31 prims or less for vehicles?!?!?! how?

so i built two cars and found out that there isn't a script to support my prim creations? My vehicles have 170 and around 70 prims for the other one. How do car builders get so detailed without using so many? Most are ~31 prims or less!

So my questions:

Can i still have that many prims for my vehicles?

are there scripts for it? if so can someone point me in the right direction? I know there is a separate section for scripts but, I thought I'd ask here.

Any help is greatly appreciated thanks in advance.

Yup. That's the limit. You can get around it in a way by making some parts of the vehicle (or the entire vehicle) to be worn as an attachment, since there's a much higher limit on the number of prims you can wear. When you do that, though, you give up some functionality, so it's not a perfect solution. It's amazing what you can do within a 31 prim limit, however. You can create some complex parts out of sculpties to save prims, and a good texture artist can make a low-prim object look VERY sophisticated .... looking as if it had a lot more prims than it really does.

there's also the option for non-physics vehicles, but those can be very complex... as for where to look for scripts... have you tried the scripting forum (please search first)

All is not quite lost, Lex.

While starting your new career learning to build vehicles of 31 prims or less (sculpties and devious use of textures and twisted prims) you can still power up the ones you made with non-physical scripting.

Head over to XStreet SL and check out the following page.

https://xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&CategoryID=111&&sort=price&dir=asc

There's a freebies there which may help - Multimove v5.1. It lets you use more than the regulation number of prims in a vehicle. It's primarily for flying vehicles but maybe you can mod it to apply to a car.

There's also a demo of a fairly pricey high prim system which might work for your own personal cars in the hope that it inspires you to buy the full price version to sell your creations.

I have a pirate ship vehicle that I bought, that has something like 270 prims. The way they did it is that there is a base vehicle, the keel of the ship, that conforms to the normal vehicle limits, and allows for a vehicle owner at the helm and 4 passengers at the cannon positions. When the ship is not in motion, the keel rezzes a copy of the additional prims for the mast and sails and upper decks, so the ship looks right for being "at anchor". When the owner of the ship gets on the vehicle, they are locked in position at the helm of the ship, and the keel de-rezzes the extra prims, and attaches a similar a 250+ prim assembly to the pelvis of the owner of the ship. That attachment has all the extra prims and "working parts", so the sails can be in different positions, and the cannon hidden, on deck, or run out and fireable. I think it even has "damaged" options for when you do sea battles, but I've never used it in a combat.

The additional passengers all need to get on the ship after the captain does, and need to leave the ship before he does. They can't move around any more than he can.

A major problem with this sort of massive vehicle is that it needs the ability to rez it's "extra parts" when the owner gets off the ship. So if you set the ship up at your own dock, where you have plenty of prims, and sail it to someone else's parcel, what enters their parcel is a normal 25-prim or so vehicle, and you're wearing a complex attachment. You get off to see your friend, and suddenly the ship needs to rez 250+ prims on their land. This can even be a problem if you are returning to your own parcel, if the place you land doesn't have enough prims free.

If there's no rezzing permitted on the friend's land, your ship suddenly becomes a derelict hull, and quite probably gets returned to your inventory as well. If you can rez prims there, what happens is variable. As long as the parcel has enough prims free, the ship does its thing and all looks normal. If there's not enough prims free, the rezzing should fail. But I've seen past cases where SL handled that action very badly, and the attempt to rez the ship's "at anchor" parts caused many of the prims on the parcel owner's land to get returned! (In fact, that is how I came to own one of those ships - so I could diagnose what was happening to cause a tenant's rented home, owned by me, to vanish when he pulled into port at his rented parcel on a sim I was managing.)