one object linked house -- why not?

I've built several houses and more recently found a solution for linked doors. When I found that, I went back and updated all of my builds to use them and the majority are one linked object (the only exceptions being those that are over 255 prims) but I continue to see houses and buildings that are built in parts and put together on rezz by rezz-faux or another rezzing tool. My question is this: is there a good reason for a building to be made this way? Is there a reason that making houses and buildings a single linked object is a bad thing? I don't use megaprims in my builds for the most part.

All I can think of is clashing scripts, some builders can't script, so when one script clashes with another I assume the simplest method of getting them all to work is not having them all with the same root prim, just a thought, not saying it's a real fact.

Well, one thing that I learned last weekend was that the range of llListen is based on the object's root prim, not the prim containing the actual script. That was a very weird time, to say the least. I stand in my dining room and issue voice commands to my door and it works. I step out onto the deck and it doesn't. Easy enough to work around and that's not going to stop me from linking doors but that was a head-scratcher for a while.

Certainly one of the biggest reasons for unlinked doors is people using door scripts that are not written to allow them to be linked. It's harder than you may think, for example, to write a script for a sliding door that works perfectly either linked or unlinked, at any operating angle, and at any angle to an arbitrarily rotated root prim. It can certainly be done, but the scripting for a good, linkable door is a great deal more complex than just moving an unlinked prim back and forth.

If the house is over 255 prims, or if the house is large enough that the entire house can not fit within the linkability sphere (about a 42M diameter sphere), then you have no choice but to use multiple linksets. For example, a 50 M tall lighthouse tower is going to have to be at least two linksets, no matter how few prims you use, because the top and the bottom are too far apart to link.

If you are using some types of scripted doors, it is simply not possible to link them to the build. For example, a multi-prim door, with prim parts for door knobs or push bars; or for a door shape impossible with a cut box prim, like a circular, plug-shaped airlock door that hinges on one rim of the circle.

I will also tend to at least initially create a building as one linkset per floor, so I can readily lift the roof or the upper stories up and out of the way when retexturing, remodeling, or simply placing a lot of content into the house. If the roof is one linkset, and the second story as another, and the ground floor is a third, it's easy to lift the roof and second floor, put stuff in the lower floor, undo the move of the second floor to put it perfectly back in place, put stuff in the second floor, and then undo the move of the roof to put it perfectly back in place.

Good points, and I thank you for your reply. I will not dispute the convenience of being able to lift a section out of the way when doing some things and indeed, I've done that myself during the build phase.

I've spent some time customizing a door script to support sliding doors, swinging doors, auto-close, auto-open, lockable, access list including an "enforcer" group of non-owners that can manage the lists. It even has the ability to open part of or more than the standard 90 degree rotation for swinging doors. I developed and used this feature for pull-down attic stairs in my house. As far as I know, I have the only house in SL equipped with that. My house is set on the land at 29 degrees off the axis (because of the way my island was laid down by the estate owner) and the linked sliding doors work just fine but your comments reminded me that I need to test that at a variety of angles.

Yep. I'm about to release a new set of linkable sliding doors right now, and the worst nightnare in it was conmpensating for not just the angle the doors needed to be at, but also for the possibility that the root prim might be at any random rotation. Check the scripting tips forums and there are some excellent pointers there for dealing with those issues, from when I was asking for help myself.

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My own new doors can work at any angle - in a wall, floor, ceiling, angled cellar door, wacky improbable angle... and with the root prim at any angle. And all with no manual script adjustments at all.

Thank you.

should it not be that the script gets the prims pos and rotation on click or other input and then moves relative to that initial location. That is the way all sliding doors that work properly do it.

None of my door scripts ever seemed to have a issue with any of the weirdness you are describing. I keep hearing about all these limitations about door scripts and never have I seen any of this, except on some of the ones that are posted in the library and some antiquated commercially available scripts that a lot of builders used to buy.

Reading the thread you referenced (and not able to be in SL at the moment) I'm a bit puzzled. Are you doing multi-prim linked doors? I deliberately didn't because inevitably, lag is going to make one prim move/rotate and the other will be delayed behind it. It will create a non-seamless opening action that I would like to stay away from but that's just me. You're of course free to do as you like.

If your doors are only one prim, I don't understand why you have to worry about the root prim? llSetLocalRot works fine for me for the swinging door and llSetPos is working for the sliding door. Again, I have to do some more testing later but as it is right now, the house is not on an elemental compass point and all of my doors work perfectly. Or maybe they don't and I just don't know about it yet. We'll see.

