Temp-rezzing to circumvent prim limits on your land

Okay, so you agree that the 15000 limit is there for performance reasons. Everyone knows that that limit is there because that's what the lindens have determined is the most prims one sim can handle. What's the point of tossing about statements like "I highly suspect the actual prim limit on a sim is higher than the imposed build limit of 15000" and picking a "good-seeming" number like 16384? I follow your logic on why 16384 seems nice, but seeming nice doesn't change at all the fact that lindens have capped the number of prims in a region to 15000 for performance reasons. Since you just said you agree with that, your original argument that we can sort of squeeze a few more into the sim just fine is purposefully misleading.

Anyway, the point of all of this is that there's a finite amount of resources in each sim, and using re-rezzing temp-on-rez structures is a way of taking more resources than you're entitled to. That's clear as day. This definitely negatively affects the sim, and when you rez these prims, it's that many prims you're directly stealing from your neighbors, because they still come out of the sim-wide 15000 limit. I've AR'd someone for this practice before and LL told them to take the structure down.

Hello everyone. I was in a sim yesterday which appeared to be temp rezzing about 30 or 40 randomly placed 4-prim trees. I watched the sim statistics for a few minutes and noticed sim dilation dropping by only 0.01 everytime a new tree was rezzed. I am not sure if old trees were being de-rezzed, the script may simply be re-rezzing every 120 seconds instead of every 60 seconds with a force de-rez.

Anyway, I just wanted to post an update saying that it is possible to use temp rezzing responsibly to create the appearance of permanently placed objects without affecting sim performance.

I just read this thread...and found it very interesting. I run a marina in Chong, the purpose of which is to give free launching rights to those who wish to use that big lake to sail or boat in. I don't charge for this because I enjoy helping people use the lake and my land. But, I was looking for a way to keep my marina fun and yet open up a few more prims so several people could rez their boats without running out of resources.

This discussion has really opened my eyes. I'm not a scripter or a tech head. I really didn't understand the whole temp on rez thing. So, I came looking for some answers. Well, I think I found some. I don't have an issue with anyone on either side of this debate... Good points are being made by both sides. But, I must agree with what Lex Neva has said...regardless of the numbers, the end result is the same. There are a limited number of resources allowed for everyone's use, whatever that number may be. Those numbers are posted for all to see and were decided on by LL, for whatever reason. The system obviously has some little room in it to be used to all our benefit in small ways so that vendors can show us products they want to sell and we want to buy. But, using that to one's advantage to clearly circumvent the resource limits placed on all of us for the common good of all of us is, to me, irresponsible.

I pay, as we all do, an amount of real dollars per month to enjoy my land and the prims it allows me. If I take more than what I've paid for, then it may effect someone else. While I have a 'good reason' for it, it's still not fair, if my use gets in the way of someone else. In short, it's an ethical discussion more than a technical one. If we all police ourselves responsibly, then LL doesn't have to do it. If we don't, then we will eventually lose some of our freedom in world. If this issue becomes a problem for too many people, LL will have to make a decision about what to do about it. And, I'm sure it will be less attractive than what we have now.

So, for now, I'm not buying a temp rezzer. I'll just make some adjustments and live happily with what I have. After all, if I really need more prims, I can make the decision to buy more prims by increasing my tier.

Thank you all for this discussion. It was extremely helpful.

Flappy.

Amen! Keep temp-on-rez just that - temporary. There are perfectly legit uses for this feature, like bullets or goofy physics enabled objects. If you need more prims go to a sandbox or get more land like everyone else.

It appears to me that most of the posts objecting to temp-on-rez seem to be from people who don't really understand how rendering and resource management for simulated environments work. These sims are engineered with huge overage margins in mind.

If you temp-on-rez a few hundred extra prims, you're not actually stealing from anybody. Keep in mind that most modern PC games have to render tens of thousands - that's right, tens of thousands - of polygons for every single frame, and then do that between 30 and 60 times a second. The sims and the clients that connect to them are built to withstand much more abuse than we're capable of generating in most cases.

It's true that if everyone did it it would be a problem, but who wants to live in a flickering house, or walk through a flickering shopping mall? The incentive to jigger the system on that scale just isn't there.

So chill out and don't worry about that huge fountain in your neighbor's yard - it's not a sign of the Apocolypse, it's just a fountain.

You are absolutely right... I really know very little about the technical side of it. And, I don't worry about what my neighbor is doing. But, I do consider what I am doing. I try to be a responsible citizen of SL.

Now this is, as I said before, not a technical argument. But consider: prims are allocated according to sq.m. owned. We all pay tier to be able to utilize that land and those prims. Those who want more prims must pay more tier. Those who don't need as many can pay less. There are areas set aside where prims are not an issue (as noted earlier, sandboxes); it's interesting to note that those areas are for building, playing and removing those prims -- not permanently keep them functioning in place. Therefore, it seems to me the general intent in game is for all of us to stick fairly closely to the prims we've purchased. I believe the ability to temp on rez prims through scripting is for convenience and playability. I seriously doubt it was the intent of LL to give us this ability to get around prim limits permanently.

