Prefab Permissions?

I released my first house with copy/mod/no transfer permissions. I did this in case someone screwed up the house when placing it. Now I have enlisted the help of a scripter and we're testing scripts to realign the house with very promising results. The owners should not need to copy anymore, because it's foolproof. I was wondering, would it be better to release no copy with transfer permissions so the house can be resold? I see both systems used there by very high-end builders. What do you prefer?

I started a similar thread here not long ago:

/108/fd/70786/1.html

In most cases I think it is given that Mod should be allowed so prefabs can be adapted to varying sites and conditions.

Mod/Copy/NO trasfer seems to be the most common. But there is no reason you need to follow those who prefer it. The most common rational for allowing Copy is so if someone screws up their house they can replace it. Another person suggested a way to accomodate this would be to provide 2 or 3 copies of the house in the box, allowing for a limited number of mistakes. I would prefer to give an owner a new copy if they really screw one up, for the following reasons.

Some land owners who have lots of rental property will buy one prefab and rent out an unlimited number of copies.

I have had several instances where people bought one of my prefabs and then installed several copies, sometimes for friends and others in thier groups. The permissions I had set allowed it, so I did not feel I was justified to object in those instances.

I have changed my prefabs to Mod/NO Copy/Transfer. I sell my houses really cheap compared to many others in SL, so I figure anyone who wants mulitple copies can pay for them.

It is possible that seeing a lot of your houses out there is good advertising, so maybe allowing Copy is a good thing. That is a judgement call you will have to make.

By allowing Transfer, there is always the possibility that someone could buy some of your houses and resell them at a slightly higher price at some other location. I have no reason to think that has happened but it is entirely possible and permissible if you allow resell. I have had property owners who bought one of my houses, sell it later with the land, that is entirely reasonable in my opinion. If you enhance your land with the biulds you place on it, why shouldn't you profit from it.

Thank you! Your link is very helpful! Also your new Fiji house is beautiful.

If I'm going to buy anything that isn't mod, it had better be so totally cool that I can't look at it without thinking "I GOTTA GET ME SOME OF THAT", or it can't cost more than a can of pop, because if I'm going to spend real money on it I'm going to want it to be perfect, and the only way it's going to be perfect for me is if I can mod it.

And I realise that mod/no-copy stuff is a support nightmare, and I don't think I've seen any mod/no-copy houses. How does that actually work out?

Obviously, other people have other preferences, but that's mine.

I thought that whether the house you bought and placed on your property, no matter what the permissions were, could be sold with the land.
When you sell your land and you are filling out the sell form, there is a place to check if you want all buildings to be sold with the land.
Doesn't this work on anything that is left on your land no matter what the original permissions were?

Nope! If any part of a build is "no transfer", then you can't give or sell it in any way. It would just stay under your ownership if you sold the land, and probably get the new landowner pretty peeved.

I decided against making my modern house design 'copy' because it dawned on me that a landlord could rez, say, 20 of them on his/her land to let out - 20 houses for the price of 1!

True story from this morning, with no names:
A tenant rents land, and buys a house to put on it. Its a nice house. $1000+ Lindens.
The tenant is 3 weeks in SL. As the landlord, she asked if i could help setup her house...easy enough. I talk her through passing me a copy of the instructions. Cool! The house has a custom rez-box setup tool. The house is also No Copy / Transfer.

The tenant is very new to SL. And, despite the brilliance of the rezzer, and repeated instructions and warnings, the new tenant grabs one (large) piece of the house and moves it into place. Instant catastrophe! (I'm sure they didn't realize they'd grabbed a house part and not the rez box...) The pieces couldn't be put back together, and there was no way to 'delete' and re-rez a new copy. Finally, the orginal house builder came, picked up all the pieces, dropped a new copy, and set it up himself...nearly five hours of constant work by several people just to erect one house.

Lesson Learned: I will NEVER recommend a NoCopy house to anyone without at LEAST intermediate building skills, NOR offer to assist anyone who has bought one. If ANYTHING goes wrong...its just way too time intensive and frustrating to fix it.

As a long time builder, I'll put my 2cents into this..

I sell all my homes Copy/Modify/No-Transfer. I learned early on that customers love to modify their homes, heck it's human nature. Would you buy (not rent) a home that you could not touch in anyway, no changing the color, no updating the flooring or carpeting, etc no-matter how long you lived there? Of course not. Hence why I sell all my buildings "Modify."

