Handy Tip for "Too Far Away to Link"

OK, so you get this message, and you know perfectly well that the two items aren't two far away to link, cause maybe they're side by side for Pete's sake!

Or, you've linked a 34-prim house for Tinies before (which is small anyway), and you end up having to link it again (cause you tried to unlink one prim, maybe, and despite how slowly and carefully you did that, the whole thing became unlinked), and now for no good reason all of a sudden it is telling you it's too far apart to be linked.

Here's what I have found is happening:

One of those prims has all of a sudden lost its little mind and refuses to be linked with anything anymore. It thinks it's too GOOD for all the other prims now.

What you have to do is find out which one it is, by linking smaller sets till you get that message. Then click/drag a copy off that prim. What it will leave behind in its exact place is now a pristine new prim that hasn't lost its little mind, and is perfectly willing to be linked!

Now you can relink build, and delete bad prim, after giving it a severe talking to.

coco

Another interesting trick I've only recently discovered - for linking things that are too large to link: If you select the whole 50m across thing, and scale the whole thing down, assuming the scaling of multiple objects didn't screw up, you'll now have a smaller version of what you were building. Link this, and then rescale up, and the object will remain linked.

If accuracy of scale is important, if you make one of the original prims in your build have a length of 10m, then after shrinking and linking, when you scale up you can drag the scale up until one of the prims is at 10m (at which point you can't make it any bigger), which is what you wanted it to be.

I'm not entirely sure how good this is in terms of prim drift - scaling and linked sets seem to be a bad combination for prim position accuracy.

maybe i'm too anal about the alignment and positioning of my prims and textures, but I find that I simply cannot do this without it getting all screwed up. I also can't drag-select a complicated set either and try to move/rotate cleanly, unless the prims are linked. Everything goes out-of-wack.

This is actually a very cool method for creating extremely long distance sit hack teleporters and large sim-wide sensor arrays which can make use of link messages.

However, when the sim reboots (either from crashing or being updated) objects linked in this manner will unlink. It's as if the sim scans for impossibly large link sets at start-up and delinks them.

I've had another way around this for a long time. The reason you get the "too far to link" message also has to do with the size of the objects vs. the distance between them. Two really big objects will link at nearly 30m apart, where two small ones won't.

What I do is add another really large prim in between the two, link the smaller ones to it, then select the composite, and unlink the large prim. The two smaller ones will stay together, having already been put into the linkset.

The method of starting scaled-down and resizing is fun, but undependable as mentioned. I remember using it to place a single wall across the entire side of a sim! I accidentally pulled across the border though, and had a huge mess of individual prims to pick up.