how to build on your own land without Gov linden returning yourstuff.

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There is no way to place a 256x256x1 megaprim on the mainland without encroaching on someone else's land. Even if you own "all" of the sim you are still encroaching on Governor Linden's protected parcels. The location of the center of the prim is irrelevant.

The prim had to go so why should there be any back-and-forth with warnings and promises to comply? If you move some of your holdings to a private island then you can make the sky look like whatever you want.

funny, I have never had things return to me other than for not wearing the right group tag.

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You're not "preaching to the choir here"...some of us manage to get along fine in SL without ever getting a warning, having objects returned or having things deleted from our inventory. What I do see quite a bit of, though, is bitching about how unfair the Lindens are and SL.

Building on your own land is easy and you won't have problems as long as you follow the rules.

This is the usual compaints floating about. People don't grasp certain things. You own your stuff. No you don't own the land. No one does. The land is a server for pete's sake. You are using 256x256x1 megaprim and expect it not to be returned? I agree with BamBam on that. It is too large even on a full sim.
As for your casino stuff:
a: LL is a US corporation. It is subject to US laws. If they choose to subject themselves to international laws to operate in Europe or elsewhere that is their choice. Yet, something that is illegal in the US doesn't get superseeded by the same something legality in another part of the world. And the reverse is true. If it is legal in the US and illegal in germany, that doesn't change LL on legality unless they choose to.
You lost the casino items because gambling online is illegal in the US on US servers.

Interesting... So, all your neighbors appreciated this mega? Okay, the CENTER is over your land, but where is the edge? I'm guessing it was at least touching someone else's parcel who was in the mood to have their space for themselves. (=_=)

When I bought land, I figured it was my responsibility to be sure that nothing I owned went outside the borders. Following that rule, I've had no complaints over my build, and, so far nothing has been returned.... Well... Not true... I've returned some stuff to people who wanted to treat me like their mini-sandbox. (^_^)y

Casino machines deleted? Hmm well maybe they were illegal and you kept putting them back?
I can imagine someone done for kiddie porn complaining about their images being deleted too.

oh boy...

Collin, from your apparent tone, I have to assume you're more interested in complaining and venting your (misguided) frustrations than in actually receiving any informed answers to your "questions". But since you felt it was a worthwhile endeavor to post this on the building forum, I will do what I can to help this thread belong here by taking your questions/comments, at face value, and responding to each as worded. There are some important points here.


You're right that it's not a democracy. It's a privately owned and operated service, nothing more, nothing less. The owners and operators (LL) can do whatever they want with with or to the service (within the confines of the law, of course), for any reason, or for no reason. It's no great revelation that there's nothing democratic about it. If they wanted to shut the whole thing down tomorrow, they easily could.

It's a business, not a government. To assume it should be otherwise is, as I just said, to be painfully misguided in your thinking.

That doesn't mean, however, that you're "you DON'T" statement is correct. The direct answer to your title question is this. The way to build on your own land without Governor Linden returning your stuff is to make sure that your stuff doesn't break any rules. In summary, that means don't let it protrude onto anyone else's land, don't let it be inappropriate for its area (no mature material in a PG region), and don't let it portray any hate-themed content or illegal imagery (such as child porn), etc. In other words, use good common sense. That's it.

I've been here almost five years now, and I've never once had anything removed or returned by LL. Why? Because I operate within the rules to which I agreed when I joined. That includes not only the TOS, but the CS (community standards) as well. You didn't do that, so you (entirely predictably) ended up with a return. It's that simple.


Right. If you want your stuff to be entirely under your control, keep it on your own system. If you're using someone else's system, you have to abide by their rules. It's no different than if you were paying money to a Web hosting service for your own website. The host is free to remove any or all of your content from their system at any time. Their service, their rules.


Well, inventory loss is a technical matter. No one, least of all Linden Lab, wants that to happen, any more than you do. Complaining about it doesn't help fix it.

If you want to do your part to cut down on it, you can. Purge your trash folder at least once a week. Clean out your Lost & Found folder at least as often. Routinely delete all copies of any items you don't need. The less the system has to keep track of and deliver to you every time you log on, the less margin for error. This kind of maintenance, of course, won't prevent all problems, but it will help.

Remember, SL doesn't work on magic. It's just a networked database, and as such, it's susceptible to all the same issues as every other network and every other database. When things go wrong, it's not always fair to blame just the architects and/or just the administrators. User actions also do contribute to the stability or instability of any system. We all have a responsibility to keep our own footprints as low-impact as they can practically be.

I'm not trying to say it's your own fault you lost inventory, so don't get me wrong. Obviously, the system itself needs improvement, as everyone knows. I'm just saying that each of us can help the developers and administrators at LL do their jobs by doing our part not to tax the system more than we need to. If we fail to do that, we don't have much right to complain when things take longer to fix than we'd like.


There was nothing "magical" about it. In order to comply with certain (completely unfair) laws, Linden Lab (reluctantly) adopted a no-gambling policy. Removal of gambling machines from the system is part of that initiative. They made no small issue of announcing the changes, well before they happened. I'm sorry if you missed it, but you must have been trying awfully hard not to pay attention in order for that to have happened.


