high-rise apartments

I think I would like to open a high rise tower for multi-living dwelling (high-rise apartments) but I really don’t have the time to do the upkeep as I find I don’t have a lot of time to log on lately.

Does anyone know if this is already done by others?
I haven’t found any yet.

Ones that rent out unfurnished and furnished apartments on a monthly basis?

The idea I had was maybe a casino and clubs on lower floors and rooms in middle and penthouse’s on the top floors.

I am looking for a apartment for myself in SL like this, can anyone tell me where I could find one?

Second life ties the number/complexity of objects to the square meters of land owned by the owner... The issue against a high rise would be that in order to properly fill it you would probably have to own much MUCH more land than jus the actual building's 'footprint' at which point if you owned say a whole sim...

why not just use seperate buildings in the first place, especially since SL is rather 'hostile' to too much vertical movement i.e. unassisted avatars tend to 'float' only up to about 60m

Thats by in large whats been done

So is this a way for SL to control you so you have to buy outward rather than upward? can it be done say multi mid size towers then?

I was not thinking of going out to make $$$ on rent just a bit over cost to run it, I have seen many buildings for sale that are many many stories tall, are you saying that the upper levels above 60m would have no access with say elevators?

just more questions to see if this could be done. Thx for your help

Its not impossible to do, the problem is that it most directly runs into a lot of SL's worst limitations... You'd be working 'against' the system to make it work really.

The idea is currently in SL there is an 'enforced' build density via a prims per square meter of land owned ratio...

I.e. if you buy 4096 sqm, you get x number of prims, roughly one per every 4 square meters, so in this case you would have something under 1000 prims.... so if you are going to concentrate a HUGE number of prims in a very small square meter space, like a vertical tower, you will have to have huge tracts of almost undeveloped land in order to 'keep' your prims per sqm of total owned land.

Generally SL was designed to 'spread out' for more space, with the assumption generally each person would own their own land plot... it was not really designed to support multiple people 'living' in the same small vertical space. Not that it can't be done its just that you would very very quickly over-ride the number of prims you had allotted in most cases, say the average 'newbie' has about 100 prims worth of things, and your building used about 20 prims per floor... even with 4096 sqm you would use up all of your available prims after just 6 floors.

To make matters worse there is no simple way to 'police' prims since it is just done by land parcel, i.e. if one person rezzed in 700 prims, no one else would be able to rez in anything.

If you want a real world ananlogue... SL more closely works with a 'spread' meme like southwestern US cities, phoenix or tuscon are good examples...

You are thinking more 'manhattan' style vertical integration, but from a SL design perspective 'vertical' is meaningless when it comes to land ownership, its only looking left/right and total land area, not 'airspace'

The limit of prims per square meter is a fixed resource limitation for each sim's server. It is not a Linden choice to force you to purchase more land. A 16 acre sim can have a maximum of 15,000 prims. No more. The server can't track more than that. That translates to 117 prims per each 512 M2 plot. So an area 16 meters by 32 meters in size can have 117 prims on it. An area 32 meters by 32 meters can have twice that, or 234 prims.

To put that in perspective, a two story tavern that I built recently, which has a 20 M x 20 M footprint, 4 bedrooms upstairs, and which was carefully designed to use as few prims as possible, weighed in at 326 prims, including very simple furnishings. So, at a minimum, I would need a lot at least 32 meters by 48 meters in size to cover the building and furnishings, and that leaves almost nothing for the guest's own posessions!

Another issue that seriously limits vertical multi-resident building is that there is no way to vertically parcel space. A parcel extends upwards to infinity, and can not be vertically subdivided. So the only way to rent out rooms that are stacked over one another is to have them all in the same parcel, with access controlled by scripted doors that lock and allow access only to approved residents. And such access doors are patheticly easy to bypass.

But as another poster stated, those stacked apartments therefore share the same prim allocation, so if one guests rezzes a bunch of prims, another might not even be able to rez one! They also share the same parcel access and ban lists.

