Building My First House :)

I am in the process of trying to build a house. It will be a one story small house and my question is how tall should the walls be? I have seen houses that have really tall walls and ceilings and some that are shorter. I was wondering if either has any effect on how the graphics load or lag. I am still very new to SL and so far it has been very laggy just about all the time. I'm thinking the bigger and more detailed the lagger it will be but I'm not sure so if anyone knows please let me know.
Thanks

Bigger prims don't cause lag..

MORE prims will reduce the amount of prims you have left.. IF you don't know about prim limits, right click your land, choose about land, then objects.. That'll show how many prims you have left, and how many it supports overall.. 512^m plot holds 117..

Higher definition textures can cause lag.. 1024X1024 is very high and isn't needed.. 512X512 is what most people reccomend I think..

I wouldn't worry about lag from a small 1 story house unless you're including a lot of scripts or something similar..

One more question...... I am building my house at the sandbox. I have 4 walls and when I try to link them together it says "link failed pieces to far apart" but yet I have a 2 story building I built on my land and its all linked together. What is causing the failed linking? ok well.... 2 questions what is the option "joint" when building something? I tried using that to put the walls together but it don't work.

thanks again

Joints are when you wish to use stoned walls... (OWWW! Sorry about that one.)

Seriously, joints are not like "joists" which are actually found in RL houses. They're really like elbows.

As for how tall to make your house, why not see how high you can go with only 117 prims? It would be interesting to see the results.

You can find some tips as to "link failed" errors in this thread;
/8/a0/41073/1.html

I believe joints can be used for things like doors and swings but SL joints are terribly problematic so you may want to stick to linking if you're building a normal house. Further reading on joints can be found here;
/111/58/1577/1.html

As for the height of the walls, I'd recommend you make them higher than life size for easier camera navigation. "Realistic" house that's built relative to your avatar height can be nice, but the camera cannot follow you smoothly when moving inside the house, but then that's just my opinion. Experiment and find what's best for you. Good luck and have fun

Chie has answered everything perfectly *applauds*

Are you part of LiveHelp Chie?

Lucie, when it comes down to it, Its your house, so make it however tall to fit your avatar. Unless you are using it for business or as a gathering place for ALOT of people, there is no reason to meet everyone else's needs, sacraficing your own.

The reason why you are getting the "Prims are too far apart" message, is because (you guessed it) your Prims are too far apart. Now, SL has a problem when it links prims that are a distance of around 10m away from each other, sometimes it has this problem when the objects are right next to each other, but are just too darn big for SL to link properly. You have 2 options at this point.

1. Make your build smaller

2. Make your build in multiple linked sections, and move them back into position when you place the house permanently.

Now, I have heard (but not tried), that if you put a small prim (nearly invisible) between 2 larger prims, which are giving you the too far apart message, and link all 3, the link will work.

If you are having problems with the metric measurements, you can use google as a calculator (example: "3.5ft in meters" in search box).

Building is the best fun - and you can change your house every day if you want to. I'm not sure why you received the "too far to link" message - perhaps you accidentally selected something that was out of range. I've had the unlinking build happen - but not in 1.7 - and what I did to fix it was select the pieces and shift-drag to leave a copy. The one you drag is the original - which you can delete. (This probably isn't your problem, anyway.)

Joints are useful at times but most people never use them at all, I think.
Houses are not proportioned like real life because we have to accomodate our cameras. Some places feel really crammed and it's hard to see - one can only experiment to get what is best.

Keep texture size as low as possible - Second Life does a great job with the handling of the texture files - they use jpeg2000. 256x256 is a good size for ordinary things. You have lots of textures in your library to start you off.

Welcome to Second Life! You sound like you will have a blast!

Hi Lucie,

Great to hear you’re building your own home!

The "link failed pieces to far apart" can be one of the most annoying things you’ll come up against when building. First, you cannot link things that are further than 30m apart, but if its only 4 prims I’m guessing that’s not the issue. SL being SL sometimes things go buggy and sometimes one of the prims in the build will go rouge and refuse to behave itself. Try linking it in smaller pieces to narrow down onto the bad apple. Once you figure out which one is buggy, replace that prim and you should be all set to link.

Joints are for making hinged prims and last I’ve heard they are still more buggy than useful and shouldn’t be touched with a 10m prim. If anyone has any experience with them positive or negative I’d love to hear about it. For a home you really don’t need them. Swinging doors and such are accomplished by using cut prims and rotation scripts.

Wall height… well that question has as many answers as builders. If prim savings is premium 5m is a good height for you can get 2 floors from one wall prim. I personally like a little more headroom due to how the SL camera floats over the avatars head. While being a high ceiling in scale with the avatar, in practicality it can feel cramped. For a two story building I tend to go anywhere from 5.5m-8m depending on the architectural style. I find a lot of folks tend to build huge just because they can, but the vast space then takes a lot of furnishings to fill it up and can still feel empty. Building a bit smaller can give the build a cozier feel and won’t take as much to make the space feel finished décor wise. If you have any furniture, drag it out when your building and it will give you a better feel of how the space will feel furnished.

As far as textures go, I can’t think of any reason you’d need anything bigger than 512x512 pixels. Most of the textures I make for my homes are 256x256 or smaller. I’ll only use a 512 when there needs to be better detail such as a large window with no repeats.

Have fun building!
KX

I make weathervanes using joints. That's the only way I could get them to work.