no stairs) I add stairs. Period. They look good, sculpted prims make them take very few (Though my house uses full-prim stairs with a full-prim stair carpet thing. Yes. I like it.)

However, I also offer a simple service:

If you don't like/want the stairs, I will remove them, fill the hole in with floor, and give you an easy-to-configure teleporter.

Yeah, I'd rather teleport than use most spiral stairs in SL. (That goes for the flightmaster towers in Orgrimmar and Thunder Bluff in WoW as well. *shakes fist at Blizzard*)

House owners obviously need to be able to get around their new home. They do not want to find it a struggle if their sim is a little laggy, nor do they want to have to explain to a visitor how to use a complex system.

Setting up is a big issue - I try to avoid giving the customer additional work. That is my job In an ideal world they should always be able to just rez their new home and move in. Getting around it should be totally intuitive and reliable.

Some of my prefabs have stairs - my Spanish villa, Casa Carmina, for example, as I felt they suited the look of the building. They use sculpties so are low prim.

For very small buildings, stairs are not only tough because of prim usage, but also fitting them in tidily can be an issue. Avatars are proportionally much taller in SL than in rl, so the clearances for heads needs to be rather large. This means a bigger hole in the celing than you might initially imagine. And in a small building, that can be a problem.

I use a variety of teleport options. Some of my builds have simple 'up and down' type tps. They don't need any setting up, can be moved around and are dead easy to operate. However, they only go directly up and down, of course.

Some have a commercial teleporter system, which requires very little customer setting up, but has some limitations, such as requiring all tps in the system to be linked.

My biggest prefab, Castle Tiberion, does have some stairs - I feel they look right in a build of this nature, they are sort of 'architectural feature stairs', hehe. However, for conveince, you can zip around the castle using a unique teleporter system from YavaScript. It doesn't need the customer to do ANY setting up and works with big builds that can not all be linked together.

So, in summary - I try to match the 'up, down and all around' system to each individual build.

And, as a customer said to me the other day 'Most the time, in a house, you just want to be able to get up to the bedroom real quick sometimes' *grins*

We can fly and teleport here so stairs aren't always a requirement and like what others say they use up space if you have only small area to build or place a home at.
If you can afford Bay City lot plus a little more I know there are several designers/builders who build you custom home or check out forgot her name but she is wife of Incanus does really great houses with stairs but I don't know if they fit on a 512m lot.
Winter Ventura built my first home for pretty cheap I gave her 2000L for about 4 hours of work when I was new.
Yet I am creator found I wanted to build my own space but at the time I was pretty clueless in everything and just wanted a home.
She helped me do pretty good build for a very small lot when I had my first land for good price.
Not sure if she still does that though any more.

Thanks for the name check FD - it's Fatima Ur, and she has her houses rezzed on Fatimas Art. Bear in mind that it's a general USA Victorian theme, so no modern builds. And we are WAY too busy to do custom builds anymore, but I'm sure deals could be done about elements

Inc

Maybe the moles are hoping to get re-hired by land purchasers?

My house has such a staircase. It's a very convincing texture, too.

I like stairs too, Wildefire I have lived in two SL homes with spiral staircases (they really aren't difficult to navigate once you get the hang of it) and am planning on putting a staircase in the building where I relocate my shop.

Tip: I took a building class at NCI - I think it was called Prim Efficient Building. We built a house at 1/10 scale using tips and tricks to keep the prims down but still have a very nice two-story house.

A staircase was made in that build from a ramp with a sculptie on top of it. I think it looked great and plan to translate that idea to my new shop.

I'd send the items to you but they're no trans. I really do recommend that class, though!!

Now that Havok 4 is here, you need even MORE prims to do stairs, now that you can't go up .5m steps. That or use sculpties with a ramp, or throw on an invisible ramp.

Personally, I dislike seeing ramps inside houses. I prefer to see actual steps. I find the ramps to be ugly, and take up a lot of space, typically rendering a large section of the floor to limited use. I use teleporters so that the full use of the floor is available.