Sorry, but that's absolutely ridiculous. Why would you EVER put anything confidential in something like your SL inventory? Keep confidential information on your own hard drive, and only your own hard drive, at all times. Never ever ever entrust that sort of thing to someone else, unless you have a vital reason for doing so (your bank has to know your account number, for example, but no one else does).


Yes. Again, they can do whatever they want with their own system, for any reason, or for no reason.


You mean you've never actually read it? That explains a lot. By all means, read it. You should have done that at the time you joined.


You're confusing the issue. What you own are the IP rights to anything you create. For example, when you paint a texture, write a script, or build a house in SL, those are copyrightable works. You own those copyrights. If someone duplicates your work without your permission, you're within your rights to insist that Linden Lab (or any other service provider) remove the copies from their system, and you can further seek legal recourse against whomever did the copying.

That does not mean in any way, however, that you own any of the data stored on Linden Lab's servers. They're free to remove any and all data at any time.

Think of it like this. J.K. Rowling, as the author of the Harry Potter books, owns the copyright to them. She does not, however, own they physical copies of the book that are sold all over the world. You could take your copy, paint it purple, burn it, shred it, do whatever you want with it, and it doesn't affect her copyright in any way.

By the same token, Linden Lab can remove data from their servers at any time, and it doesn't negate your copyright on your own material. The question of whether or not the copy you put on their system was the only copy in existence has nothing to do with it. It's not their responsibility to have any concern for what you do or don't do with your own intellectual property. Their only concern is what happens with the data on their servers. It's their data, not yours, just like it's your Harry Potter book, not J.K. Rowling's.

Make sense?


It's not a rental of our creations, it's a rental of the server space in which our creations are stored. Your creations belong to you, always. But the data which makes them exist in SL belongs to Linden Lab. There's a huge difference there.


As others have stated, you're absolutely not preaching to the choir. Some of us - I dare say, probably most of us - are conscientious and courteous enough not to build things that overlap other people's property, and are aware enough to understand what will happen if we do.



It was nice of you to volunteer, but that doesn't mean you've now got a pass to break the rules. Think about what you did. You rezzed an object that was 256 meters wide, which means it's covering not only your land, but all of your neighbors' land as well, plus their neighbors', and their neighbors' neighbors'.

In RL, if one of your neighbors extended the upper floor of his house large enough that it overlapped your property, wouldn't you be upset? Now imagine he built it large enough to cover the whole damned neighborhood. The fact that the foundation of the house happens to be on his land doesn't mean that the rest of it isn't a problem for everyone else. You'd be well within your rights to have a demolition crew come in and cut off the part that's on your land. Further, your township and/or county government would be within their rights to tear down the entire house, since it would be in violation of zoning laws, building codes, and the general well-being of the community.

LL's doing the exact same thing. If you don't want it to happen, be a better neighbor. It's that simple.


You were more than just "a little bit wrong". You were completely wrong. It's not for you to decide what kind of sky "looks better" for everyone else. I can scarcely imagine what kind of unbelievable arrogance would be required in order for you to assume that you and you alone get to dictate what everyone else would want to see. Wow.

Look, what's important is that each and every one of your neighbors has the right not to have your stuff looming over their property. That's it. If you personally feel that a darker sky looks better, that's for you, not for anyone else. Simply open up your environment editor, and set it to look however you want, for yourself.

As for whether or not you should have been given a warning, do you really think that with millions of residents and thousands upon thousands of regions, it could in any way make sense to stop to discuss the situation every time someone breaks a rule? Or does it just make sense to do the practical thing, which is to take the ten seconds required to enforce the rule?

If you really think discussion should be made practical, get ready to pay at least one hundred times as much for tier as you're paying now. Because that's how much it likely would take for LL to hire enough people to be able to do that. And the end result, by the way, would be exactly the same. Whether the prim is returned to you by LL, or whether you take it down yourself after being told to do so, it's still gone. So what would change?



It was more than "propbably" your fault. It was definitely your fault. You broke a rule, and you were appropriately corrected for it. Live with it. It's really not a big deal.

As for booting you from the world (yes, world, not game), why would that happen? Again, you broke one simple rule, one time, out of all the time you've been here. Unless you plan on making a habit of it, it's hardly worth being so concerned about.

And regarding all this "free fun content" you've been offering, again, it's nice of you to do that. But doing good things doesn't mean you're then allowed to do bad things out of some crazy sense of cosmic balance. One has nothing to do with the other.

And incidentally, the $500 a month you allegedly spend is nothing compared to what all your neighbors combined are spending, not that that really has anything to do with it either.

For the record, rezzing objects that overlap other people's property is bad. Rezzing objects that completely cover the properties of everyone in an entire region is very bad. Having an object returned to you is a very, very, very minor inconvenience. Let's keep it in perspective, shall we?

You gotta be kidding.
Edit: Not you, Chosen-kudos for your post!

