A few questions concerning buying land

Hi!

I've been playing for two weeks now, and with me quickly getting the hang of creating content I've decided it might be a good idea to set up a shop, and with it a decent apartment for my home. However I've a heap of questions in regards to it.

Firstly, is there an easy way to search for small area, high prim land? My shop doesn't need to be huge, 1024 square metres would probably suffice. However I'm hoping to create a shop with two levels (to divide content neatly), on top of which will be another two floors for my home, so I would need a fair number of primitives to construct everything, I've got the hang of rezzing objects via script which I'm told allows me to avoid the prim limitation, but I don't fancy the idea of building everything this way, since it seems more suited for creating vendor devices (ie click the image to see/try the item).
I guess I could use the extra land as road or something and sell some as budget land for simple houses or something, but I'd rather not if possible.

Second, is there a way to restrict non-adult access to a small area, or deny passage through a door if the user is not adult? It's just that my shop will have some items considered mature, but this limits my options in that I can't set-up shop to sell my perfectly acceptable items (T-Shirts, posters etc.).
The plan is to have the non-mature items on the ground floor, with a nice big glass window, and have a sign with "Adult Content Upstairs, mature persons only" pointing upstairs to another floor (possibly hidden high up in a skybox, see next question) where it is contained.

Next, is it possible to stop text from reaching different floors? Ideally I'd like to have my shop built realistically in its four floors rather than using skyboxes to seperate them, but this would mean things I say in my home would be audible to people in the shop and vice versa. If I can do this without using skyboxes it would be nice =)

Thanks for any help!

There are four sims with twice the regular prim allowance that I am aware of - the four city sims Barcola, Grignano, Miramare and Sistiana. Good luck finding land for sale in those (Well, land for sale at a price you want to pay...)

I'd rather recommend to first assess the number of prims you will need and then chose the plot size accordingly - or just go by how much tier you can / want to afford. Also, if you are "out of prims", there is always the possibility to buy other, small plots in the same sim - their prim limits will count toward the prim limit of your main plot.



Everyone on the mature grid should be over 18, and the Lindens are quite diligent in relocating people under 18 to the teen grid. If you are going to sell mature items, it is advisable to buy land in a sim rated "mature".



The range of chat is 20m, per the LSL wiki: http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=Chat and there is no method to block chat from "bleeding over" into another room or parcel. Except 20m high ceilings

Hmm, how does plot combining work exactly? Can I buy a plot of land then buy a plot of land somewhere completely different to get the prims? Or do they have to be on the same Sim or even adjacent to each other? If it worked the first way then would this mean I could buy a low prim plot of land somewhere good (ie a good place for a shop), and buy a higher prim plot somewhere people rarely visit so that I can take the prims, and just leave the land undeveloped?



Hmm, it's just that I've seen barriers (like those requiring you to buy a pass, or stopping you from entering land entirely) which state "Adults only" or such. An example of this is Furnation Prime when heading South East (on foot if you want to see it).
I suppose that's probably something you can only do on a specific area of land rather than within an area? Is it possible to designate land like this on a PG sim, say I bought one plot of land for my main shop, and another where I placed the adult section's skybox, making that area adults only, would it boot out anyone who used a teleport to get to it (from my main shop)? I've only seen this in the one place but felt it might give me more option when finding land.

Hi Haravikk


I advise that instead, you simply get enough land in one sim to reach your desired prim allotment. The total number of prims you can have in one sim is the total of what all your parcels in the sim allow you to have. In other words: all your parcels count towards your prim allotment, and you can use one parcel's prims on another parcel of the same sim.
That's what "prim land" is: unbuilt additional land taken just for the sake of prim allotment.


As mentioned above, just build your shop in a mature area. There are no minors (that I know of) in SL's main grid.


No, but you might try using IMs ?

The plots of land need to be in the same sim. It doesn't matter where in the sim they are, they just need to be in the same sim.


If you take your land and subdivide it, you can have part of the plot off limits to everyone, make them buy a pass, or just allow/ban select people. If you are going to sell "mature" items, then you need to be in a mature sim. Everyone on the grid is suppost to be 18 or older. If you place items that are non-pg in a pg sim, don't be surprised when you get an IM from a Linden asking you to remove the items.

