A Question of Size

I've got an 8 prim yurt and a very large yard on 512. The yurt is on a platform which gives it a back porch and a small front porch, and the garden takes up the rest of the property. I still have about 50 prims left to play with. Needless to say, I am building a lot of wearbles these days. Also, look into making textures. Build smarter not bigger.

Use Search and Land For Sale.
Search for land less than or equal to 512m.
There will be pages and pages of it.

Visit random parcels.
Some may have open parcels beside them. Some may have neighbour's walls built right up to the boundary - Low walls, great towering walls.
The odds are that they will be surrounded by other 512 parcels. 512's often travel in packs. Look at the builds on them.

You'll soon get a feel for for what a 512 actually is in (the real) SL. You'll get a perception of space that you'll never get in a sandbox.
Ditto for 1024 etc.

Well let's see a 512 sq meter plot is equal to a about 5,496 sq feet. So a home that size would look like this.

... and that's kind of the problem with comparing SL and RL architecture: there's a lot in that nice suburban home floorplan that doesn't make a lot of sense in SL. Starting with the garage: unless one's parcel happens to be on a road and one is really eager to explore the 0,0,0 depths of neighboring sims, it's not terribly useful to rez one's car at one's house.

And then we could evaluate each room to see just what it adds to the SL experience of the house. The utility room, for example: somehow I've managed to live my whole SL existence without ever once role-playing laundry day. A kitchen has a bit more potential--mostly because there are some fair kitchen-chore animations--but it's hardly essential. The only rooms a house needs are those that one wants to play in--for whatever "play" means to the homeowner.

And with that in mind, I used to offer 3-storey skyboxes on 256sq.m. parcels, and people were happy starting out--and staying--in those little boxes. (I think there'd be a market for them still, but I eventually learned that the time consumed by a tenant was anything but constant, and completely uncorrelated with parcel size. )

[Edit: Damn! I was just about to tweak Ceera for having very big feet! But then the post disappeared. ]

Not by half. That floor plan is 65 feet from the outer wall of the master bedroom to the inner wall of the farage, plus another 27 feet for the garage... That is 83.85 Meters long, even if you keep it at a 1:1 scale. You'd need 4 512 M2 lots dto even fit the building's footprint, and then would have zero yard between your walls and the edge of your parcel.

It would take at least nine 512 M2 parcels to fit that footprint and have any yard around it, and you'd feel like Alice In Wonderland, in her oversized period, bumping your forehead on the tops of the supposedly 8 foot high door frames...

Yup, I was on a phone call and distracted when I made my earlier post, and was doing the conversion for meters to yards, rather than to feet. So I thought the lots needed to be 3x larger than they actually do.

In RL it is a row house with a small front and back lawn. You'd have enough to keep a Scottie happy, but you probably would need to walk a labrador...

I dunno, Qie, there are some interesting things that can be done on TOP of a washing machine. But you're right.. most SL houses don't have garages, utility rooms, kitchens, or bathrooms. Thank Goodness. I like to leave the sheer nugacity of RL behind. <-- New Word I Learned Today.

Morgana, I live quite comfortably on a 1024. Others have recommended that you turn on property lines... this is under the View Menu, just FYI. These will give you a good idea of size, and on each plot you can right click on the parcel and choose About Land, which will tell you the actual size.

OK, I went in-world, marked off a 512 parcel, and took some pics to give you an idea of scale:



The above pic shows a 512 M2 parcel, from the inside edges of the sidewalks, to the plywood fences. The sidewalks are outside the parcel edges, and are 2M wide, with 1M squares on the pavement. That's me in the lot, and my avatar is 5'7" tall (small by SL standards) as measured with an avatar ruler. And I'm wearing high heels.



This pic shows the same lot with a 1-room bungalo dropped on it. That is a 10 M wide by 20 M long building, counting the front patio, and has barely enough room inside for a 150 M2 floorspace studio apartment with a queen size bed, a couch, and a kitchenette with a counter to eat at. That small building is 57 prims, so you'd have only 50 prims free for furnishings, fence, and plants.

