Prefab Builders: Where are the stairs?

I find stairs to be a no-win topic. People have very definite tastes in one direction or the other. You either have to build two models of every house or you have to pick a direction and run with it.

Years ago I remember buying one of your 2-floor skyboxes, and I chose it partly because of the thoughtfully-placed stairs. (A ramp leading up to the second level from the balcony entryway on the first floor.)

To be honest, I build with both depending on the style of the house. I've taken out ramps/stairs fairly often by custom request. What I find is that a lot of people really want "private" rooms to be reached by teleport only, so that's the way most of my newer houses have been built. For everyone that loves spiral ramps, there is someone who hates spiral ramps. For everyone who likes stairs and ramps there is someone who wants to teleport everywhere. You will never please every single person to TP's into your store, so I just go with the design flow of what I'm building - some designs lend themselves to stairs/ramps and some don't.

I prefer local teleports myself, but we do include stairs (textured ramps or sculpties) in many of our residences. When possible, I include both.

Most of my prefabs do have teleport systems, but they are very simple to configure and this is explained in the instructions. But, if anyone struggles with this, and I have the time (I can usually squeeze people in, lol), then I'll come and configure them for you, no extra charge.

A couple of my slightly larger, slightly higher prim houses have stairs/ramps, but this is mainly down to more available space to play with. The 63 Prim Home and Kramer Home (82 prims) are both available to view at my main store in Nuclear, the Kramer is via the TP to the prefab platform.

I try to keep all my prefabs as low prim as possible, but still look as realistic as possible too. They are intended for smaller plots where prims are in short supply, but if anyone needed a custom staircase I'd happily oblige!

I think the buyer should be able to have the kind of house they want. It depends on the layout of the house, but it should make sense from an architectural standpoint. If you have a two-story house, is there a visual connection between the two floors, or are you just stacking up rooms because you need the space? I don't believe that buildings in SL need to mimic RL buildings, but I try to have my houses make some kind of sense. We are free to ignore structure, circulation, heating, and all kinds of PITA RL issues, but then what do you use as a logic for your design? I think as long as the house has its own internal logic, it is ok. What matters is that the buyer should be able to use it the way she wants to.

I saw the most amazing house yesterday, created by Random Calliope. It was all angles. It probably could never be built in RL, even with all the zoning and building code waivers you could wish for.

It was delightful.

I have a more mundane suggestion for transport from one floor to another...



Speaking seriously though, a regular ramp with an embedded sculpty could make a moderately "okay-ish" staircase. The only negative is that a sculpty doesn't do sharp edges well at all.

One phantom sculpty prim and one ramp prim are all it takes to have decent looking stairs.

Sculpties do sharp edges just fine hon. The creator just has to do it right, and upload the texture losslessly.

I have many sculpt maps with 'perfect' straight edges.

I thought about the different houses I have lived in and decided that I prefer the looks of a staircase or ramp over not having any *visible* means of getting to the other floors.

That said, I seldom really use them because they are sometimes a pain to navigate. I have a tendency to create LMs to each floor and use those.

I've seen a few builders using stairs in their prefabs, usually towards the luxury end because of the extra prim-cost (although the ramp-and-sculpt solution reduces that a lot). I don't mind stairs, but I use single-click TPs to get from ground to skybox and made them look like lifts. I've used the same thing to go between floors in builds too.

I'm not a big fan of networked TPs that need several clicks to operate, but I can see their necessity when you have a lot of destinations to cover.

I've done that! I've also 'solved' the problem by putting cushions with sit targets on each floor. Cam upstairs, right-click, sit... done. I'm hopeless, I know... I keep meaning to find or buy one of those localized upstairs/downstairs teleporters but never get around to it.

Then again, I guess the question of stairs, ramps or teleports if I were buying a house would be answered by how well they fit the house. My skyhome is a complete, impossible fantasy. I spent weeks trying to figure out what kind of base to put under my bed, until I realized it didn't HAVE to have a base. It floats. Now, I'm working on the matching chairs.

I sure do love SL...

In the past when i designed prefabs for 512sqm or 1024 sqm plots I very rarely even considered stairs. Designs for 1536 sqm plots and above are more likely to feature stairs but it is still good to keep builds as low prim as possible. In 2006 I conducted a customer survey over 3 months on lots of issues one of then being stairs. of 312 people who took the survey, 79% prefered local TP's, 11% prefered stairs 10% were undecided. The general concensus was that residents would rather use TP's and save the prims for other objects.

All of my teleports are allready set up and work as soon as the build is rezzed. They are also easily customisable if people choose to relocate them. Poeple who expect their customers to set up their own teleports after rezzing need to re-adress their business model. we live in a 'plug and play' generation so everything needs to be as simple and user friendly as possible with minimal set-up.

Ramps have their place, more so in commercial builds and I have only ever seen a few instances where a ramp looks perfect in a residential prefab. If it doesnt look perfect then it shouldnt be included imho

Spiral ramps/walkways are unreliable in my experience, occasionally people fall through them, or cant even walk up them. I need a staircase to work 100% of the time so wouldnt even consider using a one or 2 prim spiral.

Sculpties....ah now here is the revolution and sculpties pretty much blow the "prim heavy" stairs argument out of the water. Now you can create fantastic looking stairs with 1 or 2 prims then I think we'll be seeing allot more stairs than we did in past. Personally, i am now developing deisgns of all sizes with stairs more often, infact I include both TP's and stairs in builds to make movement around the build as convenient as possibe.

On a related note, I am finding that a few of my higher prim 512sqm prefabs are now selling allot better. Both are 50 - 60 prims and unsuprisingly they didnt sell well for that plot size in the past. However now furniture designers are incorporating sculpties in their designs then it means people can save prims on their furnishing and get higher prim houses.

Pork!