I don't think it is wise to stop your customers from entering your shop

You can block access to land based on:
- specific person (ban specific avatars, or restrict acces to only those avatars)
- group membership (ban specific groups, or restrict acces to specific groups)

Additionnally it is possible to give out / sell "passes" that have a set duration. You might use this to make sure everyone who enters has read and agreed to some disclaimer of yours, for example.

To combine the prim allowance of two plots of land, they have to be in the same sim (on the same simulator server), but need not be adjacent. You can join them so both display the same plot name, but there is no need to - as soon as you buy a second plot of land in the same sim, it's prim allowance will count toward the prim allowance of the main plot. (The reason is basically technical, the servers on which the sims run can only handle that many prims per sim, so if you were able to buy land in sim A and use the prims in sim B, that could potentially create a huge prim usage imbalance)



Hm, I am only familiar with the "No entry" and "Buy pass" barriers, and there is no option for an "adult only" barrier in the land menu, so I'm afraid I don't really know what you mean. I went to Furnation Prime but didn't see the barrier.



Yes, the "no entry" and "buy pass" barriers can only be set around one plot. You can always subdivide your plot, and have one plot with and one plot without barrier.



Non-PG content in PG land can get you abuse reported to the Lindens if a neighbor or a visiting resident feels offended, no matter how many "adult only" signs or barriers. Also, security scripts that automatically boot out people are rather frowned upon in the community (see the numerous forum threads on that subject). I think you'd be better off buying mature land in the first place - it's not that much more expensive than PG land, has better resale value, you won't have to restrict access to the more mature items, and it respects the spirit of PG land. Or do you have a specific reason for wanting to buy land in a PG sim?

Well the concern was for things like people in the first level of the shop asking about things and people on the second floor hearing it and being confused (since the rooms would be completely closed from one another with just a staircase to get between them). And the same for my house, if I'm my home I don't care what people in my shop are talking about
I think I'll go with skyboxes then, not as nice a solution since I'll have to fiddle about with teleporters (which sound like they're not too intuitive to make, not hard but not as simple as they could be) and have big ugly boxes floating above my lovely shop.



Well, a lot of my shop content will be completely harmless stuff like T-Shirts and posters of a character I draw (Renara) who, despite possessing a generous figure, is never prortrayed as anything explicit. I suppose I could always have the same items sold in a booth on a PG sim, just seems like a could be losing out on customers by limiting myself to mature only areas.
What about stuff in properly built houses? Do personal homes have to comply to the PG limit on a PG server, even if it has properly locking doors etc.?
I think I'll just go for a mature plot though and save the hassle.

Thanks for the replies, you've all been helpful! Just need to create a mock-up of my shop and see if I can limit it so it fits on an affordable plot then I guess =)

Another open, if you're going to buy multiple plots anyway for prims, is just make sure the plots themselves are at least 20m apart and build your house on one of them!



While there are a handful of people who stay to PG sims (and the Lindens can even tag your account so you can't enter a mature sim if you ask) most people just like knowing that, by being in a PG sim, you have less of a chance of some strip club opening next door to you. You are unlikely to lose any serious amount of business, and you can always have a second kiosk in a PG area if you like, or sign up with web-sales outfits like SL Exchange or SL Boutique.



Privacy in SL is an illusion unless you own a private sim. Doors are trivial to pass, and even ban-lines can be floated over.

Shop construction is going quite well, I've only used 31 primitives so far including two floors, stairs (well a ramp actually), sliding automatic doors and a grand total of one shop item, I might post a screen once I'm happy with the front!

I have another question though.
I heard that objects rezzed through scripts are not counted towards a plot of land's prim allowance (else games like Tringo surely wouldn't be so common?).
I'm wondering how practical this is for construction? I figure I'll use object rezzing for shop items, e.g have a basic 1 prim poster which when clicked will spawn the item for you to see and get rid of it after X amount of time. But what about for building purposes? Could it be used to cheat and create relatively linear but prim-heavy things like stairs?
I expect the amount of time the items can be there is limited somehow, but how hard would it be to have each item contain a little script which messages its parent when it is removed, so that the parent can immediately respawn it?

This kind of prims is called "temponrez", which is the name of the checkbox that assigns this property to objects, in the Edit->Object window. I know a few people who have whole houses built this way, with one permanent prim that re-rezzes the rest periodically. It's also very handy for thigns like projectiles and vendor-created demos.