FYI - The pics were taken in the RUCE 4 sim, which I am building for Rutgers University. So far, it just has the streets and sidewalks around the edges, built at 1.5x scale, which works extremely well with most typical SL cars and avatars. The sim will eventually house school buildings for in-world classes, and a student store and recreation center for their students and faculty. It's one of 4 sims I am building for them.

If you don't spend more than 17 prims on the house, you can have a nicely decorated ranch, if you use low prim furniture.

You just learned the word "behind?"

Which, as mentioned before, is completely unnecessary.

Awesome pics, Ceera! Very helpful!

I like this approach Everyone has their own personal tastes, budget, reasons for preferring certain amounts of land over another. This thread has done a really good job (for the most part) of giving the original posters ideas of what to expect with different size plots.

Having begun in SL living in a one-room apt. that I had decorated very nicely to my taste with prims left over, ~anything~ seems larger than that.

I'm finding in my RL as well as SL that I am more and more going the way of the quote above and enjoying less clutter and less stuff (I always think of George Carlin when I say that word) to deal with.

Back to reading more of the thread....

I just had a chance to peek at my build while taking space and size into consideration. The thing is... It's so blended in to the build around it, it's difficult to say where it starts and ends. (o.o)

That said, my basement is bleeding HUGE! Hits the parcel boundaries on three sides and It's pretty sparsely decorated with some Japanese walls and tatami mats. And, I plan on scattering pillows around soon. (^_^)

But, for what it is, I'm finding I have more than enough space for whatever I want to do. Heh.... Luck of the draw I guess. =^-^=

I sooooo wanted this thread to be about something other than what it is about.

That's another good point - style of furniture.

One can furnish a home in Asian style very nicely for relatively few prims just due to the inherent minimalism of most Asian furniture. By contrast, I also love Victorian furniture and was browsing through some stores one day and saw a piece I loved - but it contained almost the same number of prims as our entire living room/bedroom/tea room!

If anyone begins making low-prim Victorian furniture, please let me know!!

Low prim Rococo would be a miracle. =^-^=

When furnishing, its good to bear in mind some points...

Freebie furniture is often free because it didnt sell well, and didnt sell well because of its high prim count. (Of course thats not true of all freebie furniture, but you do need to check in the edit box to find out what you are putting down).

Learn to look at your furniture with a 'builder's eye' and think about what you can remove, and still keep the spirit and style of the piece. If you take things apart its amazing sometimes just how many you can delete and still have a good piece. This is also true of plants and trees. Most plants are three flat planes intersecting so you get an all round view of the bush or plant, but if you are not toooooo picky about realism you can take one off, and get four for the cost of three. When you are working with only 117 prims, every prim you save is a bonus.

Get yourself a box of megaprims which come in a huge variety of sizes now and you can save one or two prims per wall or floor section. And learn to use hollow and path cut. These are your friends when you become a prim whore....


imogen

Not low prim, but I have some stuff located in the house next to Curtis Dresler, Accountant at the Kaw Trading Post that was reasonable - each chair was like 10 prims and the tables 5 - and I think they look pretty good. You'd have to edit check to see who made them, but I keep thinking some place in Caledon (surprise). I could check, but I'm doing a coffeehouse tonight and preparing for a trip tomorrow, so won't be on-line for long until Sunday afternoon...

My first plot of land in SL was a 512 plot, and I think it's great to start out with this size. It teaches you the value of a prim, and also teaches you to build when you can't find something low-prim enough to suit your needs! I remember getting very creative with that plot, and in a way it was a lot more challenging to use the prims wisely than I have with the larger land I own these days.

I still have a 512 plot in Lusk, and it's been a joy tinkering with it, trying to fill it without sacrificing detail and ending up with a sparse plot. But yeah, I ended up with a temp rezzer eventually, but only to house a piano (which, on its own would have been 50 prims). The most fun is trying to change it for the seasons and holidays; taking away a picture here, a plant there, so that I can add snow and Christmas lights, etc.

If you can afford it get a 1536. Good bargain as you get uour free 512 and pay only $8 a month for the rest. You have sufficient space and prims to work with, and options when you want to sell and trade up to a larger parcel.

I never thought of that, 1024 would cost me $5 a month (with my free 512) so for an extra $3 i get a lot more .. hmm thanks! thats something to think about if i ever decide or need to go bigger

Thanks Curtis...will have to check that out