The final issue with dense housing is that there is no way to limit sound between closely-spaced rooms. Residents in two apartments that are side by side, or stacked atop one another, will hear every word spoken in open chat in the apartments that are within 20 to 30 meters. There is no way to sound-proof a space. Closely spaced living spaces have absolutely no privacy.

Great that helps out alot, points me in the right direction....

Thank you alot for the help!!!!

Glad to help, Earl.

By the way, assuming you had enough land in the same sim to suport the prims, and assuming you used some sort of locking doors or security orbs to limit acces to the apartments, one thing you could do would be to build your high-rise mostly hollow, with individual apartments spaced vertically at least 30 M apart. You can do stable construction to 768 Meters altitude, and can use a 'sit elevator' (one passenger at a time), a 'physical elevator' (multiple passengers possible, but harder to build and script right), or a series of teleporter stations to connect the apartments to the ground floor.

You would still need a lot of land, and would still have the problem that one resident could become a prim hog, but you could do a high-rise with at least some privacy for each apartment that way. Maybe you could have a nice, open park area somewhere in the same sim, and make that area no-build, to support the prims you need?

Hi Earl!
I've written a "multiplexed" floor rental system, mainly for use with Midtown Bienenich's (that's probably misspelled) Santa Maria condo building. I can give you a demo inworld sometime if you'd like.
It uses an ACL and ghetto llSetPos elevator, and has an infinitely configurable number of floors (well, limited by script memory only).
--Jesse

Akasha Tower was just such an experiment. I think it was 13 or 14 floors with a club, stores and apartments. Gone now... Akasha Village is back.

I have seen this in a sim that was developed as all rental units, with mostly one and two story units, but it also had two mulitfloor apartment towers. It was a very attractive sim, developed I believe by that "Barnsworth" fellow. I have a landmark for it in SL, but can't get to it right now since SL is under attack.

Send me an IM later and/or I will try to remember to post it here later.

Back in the Fall of 2004, there was a supertall 700m+ tower at the border of Bonnydoon and Phobos called MegaTower. Each floor of the building was a rental unit, with commercial mall-type space in the bottom to levels. Some people rented for living space, others rented floors for retail space.

One of the problems with the concept... getting to your floor. Back then, you couldn't direct TP, much less TP to such great heights. And at that scale, elevators were fairly slow. A tube system was eventually used that would push your avatar to certain key floors.. which you'd then use an elevator for the rest of the trip. I might be wrong about that though.

But I think the greatest problem is the streaming media limit brought about by all the floors stacked over the same parcel. Since a parcel may only support one audio stream and one video stream, everyone is forced to listen to the same streams.

When the MegaTwoer was demolished, there was an attempt to create a mid-rise city at the same location. Rather than one supertall, several 4-5 story apartment buildings were created around several city blocks complete with streets and a transit system... the project was called Living Cities, but it too was demolished after a couple months.

I've created MegaTower scale replicas, with the smaller version displayed at my place in Europa... which is adjacent to Phobos and overlooked both of the projects described above.

I still prefer the old Akasha Village.

Anyway, I hope some day, sims can be arbitrarily arranged in all directions, instead of just horizontally. So one can buy 'land' below ground level and limitlessly up into the sky.

Yeah there is something nice about the village concept. The tower was interesting for living spaces, but shops work better spread out or in an open mall like area.

Hi Earl

I very much wanted to put together some multi-use spaces when I first came to SL. I had plans to build a small shopping mall with boutique stores with cool apartments above. These are the major issues I came up with:

1 - Prim limits kill you the higher you build. If you look at tall buildings in SL, most are "set pieces" above the 2nd level. There is no usable space higher up.

2 - Lag. The more people in a sim, the more lag. A shopping mall full of people and vending machines would create tons of lag for apartment dwellers above.

3 - Roving cameras. I bought a pre-fab apartment building and set it up on a test site. Stood on the first floor, and then panned my camera up through all the floors to the penthouse. Your renters would need to know up front they are basically living in a public space and would need to be fine with that.