I make doors with way more than 4 panels that are linked and there is not a lag problem and they all open /close together at their defined speed. There is a difference in how fast they open and close each time because the movement is client side so every viewer will see them slightly different. I know this because I spend a great deal of time trying to match the speed of doors with custom sounds.

I would like to see a sample of your work when I'm in world. Do you have a shop?

One reason for using Rez-faux instead of linking is if the parts are just too far apart to link.

Another is to preserve sit targets.

Another is to keep phantom prims phantom and solid ones solid.

...or did I misunderstand something?

You didn't miss anything. Those are good reasons if they're present in the build. But assuming that

(1) the build is 255 prims or fewer
(2) there is no greater than 40m distance between any two prims
(3) no phantom prims

I can't think of a good reason to not link it into one object. I typically don't install poses / sit targets in houses as I prefer to build realistically meaning I build stairs instead of relying on teleporters. I also presume that the sit target could be overridden with modifications to the script or configuration if it is linked into the build but I have little experience with that so I'm not 100% positive.

What I am doing in my case is making door sets that have a door frame, within which are either one or two single-prim doors that, depending on the version, hinge open, or operate as pocket doors, or operate as patio doors do. Adjust the any of the X, Y or Z dimensions of the frame, or the hollow of the frame, and the doors recalibrate on first subsequent use, resizing and positioning perfectly in the frame, with no need to ever touch a script.

About prims and the size of the build.

Most people build way too large, adding to the need for multi-object builds. Most avatars are somewhere between 6'6" and 8' tall, many people overcompensate for that and create builds that are scaled up double-size or larger. Most of the prefabs I've seen have been at least twice the size they should have been. When building like that, it really drives up the number of times you're going to hit that "prims too far apart" message when trying to link the whole thing.

Building smaller not only reduces this problem, but also lets you build with the same amount, or greater, detail in fewer prims. (A 10x10 floor is one prim. A 20x20 floor is 4 prims. Now apply that to walls, stairs, ceilings, et all and you start saving an impressive number of prims pretty quickly. The larger the build, the more prims you save by downscaling.) On top of this, it gives the person using the building much more land area to work with. Meaning you're potential market grows to include people with smaller land parcels, and people who want multiple buildings on one parcel will actually have room for that.

Of course, standard residential ceiling height is around 244cm, or about 8' tall, in SL it's not uncommon to see avatars taller than that and the SL camera is poorly placed somewhere way over and behind the avatar's head so you need to build taller so the people inside can actually see anything.

Building ceilings at about 350cm will be enough to accommodate the SL camera, without looking too skewed if you build to scale area-wise.

I have 2 or 3 shops , there are hundreds of Doors in them and many thousands of them installed all over the place. If you want I can show you some of the custom ones I made that are way beyond the retail ones...

The diversity of SL avatars is really a challenge. Take an avatar at max height, add on some styly tall shoes, and then toss some wings on top of that and you do need to those taller ceilings. It's easier to make high ceilings than to mod a house at a later point to accommodate some of the avatar sizes and attachments.

in addition to preserving sit targets, phantom parts, etc... multiprim doors work best unattached (there is a method that can do them as attached but it's prone to spotty behaviors, and the most effective method requires several scripts, instead of one). there is no reason a single prim door/window/lid/etc shouldn't be able to be linked with a proper script (although poorly thought out one abound)

As long as it's mod/copy it would be great. I just hate a house that have a room I don't want and can't modify it.

additional reason:
sometimes it's easier to script a certain set of prims to do specific actions based on their link numbers rather than looking for the prim you need to modify by it's name/description.

You do need to build taller, yes, but not as tall as most people go. Unless you're talking those huge prim robot and dragon avatars. But generally people aren't buying prefab houses for avatars like those. 3.5m tall ceilings will work with pretty much the tallest avatar anyone is likely to use, with room to spare for the camera. Of course, we're talking houses here, not barns, warehouses, or clubs (which are still generally way oversized, but you would want a taller ceiling than you'd expect in a house).

It is a big problem that most avatars are about 7' tall, though. I wish LL just gave everyone height info right from the get go so everyone would be working with the same information. Ironically, that would create more variety in avatar heights (since right now, most people avoid avatars under 6' like they were the plague), but content creators could at least work with reasonable assumptions about their target market, and at that point uber tall avatars wouldn't be made with the expectation of everything being upscaled for them. That defeats the point of being uber-tall, afterall. ^^