Prims

This is the only place i could find to ask this What exactly is a prim and what are prim limits and what is the purpose of prims? I know this is a silly question btu for the life of me i dont have a clue. Thankyou.

I would suggest you look up the Ivory Tower in world and walk through thier tutorials. It is great.

Prims are the basic building blocks of SL. They are what you create and and maniputate from your create options.

http://ivorytowerlibrary.com/

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Natoma/204/70/25/

Amelia...

Prim is short for Primitive - as in the "primitive" shapes that are used to build advanced shapes.

Walking through the tutorials in-world is probably going to be a lot easier to understand than reading a web page. Basically a prim is a cube, tetrahedron, cylinder, sphere, torus, tube, or ring. Everything in SL is built up of these prims, which can be sized, twisted, cut, rotated, textured, and stuck together. The complexity of an object (and a rough approximatation of the computing power required to draw it on your screen) can be found by asking for the number of prims that make up the object.

Linden Labs has basically equated prims with computing power, and therefore has set limits on the largest number of prims that a user can have on his property, based on the amount of property that the user owns. I currently own a basic 512m2 plot (the size first given to people who buy land) and according to this I can have at most 117 prims on my property.

The thing that solidified it for me was an explanation I got as a n00b. I forget who from - probably Jai or Siobhan T.

PRIM is short for PRIMITIVE: think of it as a lego block that you can LINK together with other lego blocks to make more advanced, scalable OBJECTS.

Prim limits weere set in Second Life v1.2 to keep some people from "hogging" all server resources. While not a perfect model, it does generally keep things fair; typically, the more prims you use, the more textures you use, the more scripts you use. The number of prims you can use is directly proportional to the amount of land you own in a simulator.

There are 15,000 prims allowed in a simulator (region), or sim. A simulator is 65,536 meters. A single acre (for SL purposes) is 4096 meters, of 1/16 of a simulator. So, divide 15,000 by 16, and you'll see why each 4096 meter plot (acre) gets 937 prims each.

BusinessWeek had a great little sidebar on SL slang:



I hope this helps!

Regards,

-Flip