prim counts per parcel

Hi, I'm pretty new to SL, and got all enthused with building on my first land --then I hit the prim count limit. Only 117 prims on my land. Is that a fixed number? And is it standard throughout SL? 117 per 512sqm of land? Anyway to up the allowable prim count, besides buying more land?

Thanks,
Zizonus Serapis, Cicero

Yes, 117 prims per 512 square meters is standard. If you want more prims, you need to get more land. That's all there is to it.

The way it works is every sim supports a total 15,000 prims. One sim is 256x256 meters, or 65,536 square meters. Divide that by 512, and you get 128. 15,000 divided by 128 is 117.1875, which of course gets simply rounded to 117.

The key to successful building in SL is to learn to do more with less. Always strive to be as efficient as possible, and never waste prims. As you get more experience building, you'll learn lots of little tricks to make complex shapes out of a single prim, and you'd be surprised how much good texturing can save you.

For an easy example of texture benefits, think of a checkerboard. Without texturing, the single board requires 64 prims for all the squares. With texturing, the whole thing can be done in one prim.

thanks!

I'm also pretty new to SL. I've noticed that most clothing and other things that you "wear" use prims as well - for instance a pair of glasses I was looking at took 20 prims to build. Is there a limit to how many prims you can wear? Does this limit affect your land limit?

Thanks for any answers!

There is no limit to what you can wear beyond the 254 prim limit per linked object. Worn prims do not count towards the parcel limit.

Thanks Dnel!

So, there's no need to concern yourself at all as to how many prims something you're wearing is made out of?

There is one concern for wearing lots of prims. They can cause lag, for the wearer and for those around them.

Do a search in the forums for "hoochie hair', to read how some super-curly prim hairstyles, made with hundreds of twisted torii, can bring an area to its knees with lag.

I can also attest to the fact that high-prim avatars, like furries, will at least lag the wearer. I get twice as fas a frame rate in Human form as I do when I am wearing one of my fox avatars.

Thanks guys! I think I have a much better understanding now.

there is no built-in rule regarding highly primmed atachment but the general consensus is that it is usually a waste of resources and a lack of building skill

A waste of resources may be a debateable point, personally I try to use only boxes, cylinders and spheres myself to make jewelry, as noted, things like twisted torii can really kill framerates.

BUT

A lack of building skill? Excuse me? I personally create high detail prim based jewelry, and beleive me there is a hell of a lot of skill involved in making such items. Don't even think to tell me that it can be done with less prims, well made prim based jewelry looks way better on an avatar than any item that is made by ripping textures from the web and adding an alpha channel.

Kyrah, I take your comment personally, and am offended by it. To tell me, and the great jewelers out there that make prim jewelry, that we have a lack of skill is just plain rude, not to mention passing it off as 'the general consensus'.

i am sorry that you take it personally, but as being somehow into the video game industry, i know that there is a big difference between what you can make for a still picture or a big budget animation movie and in a real time game-like platform. By lack of skill i mean that considering most jewel items (we will take jewelry since its what pose you problem) are covering like, 2/5cm^2 on an avatar, it is not exactly justified to spend hundreds of prims on a detail.
Detail that will only show when seen from very close, think that your jewel or hairs or whatever will not be the only element the person will wear, and most likely not the only avatar in sight.
I perfectly understand one can be proud of high precision items on such scale and i totally agree that it ask a good deal of skill and patience, however, it is putting a drain on the end user system where using:

-a carefully made texture
-an optimized design (detailed textures and prims mixed)

would achieve the same appearance.
the other side of the skill is to be able to discern and balance when what you are actually doing is"too much"

we all know how bad our framerate is in sl, in some busy places the polygon count read astronomic numbers that, even a top of the line rendering engine couldn't handle.

but i am all for education to a more efficient building

as for the boxes spheres and cylinder it is an exellent point, being in their original shape the lightest objects in SL, rendering wise

Unless Linden Labs hire a top level Software engineer specialised in 3D (and one of the best in the world) i can only see the current situatuin going worse, and i can't imagine the current 'all you can eat' status of attachments prim count stay this way in the near future, so it is most likely that we will, sooner or later get hard limits on them.

Ah yes I know what you are saying Kyrah, but I think there are a couple of points that I would like to make.

First off, you are absolutely correct in saying that the detail is lost unless you look closely at the item. So is the detail in the beautiful sterling silver bracelet that I have from my grandmother in real life. From afar it looks nice but close up upon inspection is where the real craftmanship shows, and the same holds true in Second Life. Quality is shown under close inspection, as is the lack thereof.

Secondly your point about having to render all of those polygons is a little flawed. We have a system of reducing the LOD (level of detail) in SL now, so if the avatar is say 10m away, those prims are rendered with less polygons, and in the the case of very small prims (which high detail jewelry is mostly made of) they do not get rendered at all. So in fact, by this logic, an avatar wearing high detail jewelry made of tiny prims is any distance away from you they will not render ANY extra polygons on your screen because of thier highly detailed jewelry. This is absolutely fine, since if the avatar is 20m away you are likely totally uninterested in thier jewelry.

So I stand by my decision to make highly detailed jewelry, for the simple fact that with LOD at any significant distance, it doesnt add to the polygon count that your graphics card has to render and up close, the detail and quality of the jewelry becomes visible and can be appreciated, exactly how it is in real life. Think of this as a simple example - how often have you noticed a woman's earrings, unless you are close to them?

the RL comparison is quite moot as in rl we don't have notions of client side hardware and stuffs that can lessen the "performances"

i just hope, for you that you can fall back on your paws the day we finally get a hard limit to prims worn by avatars