linking 256 prims

It seems like it may be impossible or very difficult to actually link 256 prims together into one link set. Try it... I've crammed a bunch of default-size spheres so close they were mostly overlapping... 255 link fine, 256 (with that last directly inside all the rest) fails because "objects are too far apart".

More vexing is that, in the sandbox, I found that an attempt to link 256 prims together occasionally resulted in _two_ link sets produced from one link command. That's very odd, and I think it's probably a bug. At one point, I created 256 spheres all jammed together and linked them like this, producing one link set of 254 prims and one of 2 prims. I then simply repeated the link command and the 256 prims linked together. What's going on there?

Anyway, I encourage anyone reading this to go give it a shot -- try to link together 256 prims, any old prims, and see what happens. It seems that, no matter what order I use and no matter how close together they are, that 256th prim is always "too far apart". I'm working on a somewhat prim-heavy game, and that one prim is really going to hurt us. Is there anything I can do?

I'd love to sit down with a developer/bugshooter Linden in-world and demonstrate some examples of bizarre link behavior. I've read the link algorithm post forward and back, trying to make sense of it, and from what I can tell, what I'm trying to do should link.

255 sounds right. A link number of 0 is for an object that isn't linked to anything. The root of a link set is 1 which only leaves 254 spaces for child objects if they want to stick to a single byte for the link number.

Yeah, that makes sense. Why would it even let me try to link 256 prims together, then? If it is, in fact, impossible to link 256 prims together for the reason you stated, the UI should prevent me from trying to link 256 prims together, just as it does when I try to link 257 or more.

Probably the same reason that when it does fail it gives a specious error message (objects too far appart). My guess is that there's one bit of code in the tool that checks how many objects you're attempting to link and that checks for the wrong number - 256 instead of 255. And then there's the routine (probably on the server) that actually does the linking and that doesn't sanity check the number of objects you're attempting to link upfront, but does have a generic fall-through for errors that just reports 'objects too far appart' because that's the only way they think it'll fail.

Official word from Kelly Linden: you can only link 255 prims together. I reported a bug that the UI lets you try to link 256.