I agree. I don't sell prefabs (and I'm not a very prolific builder at all) but I did dabble with a couple of 110-125 prim homes for a bit and they all had stairs. Real prim stairs for that matter, with an invisible ramp overlaid for smoother walking. They don't *have* to take up tons of usable space, and prims used here are like anything else - you either think they're worth it or you don't, and I do. Same goes for alpha walls - I'd *much* rather use 4 more prims on a wall to make a real window and not suffer alpha flashing with plants and furniture and hair and trees outside etc. etc.

If I ever use these it'll be to outfit rental properties on a sim of my own, so I get to call the shots

personally, I like prim stairs.. I DON'T like sculpty stairs (because they tend to load very slow, and not look passable until they DO load).

I like teleporting.. I like single level builds, and I do like stairs. Ramps are cool too (especially when done up as escallators).

But when doing prefabbed housing, prim limits are a MAJOR selling factor. Sculpty stairs have to be unlinked in many cases (so that the sculpt stairs can be phantom). Prim saving tricks (like L-Shaped prims to half the number of steps) look good from the step side, NOT SO GOOD from the backside, And ramps very often FEEL cheap.

The way that cameras can "slip through" walls and get stuck behind things, staircases, tend to be annoying to navigate.. (particularly corkscrew staircases and ramps, which I think LL should ban).

Simple sitjump teleporters are HUGELY preferred by me for popping around a building.. but then again, I do make use of stairs from time to time.

If your build calls for stairs.. and doesn't look good with a ramp.. I PROMISE YOU it won't look good with a floating sphere where the stairs SHOULD be... skip the sculpts PARTICULARLY if you're building is a STORE. I won't try to plow through floating spheres in the hopes that they're really sculpty stairs. Unloaded stairs will just make sure I never make it INTO your store, to shop.

if you NEED steps to make it look right, then invest 8-10 prims, and do it the RIGHT way.

Prim Type: Box
Cut B:.125 E:.875
Size X:1m, Y:.375m, Z:8m
Rotation: X:270 Y:0, Z:0

All of my steps are .5m and nobody I know has a problem with them. Even my tiny avatar can go up them since Havoc 4.

Another issue sometimes with ramps is you can suddenly fall through them I have experienced this a few times trying to do or when friends have used them.

One flight of stairs can use up as many prims as an entire house. So teleports make more sense.

That is either one small and low prim house or one huge flight of stairs. I have about 8m between my first and second floors. I have a set of stairs gong between them, with prim carpet on them (Essentially a second set of stairs). It takes 16 prims. It doesn't look disproportionate, and doesn't look clunky, in my opinion.

Use cut to make one prim into two stairs. Continue thusly.

Seriously, if you have a house under 16 prims, it's going to be small, which is fine and all, but you aren't going to need stairs in most cases. And if you do need stairs in a 16 prim house, you are going to be willing to use a ramp instead, because obviously you don't care too much about things looking particularly detailed with any quality (I count alpha texture walls as lower quality, personally, because of their problems)

And a single flight of stairs can also be 2 prims, one sculpt one ramp, and look just fine. Personally I like full prim more, though both can look lovely.

I tested this a while back, on Havoc 4 you can walk up .65m steps, at .66m you have no chance, sometimes you need a short run up to the first step, but in general .65m is easily doable.

I go for ramps some of my avatars are tracked or wheeled and plus it allows disabled access. Also having a ramp means when TP is down and you have a virtual fire you can get out in a hurry rather than having to remove a wall to escape. Even simple TP's have running scripts too, how that compares to a single prim ramp for lag generation, I'm not sure.
Also you have to explain to people how to "follow me upstairs" where walking up a ramp is a dead giveaway.
But each to his own, why do we bother with opening doors or even doors between rooms when you can TP into the yard or garage, or even from the loungeroom to the bedroom.

I cant stand ramps or teleports in homes, when I build a structure I want it to look as true as possible, including as much scale as possible so every house I make has stairs if it has more than one level. Some include sliding panels with drop down ladders (usually to attics, terraces, or unusually small spaces) - sometimes I will use a sculpted stair other times not - just depends on the build I guess where I need to trim prims and where I dont.

But I agree this has always bugged me and drove me crazy when I first looked for a home and didnt quite have the know how yet to make my own (or was too lazy/busy to do so).