another basic textures Q

hi everybody well i am building a replica of my rl home in sl. and after adding the garage i couldnt link.. it was to big . so i shortened the garage and solved that problem. now when i work on it . i have no problems linking it back until now... here is what i did. my rl house has siding on it, so instead of buying a texture for siding. i found some free textures in the edit window .... there is a list and one of them is siding and i used that one..it actually matched my rl house , how ever after i textured the siding on the house . i couldnt link it again..? i was baffled ... so i assumed the texture must be like a layer making the whole house a bit larger and not allowing me to link again.. so i just shortened the garage again .. not by much and now it links again so my problem is solved but my question is..

1) does all textures make prims larger or just the ones in the edit window because they are free?

2) does the textures in the edit window count as a prim?

3) if i would have bought a texture for it would it had been better quality and i not have had this problem?

Textures are just a pattern on the surface of the prim, and don't make it larger.

The textures in the edit window are textures in your inventory. You can find the texture in your inventory and examine it to see the permissions on it.

It's probable that the texture has nothing to do with the linking problem. Linking large builds in SL is a bit of a black art, and if you don't pick the right prim for the root you may not be able to relink it.

yes ty for your reply but i know about picking prims for the right prim.. i have been doing it with this house for 2 weeks and never added anything . until i added the siding on the house.. one thing i did do different, before i put siding on. i dl the new emerald viewer and that is when i noticed the problem. so i logged out of the emerald viewer and went back to sl viewer and same problem . so i figured it had to be the siding . cause

A) i didnt resize or make the house any larger then the previous times.

B) i selected the same parent prim as all other previous times.

i dont know if it was sl acting up or what but when i shortened the house yet again it linked no problem witch led me to believe it was the siding that caused the problem. cause that is all i changed .

Unfortunately, SL isn't very predictable about what it will and will not allow you to link, as you approach linking limits. I have had builds that were 100% linked, took them into inventory, and when I rezzed them they completely unlinked...

Rather than making the garage shorter, just make the garage a second linkset on its own. That should eliminate the problem completely. You can still click on the garage, hold down shift, and click on the house, then take the two linksets at once into invenrory as a backup.

as for the questions:

1) does all textures make prims larger or just the ones in the edit window because they are free?

No texture can ever make any prim "larger". It just changes the coloring of the surface, and doesn't change things at all in size, ever.

2) does the textures in the edit window count as a prim?

No. Textures are a surface property, not a prim.

3) if i would have bought a texture for it would it had been better quality and i not have had this problem?

No. The problem you are having relates to the size and spacing of prims in your build, and has nothing to do with the textures you applied.

thanx ceera but its strange i have been unlinking and linking this house for i know a good solid 2 weeks and never an issue . however i understand what u are saying that sl is unpredictable and at any moment it may read the prim as to large.. well this is the second time i have shortened the garage and believe it or not it still looks right with the house so maybe this will fix the problem permenantly

There is one other possibility, as well. One or more prims may have become "corrupted" - meaning they won't link to *anything*, not even another prim in direct contact with them.

Try re-linking in small groups, and if you find a group that won't link, try linking those prims one at a time. When you find one that won't ever link, drag copy it and delete the original. That usually fixes it.

Why is it important that you link it all as one?

I would not sacrifice esthetics just to be able to link it. You can always take it as one set even if it is a few linksets.

Alternately you can get a packager that allows you to rez and derez the sturcture, which is usually the best approach.

Then all will be perfectly predictable and controllable

yes von i know but im a noob at building and that seems like a new learning process right now but the garage still looks good. it doesnt look out of porportion or anything. and ceera u may be right about the corrupt prim.. cause when this happened i also couldnt edit a few pieces . it was really strange. so i deleted the house and rezed the copy and then it would edit. so that is a possiblity now that u brought that to my attention.. never had a prim not go into edit mode .. it was odd.

A while back I built a 4 story tall, 2000+ prim school building for a University client. It had something like 17 linksets and 100+ seperate doors. When I went to take a copy of the finished build, it wouldn't let me, despite the fact that I had created all the prims myself!

After much searching, I located one prim in a wall that had unlinked itself from its assigned linkset, and which was now unlinkable and uncopyable. I had to delete that prim and re-create it to finish the building.

Building in SL sometimes has very erratic and unpredictable twists. You just have to learn how to identify and work aroudn the glitches when they occur.

how did u find the unlinked prim? just highlight the whole thing and look through it till u found a part that wasnt highlighted?

No, it would highlight just like anything else, so that wouldn't work.

What I had to do was go through, section by section, and with "Advanced > Rendering > Hide selected" chosen; shift click on each linkset that I thought should be a solid unit; and look for any prims that "got left behind" and were still visible. In this case, when I clicked the wall section around a building entry, all but one prim obligingly vanished. I deactivated "Advanced > Rendering > Hide selected", and tried choosing that prim, then tried re-linking it, and it failed. Then I tried doing a "take copy", and found I could not take it, take copy, or even mod it. I had to delete and replace that one prim.