A Warning to Land Newbies about "Low Prim" Sims

Someone is advertising the "sale" of a pre-furnished "low prim" sim (island) in a couple sub-forums here, and I want to make sure any SL newcomers understand what they're getting into here:

Low-prim sims (also called "openspaces" or "voids" are special regions that run at 1/4 the performance of a regular sim, and only have 1/8 the number of available prims. They were intended to give estate owners an inexspensive way to add more water or land to their estates for scenery or sailing, etc.

Openspace sims CAN be nice places for one or two residents to live, so long as you understand the limitations. They don't perform well with a ton of scripts running, and you can never increase that total-sim prim limit of 1875 prims.

HERE'S MY WARNING: This person is advertising the "sale" of an openspace sim for L$60,000 and claims this sim is already furnished with 16 skyboxes for rental purposes. While I doubt many boxes are currently rented out, an openspace sim is NOT an ideal place for multiple people to live. One or maybe two residents can live happy lives on one of these sims, but not 16 families! Given the prim limits, each of these residents would have only 117 prims to deal with INCLUDING prims used for their apartments and pre-arranged furnishings.

I have two problems with what this person's doing.
1. You cannot truly sell a single openspace sim to another resident. They are transfered in bunches of 4 only. Linden Lab will not transfer ownership of a single openspace sim to another resident.
2. If that sim ever gets any tenants, those poor people will have a terrible experience if they end up using the very few prims they have to rez scripted furniture and whatnot. (They already have sexbeds installed in every room.)

Please pay close attention to the wording of such advertisements and know the limits of SL land ownership and renting.

This is the thing that concerns me actually. This is certainly the case (otherwise, I would perhaps be in the market for one from LL myself, and certainly they would be very popular). The advertisements seem to indicate that all that is required is LL tier. I would be interested to see a bit of clarification there.

this post is as misleading as the post you reffer to

they are selling the land (not the island if you read carefully) WICH is setup as 16 rentals at a price of 60k and $120 tier a month set by the estate owner


btw, i agree with the 2-3 people normally per void and preffed just 1

Considering that an OpenSpaces sim usually can only handle 10 avatars at a time, this is especially suspect. I have developed quite a few OpenSpaces sims for clients. And all of them were one household max per Openspaces sim. The very idea of expecting 16 rentals to co-exist in one OpenSpaces sim is rather absurd.

Renting out an *entire* OpenSpaces sim to a single tenant is like renting an 8K M2 parcel, but getting all the land area and space around your place that you'd have with a full sim. It can be wonderful for a small group of people. But NOT for more than 10 at a time!

They got considerably better once put on class 5 hardware.

It's true, the class 4's have a tough time with 10+ avatars. But I've had a class 5 openspace filled to the maximum 100 avatars and .99 time dilation (NOT kidding!).

There were some modest script lag issues, but the region is designed intelligently (not too much load to begin with) and yes, it does have a reasonably significant number of structures in it.

The secret? It's simple. With only 1875 prims, the texture cache doesn't overload as readily as a full sim, so the 'avatar empty' load is low, and reasonable. Even though there is reduced performance, there is also significantly reduced demand on performance.

In fact, openspace sims on class 5 hardware have become rather prized in Caledon as places capable of large events. I'd never dream of trying it on class 4 hardware, though.

The region is much as it was on that day even now - Caledon Carntaigh, during one of Gabrielle Riel's events - Carl Metropolitan of NCI was a witness.

I rent an open space sim at Isles of Fatima and we just had our rez party there. There were at least 40 people there for about 3 hours flying all over the sim. I also have 4 automatic skaters and one sleigh ride, all scripted, about 10 sets of poseballs and before anyone arrived there were around 150 prims free.

There was very little lag during the event (*much* less than I would have expected with 40 people in any area) and all the scripted rides etc. worked just fine most of the time. Well ok, Fatima managed to sink the sleigh but we forgave her and all the reindeer survived

Thank you for the clarification, Desmond. I was basing my statements on the 10 Avatar limit on what I originally read in the Sim Owner's documentation from LL on OpenSpaces sims. in which they originally defaulted to no more than ten in a sim.

I just went back to several Class 5 OpenSpaces sims that I helped build, and sure enough, a class 5 OpenSpaces sim defaults to 40 avatars, not 10.

I never understood why a 1/4 price sim only gives you 1/8 prims instead of 1/4, where do the extra prims go?
If it were the same I guess many would prefer the low prim sims to get more space around them for water/ grass etc and buffereing from neighbours rather than normal sims.

I rent a (full) openspace sim and I am very happy there. I had some visitors (never a lag problem) but not a big event so far.

On the upside, you get lots of space and the nicest surrounding money will buy in SL. Only when I return for a visit to the mainland I realise how used I get to sunsets on the sea.

On the downside, you need to be somewhat careful with prims and scripts. First, huge builds are out. It's an incentive to build in a prim saving way. Second, heavily scripted objects like weather generators or freely moving animals won't run reliably. Also, megaprims placed near the region border may induce noticeable lag.