making a 'floor' on my land

Yesterday I rented my first piece of land of 1024 m2 and made a 'floor' on it by using a cube and flatten it to 0.001 and using the max. size of 10 x 10 meters.
I used 9 of these pieces to cover most of the land.
This takes 9 prims; is there a way to do it with less prims?

I also want to make a fence around the land; I read about the trick to use textures for it, but still you have to make something to put the texture on. Is that right? If do, can that also be pieces of max. 10 meters long? In that case I would need 12 pieces = another 12 prims.

Or can you make a fence using textures without using any prims or using less prims?

Nope.

Well, sort of. There are a few tricks you can employ to save prims. For example, if you flatten a cube all the way, and then skew it all the way, you'll end up with a prim that covers an area of about 10x14M. It won't be completely level, meaning half of it will have a slight slope to it, but it only descends 1cm over 10M, so it's pretty minor. If you don't mind that slight unevenness, then you could save a few prims with this method.


Correct.

Again though, there are a few tricks which can help save prims. For example, instead of using two cubes to form a corner, hollow one cube, and cut it in half to form a single L-shaped prim. This could lower the amount needed for your fence from 12 to 9, not a huge savings, but every little bit adds up.


No, your first assumption above was correct. Textures don't do anything if you have no geometry to put them on.


I mentioned two methods that can help you save a few prims here and there. As you get better and better at building, you'll discover more and more of SL's little tricks. There are lots of places where cutting, twisting, skewing, hollowing, etc., can allow you to sculpt a shape out of one prim that would otherwise take several. You may want to head over to the Ivory Tower of Primitives for an overview of what all the parameters do on ever prim type.

I should be punished for mentioning it as i dont agree with them, but need to give poeple all of the options. You could purchase giant prims and do the 30 x 30 floor in one prim. Giant prims are not meant to exist and people have associated them with extra lag on the sim not to mention other issues. I've never used them myself so cannot give them a fair assesment, however the option is out there.

/me slams his head in the door for suggestion the dirty prims...bad porky

Hehehe, bad Porky. Bad Porky.

You're probably right that all the options should be covered. I thought about including megaprims in my post, but in the end I decided not to mention them since they only really work reliably when they're phantom, which means they're not practical for flooring. Also, since you can't control their size, their uses are quite limited. Is there one out there that happens to be 30x30? I don't own any myself, so I don't know what sizes are available.

Anyway, Ron, if you do end up getting a set of megaprims, whatever you do, don't rez the 64,000x64,000M cube on the mainland.

So you buy/ create a megaprim at a pre determined size and cannot adjust any of its dimensions? I never realised that, just assumed they could be resized and manipulated like a normal prim but to excessive proportions.

Well you learn something new everyday (and its generally from Chosen )

I don't think I wil be using the Megaprims; perhaps when I am better in building I will try Porky's options.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the info.......

/me punishes Porky Gorky because he said he should be!

there's ways to trim the megas, using "prim torture" techniques. I've found them to be reasomably reliable, as long as you're willing to sacrifice some things in exchange for prims. On a 32x64 parcel.. 2 prims for a floor is WAY better than 32. As flooring, they can be a little weird with the camera.. but that 1.75x7.25x40 is great for fences tho! I still wish there was a 20x20x20 prim in the lot. Oh well.

The "weird physics" people complain about, seems to be mostly in relation to hollowed prims, and rounded corners acting as if they are solid cubes.. (causing you to float). this is just a limitation of the Havoc 1 engine. and.. if you slice and dice the prims, they start behaving quite resonably when the chunks are about 10x10x10

Every time you use a megaprim, a kitten gets drowned in a burlap sack by a grinning clown.

Just saying.

The Physics problem