4 - Streaming music. I didn't look to far into this because by the time I figured this one out, I had decided until something changed in the structure of SL, what I wanted to do was not feasible.

Ravenglass Rentals has several apartment buildings for sale. Do a search and you'll find the listings and you can go and take a look.

I bought a really cool apartment tower, but right now cannot remember who I bought it from. If you want to know, send an IM and I'll look it up for you.

I read the other posts and don't see a problem with building or living in high-rise apartments. In fact I have a number of condos available for rent now, and have been doing so for many months, and not once had a problem with respect to creating the building, maintaining it, or extending it higher.

The biggest issue is going to be managing yours and your guest's prims. If you have prim limits, you must make the limit clear before someone rents, and must enforce those limits without exceptions (to be fair to all guests). Use the existing land tools to manage and enforce prim limits.

The next issue is going to be managing group membership (assuming that you use group-owned land which makes it easier to keep your guest's prims while keeping out others' prims). Scripts cannot add or remove group memebers and, depending on how you manage autoreturn and other options, your guests may have to be a member of your group to ensure their stuff stays in their apartment. You need to stay ontop of these and a number of other things to be a success.

Most new people in SL have a great sense of entitlement and wonder why they cannot leave their 200 prim bed, car, motorcycle, or other high-prim items rezzed in their condo.

Running a successful apartment rental business takes patience, lots of typing, great organization skills, and time.

If you enjoy meeting new people (new to SL and new friends) then there is nothing quite like renting condos/apartments.

If your intent is to make money fast, apartment rentals are not the way to go.

Good luck - post the location of your apartments here - I'm interested in seeing your approach

-2fast

Hey 2fast

I guess I answered a little too quickly. Earl mentioned a club on the first floor with apartments above. I was focused on the multi-zoning aspect.

I agree with you that apartment buildings are not only possible, but successful.

The renters need to be told up front of the privacy and music issues. Policing of prims falls on the apartment manager.

I'd love to see your condos in SL. Will search for them.

I think the major hurdle to get over is the human factor. There are certainly ways around the technical limits and we've heard from several people already who make some sort of system work.

The people are really what make up a successful building and the human factor will be the downfall of any build.

1. High-rise buildings can be fun places to hang out if the people are cool. Getting cool people is a tricky thing to engineer as you might guess.

2. Apartment living is, by nature, minimalist living. Frankly, I find it refreshing and liberating from time to time but that's a matter of oppinion. Both new and old avis frequently don't see it this way and get frustrated by the prim limits. I've seen some really KILLER apartments that I've loved hanging out in which was simply a well-designed livingroom with eye-catching furniture. 75 prims and you can sit in there for hours. But alot of people are in this world to build mansions...

3. The "more savings" mentality is a large part of SL as in all worlds. Once an avi begins looking at the land tiers and pricing, they get excited about how much cheaper per prim it is to just buy their own little plot. This might turn into a huge headache for them, but for you it means a certain turnover rate and a few hassles about your prims limits and their rent.

4. People will generally get away with as much as they can, by principle. It's quite innocent, really but they will always go over their prim limit. Even if by 3 prims or 100, it'll have to be dealt with on a regular basis. The rub isn't IMing people politely to remind them that they are over-limit, it's having to finally begin returning things to them after 3 days only to be rewarded by a good chewing-out by the tennent. Oh well

5. Finally, people are known to be, at any given time, 80% nice and polite. This will factor into your roll as mediator. You'll need a little patience when dealing with people who think it's their right to keep yelling regardless of the other people. Things as small as "i can hear my neighbor talking" will be in your IM box from time to time. Prepare for it to be all your fault and then go from there

Other than that, you'll probably be fine if you are lucky enough to filter through a few bad tennents and end up with a handful of cool people living in your building after a few months of operation. Just keep the building simple and throw as many prims to your tennents as possible while telling them upfront (and periodically after that) that they're paying next-to-nothing for a little space of their own to sit and chat the hours away. If that 50-prim chair is just too important to them to part with, they might want to check into somewhere else

~Lefty