Now, which is also human nature in Second Life, not everyone is a fantastic builder, or even an "ok" builder. Accidents do happen, heck I've been building homes for over 2 and a half years now and I still occasionally mess up. I'm sure everyone has managed to texture a room or "thing" all one color by mistake before. Now if the home is not copyable, you'll have to either:
A) Fix the problem prim by prim, which usually means contacting the original builder for textures unless they happen to be AF/Linden provided.
- OR
B) Find a new home, or buy a replacement copy.

Now considering I would be on the customer service side of this mess, I'd gladly opt for the "fix it yourself" box, by providing you unlimited replacement copies, then having to assist every person that makes a mistake, no matter the size. Granted for major mistakes I still get called, but it's no-where near a inconvenience to me that it used to be. Hence why all my homes are also "Copyable."

Some people may panic and say "ZOMFG THEY CAN COPY YOUR BUILDINGS!!"
Yes, this does allow renters and other various buyers to place unlimited copies of your home for use as rentals or the like. I personally do not mind this, as there is no-way for them to resell your home. If a customer wants to use a prefab multiple times, I'm all for it. Plus I love seeing neighborhoods full of my prefabs lol. Builders who sell homes in rez-containers should always allow copying of their structures, as rezzers will not rez another copy after the first time, due to permissions.

As for transfer permissions. The only times this would be a true issue for customers are when they buy a home as a present, or would like to sell land with a pre-build home already placed. As the first scenario is easily taken care of via an IM to me (the builder) or to simply give the receiving party money to buy the home. The second scenario is the only negative to this permission setup. There is no-way for you to literally transfer the home to another owner. In this case some builders may offer gift certificates or special promotions to solve the problem. Remember, if you sell your home copyable, do NOT sell it transferable. Thus all my homes are NON-TRANSFERABLE.


Anyway, I hope this helped.
- Sam Portocarrero
Chief Builder: Dominion Custom Homes

Copy is also essential for any kind of modification to the structure of the house itself, no prefab is ever perfect. Without "spare parts", it's impossible to divide a big room into two, or to combine two rooms into one, or do any kind of big alteration.

Even if the house was perfect I wouldn't want NC/T on a house because I've found that placing a house (dragging the arrows around) will result in visible seams or the odd prim rotated wrong after a few moves and the only solution is to derez and rerez when it's finally where you want it to go which would be impossible to do with NC/T.

I can't imagine moving a NC/T house either. My house comes in 30-40 parts, it would take days of frustration to get that all to line up again, if at all.

I have never used any commercial rezzer, but I sell my houses with a slightly modded form of Builders Buddy, and one of its options is to issue a "position" command which will position all objects where the builder intended them to be.

I do also sell MC/NT so buyers can copy and modify to their hearts' content. A landlord with multiple houses may get a surprise rezzing mine when he rezzes the second house and all the bits from the first come walking up to the second! But generally, I would only be too happy if he successfully rezzed a heap of copies from the one house.

The reason I modded Builders Buddy was to allow the basement to act as the rezzer. Generally you can see how the house will sit from the foundations and you really don't want any walls to get in the way of your view of the corners of the house and the parcel. Once the basement is positioned, you can tell it to rez the rest of the house and sit back and watch it do so.

I'm just starting out building prefabs. I have built many for my own personal use. However, I seem to have a problem. Maybe someone here can help.
I built a small test house. Purchased "Rez-Faux" and packaged up the house. Every thing went well but...I found that my packaged house, which I have one on display, can easily be copied. (right click, more, take copy)
I made sure that all the linked sections were copy/modify/no transfer for the next owner. I made the display copy from the Auto-Rezzer. Is this the reason anyone can take a copy? How do I set up a display model without allowing anyone to copy it?
Any ideas?

I would not buy a house that is no copy to many things go wrong and i have seen way to many people "break" houses they paid a lot of money for just trying to add their own personal touch because it was mod. I know someone who went through about 5 purchased no copy houses before putting one up without breaking it.

its great to offer support and all but honestly I find a lot more people with less and less "techy" knowledge entering the game they want to fart around but are never going to be 'uber builders" they just want to put wall paper on

so even with those cool rezers or houses that are linked when they come out of the box one wrong move and you have a ruined house.

you can always add a notecard such the same as places like textures 'r us does with their textures and make people click to agree 20 million times (think i have their agreement memorized by now) that people are not to rent them out or whatever or put on properties to sell them or whatever there are ways around this without restricting the homeowners from having a cool house

also with the server issues i have come to my land to find stuff i built the day before or put up to have gone poof. Its just not worth having so many unhappy people because your worried about the one guy who may abuse it take other measures as I described above.

