Building in the sky vs on the ground

I could use some advice. I'm building on an 8k sqm parcel, about 1,800 prims. I'm making a very large cave with some mega prims, sculpties, flexi prims, a fair number of textures and just a few scripted objects. This is large, but I think it looks ok from the surrounding area - it mostly blends in well enough with the landscape. The scripts are mostly animated textures and a couple of particle effects (fire and mist). The textures are all 512x512 or smaller.

The land is on an old continent, so I assume it runs on older hardware. It's on Route 2 and there's quite a bit of traffic in the area.

I'm thinking maybe this whole thing should be done in the sky, especially where the building limits have been raised now. As far as I know, the benefit of building in the sky is that it would be outside the draw distance for most traffic, so other people don't need to load my build unless they choose to tp to it.

There's probably a lot I don't know about this, so any advice will be a big help. thanks

Another wonderful perk of building in the sky is "less" lag. Much less lag. Of course if your cave is heavily scripted etc..., you'll end up with lag nonetheless, however less than if you were on the ground among other scripted/etc. builds.

Thanks Moxz, I've only used a couple of scripted objects. Why is there so much less lag in the sky? Is it only about the number of textures you need to load?

About other scripted builds in the area, I thought that if a script lagged a server then it would impact anyone on that server - no matter how high you are. Even if you can't see the scripted object. Is that wrong? thanks again...

alot of it has to do with whats in your view range. something up at say 1500 feet is most likely not going to have anything else in it's view range. even at max.

/me loves caves. "can i have a SLurl Please?"

personally i found cave building alot easier on the ground where i can use the terraforming tools to my advantage, i'm asuming your mainland tho? that makes things harder with the +/- 5 meter limit. but it can still save you many prims and it will make your floor more natural looking.

-Crunch

I'll send you a LM Crunch. The parcel is steep hillside, so I've had to make prim floors anyways.

Most of the mainland servers were upgraded to class 5 hardware quite a while ago, so that isn't likely to be a concern for you.

Make sure you have a teleporter that will work at higher altitudes. Most of the standard ones still won't work above 768 Meters.

Thanks Ceera. I didn't know either of those.

I have always found building in the sky, way less laggy. My build deck is at 550 m, I haven't needed to move it since placing it.

I don't bother with TP gadgets, they are unreliable and slow sometimes. Use regular landmarks which mostly are instant and can take you any height.