Hallelujah! For one tiny second when I first read the OP's post, I thought maybe I was in the wrong choir. Guess not. Thanks to everyone who has already posted. You reaffirm my faith in the community.

I don't know if it was just badly worded in the earlier posts but I don't get how it's *impossible* to rez a 256x256 prim without encroaching. When I briefly owned land, I successfully did so with both 128x256 and 256x256 prims (for skywriting). There was no Protected land anywhere near the sim so I owned all 65536 meters. Rezzed at ground level, turned on property lines and centered it. Everything aligned perfectly so I set it up in the sky. Never got complaints from neighbors, Lindens or anything returned.

Now if you have Protected land on the sim though, then yeah you're clearly just out of luck. One of the prices you pay for roadside location.

You have a very funny concept of "ownership".

Even if you happen to own a whole region (256x256), it is still a disservice to people owning parcels in adjacent regions if you rez a 256x256 megaprim, as you will increase their lag through increased intra-sim communication overhead. That is one of the downsides of megaprims.

The only circumstances where I would consider that harmless is on your own private island, if it is surrounded by plain water (i.e. no other regions).

I used the term "own" loosely. I'm well aware I never owned anything in the traditional sense just like with Web hosting. But much of the SL population doesn't understand this and often doesn't care so it makes things simpler and less confusing to just say you own it and let everyone continue on with their lives. Calling it "rent" confuses it with the services offered in-world by estate owners which is a whole different matter.


Now that I didn't know. This happens with anything that goes right up to the boundary of a sim?

It's not a problem for normal prims, but becomes a big server lag producer for larger megaprims. The reason is that the prim visibility range is linked to prim size (the bigger it is, the farther away you still may see it).

That does make sense, though I had always thought (physics issues aside since H4 solved them anyway) the real lag issue with megaprims was on the client rendering them. Would a single one of these huge megaprims cause noticeable lag or would you need several of them to cause problems?

While on the subject I may as well try to get solid answers on this: would smaller megaprims (under 50x50) be a serious issue? Some of the builds I intend to do eventually are pretty large scale. They could be doable with normal prims but it would chew up every one of the 15,000 available without even trying and I know that's not good for lag, on the server and client side both. If I use megaprims mixed in with the normal ones (most would be around 25x25 or less) it would only be a few thousand needed.

The answer is a resounding ... "it depends"

Generally, the smaller MPs should not constitute a problem if the neighbouring region is not an openspace sim. I suggest that you place a pile of the kind of MPs you want to use near the border and see what happens. If server performance is remaining stable (good time dilation and FPS rate), you are OK.

Ok, that helps. The land I had before I sold due to money issues at present but plan to get more in the future. Either a mainland sim or possibly a private island, mostly depending on income at the time. Avoiding many of these kind of concerns is one of the things that has me still considering an island over mainland, despite the ridiculous tier.

I actually had about 600 meters (probably ~400 megaprims used) of a planned tower constructed not far from one of the sim corners and it didn't seem to induce any noticeable lag, though it was a newer area too, not as built up. I'll just have to test things first if I end up with a mainland sim again.

That's half true... Prim LOD is linked to prim size, visibility range is a hard-set value that's handled client side by the draw distance. (^_^)

That said, it's not that people with short draw distances are more likely to see it. It's just, when they do, it will have a higher poly count. (^_^)y

Yes, you're right. Client-side visibility range (can be set in the Preferences) and server-side LOD are completely independent of each other. It's the latter where megaprims may or may not be an issue.

Client-side I don't think that MPs create any additional lag (at least I never noticed any).

Ricky, can you explain what you mean by "server-side LOD"? Usually when we talk about LOD, we're talking about render detail. The amount of polygons in a prim is increased or reduced, depending its distance from the camera. This, as I'm sure you know, is a client-side effect (which, by they way, can by turned off in the debug settings: RenderDynamicLOD -> False).

So, if not render detail, what other variable detail level do prims have, and how does the sever control it?

I'm not sure that ever proved to be true.

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The interest list, maybe?

Really, just about the only thing handled real-time on the server side is physics and scripts. Draw distance, LOD, rendered animations, and such are all client side. (^_^)

That said, client side lag is usually mostly polygon count + texture count + attributes (flexi, local lights) * transparency layers. So a mega sculptie, sphere, torus, and such with more or less torture can and will lead to lag issues as it's pushing the client side to render huge amounts of polygons. (^_^)

But a flat mega cube should result in less lag, since there are less faces to render and texture. Covered up and hidden faces get rendered too, remember that when prim stacking and be happy that 'Plywood' is almost always cached. (=_=)

As for physics... I wanna know... Who has experience in playing with un-tortured megas? What ACTUAL problems are you seeing on a mega with no cut, dimple, or hollow? Especially since Havok4. Can someone describe the server side lag that currently exists with megas in our current physics engine? I'm asking because, while I understand the numbers, I choose not to view them and I've been to mainland and island regions that are mega-primmed to death and are practically flawless places to visit, explore, and shop in. (^_^)y