Easy way to subdivide land?

Hi all,

I have just purchased an Island, and the first thing I want to do is to subdivide the entire sim of 65,536sq m into a 4x4 grid of 4096sqm each.

Flying high and trying to select plots with the Select Tool under the Edit Terraforming menu, is not for the faint-hearted. It is next to impossible to get clean lines, starting from clean starting locations.

Does anyone know if there is an easy way to do this, and/or any land subdivision tools?

Regards to all

Rock

Firstly, your maths is wrong... you'd get 16 4096 plots on an island.

The easiest thing would be to make a linked set of prims to cover the area you want, then place them out, and then highlight the land and cut underneath it.

But why would you want back-to-back plots anyway? Assuming you're cutting it up for resale, wouldn't you want to add some kind of landscaping or quality in there as well? Breathing space between plots?

Take a look - when the grid comes back up, and assuming it's still there - at Independent Island, which Lewis recently built and landscaped to a customer specification. It's got 20 nice rental plots, but more importantly it actually looks designed and like it should be there, rather than a patchwork of cookie cutter plots.

Making rental land attractive is far more important than maximising your profit margin - if the place doesn't look good, then people won't want to live there, period. I've seen some of the rental places that are 'back to back', and wouldn't live on them if you paid me. I'm stuck in a city in real life, living almost back to back to another row of people - why would I want to live in a concrete jungle in Second Life?

Broccoli

I don't know of a good way, in world, to make clean boundary lines.
1. in world, get as close as you can. When property lines aren't right, then cut off some smaller pieces and join them up with neighboring plots. Tedious.
2. offline, you can download the Terrain file. Channel 4 in the RAW file allows you to identify individual parcels of land. I've not used Channel 4, but other RAW capabilities are quick and easy to up and download. (There are several threads running on how to edit offline. Search on RAW and TERRAIN for tips on offline software)

If you're only doing one island, its probably faster just to go ahead and do it inworld--unless you like the challenges of 'even more new software to play with!'

And to Broccoli's point:
Cutting up your Island into a 4 down by 4 across grid (=16) may be a good idea if you're targeting shop owners who want their own malls. I assume you'll be flattening it out to be billiard table smooth? Or perhaps the land is immaterial, you're just selling 16 spaces for sky boxes?

Personally, if this is a land based Island, I'm with Broccoli on this one, but it depends on what YOU want to do with the land. Looking at some of the shopping SIMS, the better ones, have some sort of central 'theme'. A town square, a central hub, even just a signpost and walkways that point out how to get from one store to another.

Your probably worried about 'just how am I gonna pay for this island thing?'
You're going to want LONG TERM and STABLE tenants. That means they are willing to stay, and are pleased to be coming to your Island.
My suggestion is you plan to "hold back" a percentage of the land to use as this common theme area. Raise your prices to cover this. Then, to attract and keep tenants happy, build out the 'hold back' areas. This is similar to the way commercial buildings work. Rented office space must somehow pay for the elevator lobby, the restrooms, the fire escapes, etc...

I think 10-15% of a SIM is a reasonable hold-back for common use. Many sims have much more.

Hi Sterling,

You got both right. The Islnad is to be split up into a 4x4 grid (=16) plots of 4096 sq m.

The land is not being built on at all, except for a small private beach area for the use of the residents and their guests, as all the residents will be in SkyPalaces (11) and 1 SkyPalace Alcazar.

I am reserving 1000prims for the beach area.

I just wish LL would provide an easy way to divide an entire sim into 2, 4, 8, 16 etc, instead of all this flying high nonsense and doing it all by hand.

Thanks for the useful response.

Rock