I have - Bill Sterling Designs is one example. (If the name is unfamiliar, he did the freebie "Archer House" that's kicking around freebie places and on orientation island)

I personally *hate* no-copy. I would much rather have no-trans than no-copy, any day when it comes to a prefab. As others have mentioned, it's easy to screw up a placement, or retexturing, etc. I know I've done it enough times. I've spent 3 hours placing a build, only to blink, click the wrong place and *SPROING!* things are out of place.

It's so much easier to just re-rez at that point...

Landlords do buy my copy/no trans houses and it's a great deal for them, to buy a house once and be able to make money off it a dozen times. That said, there are two positive sides to it.

1) They do tend to come back and buy more houses for variety, or often buy at least two or three in one visit. Some have bought half a dozen or so in one trip to my store so I can't really complain about that.

2) Visibility- definitely. I get IMs, or conversations with people at my store who tell me that they saw one of my houses somewhere and it made them want to come check me out. I know there are some very well established builders in SL who's names are ubiquitous with prefab so much that they'll be referenced at the merest mention of "looking for a house" in a group IM. I'm not that famous, so having someone fill a half sim or more with my houses is a good way to show my stuff.

I sell mod, so I sell copy. I wouldn't personally buy a no-mod house, it would drive me nuts. It still isn't enough- I get IMs all the time from people who would rather I fixed their house, or give them all my textures, than re-rez/re-do their mods when they slip up. So it's not an easy-out from a CS point of view unless you're good at saying no. I also update my scripts and stuff all the time, so mod is ideal for that as I offer free updates on the houses. No-Copy would only work if I was big and rich and cruel enough to laugh at the misfortune of an unlinked home, or had enough time in the day to deal with collecting ruined piles of prims and sending out new ones.

As for no-transfer being non-resellable, sadly that's not strictly true. SL land sales are *full* of vipers advertising BS like "oceanview sim" (region next door to a spot of water) "protected access" (vendor kept a strip of land in front of the one you're looking at to pretend its a linden waterway or something) and "house and furnishings included" when the house on the plot is a no-transfer house. I know some land resellers buy my houses to dress land, I also know from talking to some and their customers that they try to be clear that the house doesn't transfer with the land, and so I get people referred to me to buy "their own" copy and that's cool. But I have had an IM from someone who was upset that I wasn't going to send him a free house because he'd been scammed by a land flipper, and I've also had one land reseller actually asking me how they can best defeat the permissions and owner-only options to help the new owner of their land to use my house as if they were owner.

The only advice I can think of is: make, sell and be happy. Selling three houses to a landlord is better than selling no houses to twenty people. and no landlord wants to buy 20 houses even when the total cost is barely more than a single 512sqm plot of mainland.

Houses that are sold with no copy just doesn't make sense, I know with rez'ing systems (as i have scripted some) Things tend to go wrong, lag, user error, you name it. I don't know about you, but you ever try to put something back together that someone else built? I mean hell I can't build that much but trying to figure out what someone else did or align it back together, or w/e is just a nightmare. Not to mention if you accidently delete a section or unlink the whole house when ya meant to unlink 1 piece. I've worked with Sam alot scripting his stuff for his houses, and I have no issues with it going copy, cause 1 its no trans and 2 its no mod on the scripts.

As far as someone rez'ing 20 copies of it, big deal, who's to say someone won't rez a copy for each of his/her friends on their land? I know alot of ppl in SL that may use a house someone else owns, but in the end, they want their own copy, and if someone sees a ton of one house, they tend to like it and buy one of their own. besides renters nowadays usually don't rent with a house. some do, but 9 times outa 10, its up to the renter to get their own house. plus when a renter supplies a house, it limits to if the potential renter even likes it or like the prims used up with the house. gotta take that into concideration.

I would neither purchase nor sell any home that is not "Copy-OK/Mod-OK/No-Transfer".

Aside from newbies, most people are not the least bit interested in buying a used house when they buy land. As soon as they see the variety of options available to them, they decide that when they buy a parcel, they are going to re-make it to their own personal ideal. Or at least to try. It doesn't matter how well professionally landscaped, terraformed or set up the parcel is. Selling a parcel with anything on it other than a few plants for 'window dressing' is usually a waste of effort, because your house, plants and everything else get returned by the buyer almost as soon as they take control of it.

SL has so many rezzing problems that I would never buy a no-copy house, unless it came with an ironclad guarentee from the maker that it would always be replaced for the original buyer, no questions asked. And of course, they can only afford to do that if the house is no-transfer, otherwise you could keep selling it to others, and asking for replacements.

Buy a 'used' house? How do you know you got all the pieces? Or that the previous owner hasn't messed it up somehow? You only know it's OK if you bought it direct.

And I would always want to be able to mod any house, so I can at least re-paint the walls!