It's just a thought. We all have to decide for ourselves where we fall on this issue.

I have a degree in Comp Sci, and I say everyone should be educated that temp-rezzing hurts other users. It takes up limited server resources. It's similar to having an excessive number of scripts running on your land while offline. I hate to sound like a resource Nazi but people need to stop programming stuff like this that gets around limits set up by LL for a reason. It's like in Jurassic Park... was it ethical to introduce something in the environment that has no place there... "Yeah, but these programmers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."


If these servers can take so much extra abuse, lag must be a non-existant problem in SL. So I must be imagining how slow things are running in my sim. And yes I have a P4 1GB DDR RAM 9800 RADEON etc. so my computer doesn't suck and my internet is somewhat fast... my roommate doesn't lag in WoW.

BTW... I couldn't help it. Someone earlier mentioned Kant's imperative. I think that is right on point here. The argument for temp rezzing seems to be that it doesn't actually hurt anyone because it's not done enough to cause problems. That would imply the inverse would hold true: that if it were done enough to cause problems then it would be wrong. So, the ethical issue boils down to how many people do it? If a few do it it's ok, but if many do it, it's wrong?

Hmmm... if a few people steal bread from the store, it's ok. But, if many people do it, it's wrong?

Another example...if the system is designed to suffer the abuse with minimal functional reduction, then it's ok to abuse it... but if it's designed to withstand very little then it's wrong?

This argument is seen all around us in RL. The consequence (or sometimes just the intended consequences) are the measure of morality, not the act. Kinda hard to predict beheavior with that kind of a moral theory.

If I pay $xx.00 / month for xxx number of prims and my neighbor pays only $x.00 a month for xx prims, how is it ok for him to use x,xxx number of prims when I can only use xxx? Then what the heck are we paying for?

Lots of people have Comp Sci degrees - doesn't mean by default that you've ever worked on a MMORPG scene graph or rendering system. It's not that lag doesn't happen - it's that it takes a great deal to shift to lag profile one way or the other. Ten guys in one sim all rezzing an extra couple thousand ToR prims every few seconds, you'd see that. But one guy in the corner won't affect much.

Your last paragraph may contain the problem, by the way: RADEON. The SL client isn't optimized for that, it's optimized for NVidia chipsets. You'll experience different amounts of lag depending on your hardware, your video drivers, and several other factors.

Also, WoW streams a lot less of its content than SL does, because in WoW you can't create your own content - you just buy it.

Okay. So one person doing it doesn't hurt (much), but ten doing it isn't acceptable. That means this fails the "if everyone did it..." test. That means no one should be doing it.

Well - you have a point on that one. I don't think it's much to worry about, though. It's like saying, "If everyone used very heavy particle effects on the top of evey building they owned, the player experience would grind to a halt." It certainly would, but the likelihood of every member of an entire sim doing that is pretty low, let alone the entire grid.

...but that's still a perfectly good reason for no one to do those kinds of heavy particle effects. The same thing goes for having 500 scripts on your avatar: one person doing it won't completely kill a sim, but you'd better believe that 10 will. In a shared environment with shared resources like this, we have to follow the universal imperative. If an action, done by everyone, would grind a sim server to a halt, then it doesn't make sense for only one person to do it. It's not fair. In a case like this, where it's a matter of getting something for nothing, something that everyone wants (ie more prims), more people WILL end up discovering it and doing it, and the likelihood of "every member of an entire sim" doing it becomes a lot higher.

To state my point more simply, the argument that "well, maybe you're right, but only a few people are doing it right now" isn't good enough. Only a very few people commit murder, after all.

And to state mine more simply, the system is designed to allow occasional variance - and your attempt to compare such occasional variances in the creative use of resources to murder is pretty lame.

Oooh - how about the Wicked Witch of the East, who was killed when Dorothy Gale's house landed on her?

And by so doing, you'd be severely skewing the usage of resources.

At that point, it's not a variance from the mean that the system was designed to handle - it goes way beyond that. At that point, then it's a problem.

What I see as a recurring theme in various discussions about prim usage, particle usage, variances in public behavior, et cetera, is that the environment is a simplified, statistical interpretation of reality.

It is not reality.

The normal rules we use to interpret the validity of actions simply do not have a one to one correlation with how we deal with things in the outside world.

Work within the variances the system is designed to handle, and everyone has a good time. Intentionally move outside those parameters, and everyone stops having a good time. It's really that simple, and it has little to do with our personal perceptions as to what right and proper behavior is other than the simple end result.

(Besides, if you want to take your extreme example to the REAL extreme, alt accounts are free now, so you could theoretically build a mansion on public land for free - that is, until some Linden figured out what you were doing and kicked your account off the grid.)