A Few Questions

Hi there, I have a few questions regarding land.

1) How do you measure land? How do you know if its 512m2 etc?

2) Do you have to buy land or can you build on any free land around SL?

3) How come the telehubs are just on little islands on the map and not the main land. Do you need a telehub in your land for others to teleport there? I would want my land to be easily located by other SL members?

4) What are good areas to have land in where I would get a lot of visitors?

5) Let's say you have a building on 512m2 land, is there a limit on how tall it can be?

6) What does "HUD" mean?

Thanks for your help.

1) Right-click on the ground and select "about land", or alternatively click the info line at the top of the SL client that indicates your current region and position. The first tab has square meter info.

2) Search for "sandbox" to find places where one can build freely, but understand those are just temporary for works in progress - things will get deleted or returned periodically. To build something permanent, you need to buy or rent land, or enter into some other arrangement with a land owner. It's bad form to build at random on other people's land, and you'll end up with irritated people returning your stuff to you.

3) One can teleport anywhere unless it's specifically disallowed by the land owner. The telehubs are mostly remnants from an earlier time where one could only teleport to those particular places.

4) Good question, some would say it's more about advertising than just getting random traffic. That said, you can seek out land near existing busy places, but keep in mind lots of people around all the time can make for a laggy experience.

5) Nope, as high as you want, the only limit is the number of prims used (unless you're renting land with restrictions in place to keep things looking a certain way). Above 768 meters strange things happen, but it's unlikely you'll get anything that tall - it's more of a concern with free-floating airborne builds.

6) Heads Up Display, an item that attaches to your "screen" such that you can see it and interact with it, but nobody else can. A useful way to present certain scripted utilities.

Hope that helps

1) How do you measure land? How do you know if its 512m2 etc?

Using the editing tools, you can select terrain surface in increments of 4M x 4M squares. All parcesl follow the edges of this 4M grid.

2) Do you have to buy land or can you build on any free land around SL?

You can only build something permenant on your own land, or on land where the owner has granted you explicit permission. There are places called "Sandboxes", which can be found in Search, that are for practicing building if you have no land of your own, or if you need more room than the land that you own to make something. All builds on sandbox sites get deleted every few hours. It's strictly temporary. Building anywhere other than your own land or an approved sandbox is stealing resources someone else is paying for. All land in SL belongs to someone who is paying for those resources.

3) How come the telehubs are just on little islands on the map and not the main land. Do you need a telehub in your land for others to teleport there? I would want my land to be easily located by other SL members?

If you own land, you can set up your very own telehub. It used to be that each sim had one telehub, and you teleportet there and then had to fly to other points in that sim. Now you can teleport to any point that isn't restricted. Setting up a telehub or a parcel landing zone restricts the possible landing point in that area to that hub, so, for example, they can only teleport to your hub, and not to your bedroom.

4) What are good areas to have land in where I would get a lot of visitors?

Look for lots of green dots on the map. Places where they are is where you find lots of people. Of course, that may just be a concentration of camping chair zombies, or club goers who won't ever look are what you are offering. Actually visit an area and see if it has real traffic, or just zombies.

5) Let's say you have a building on 512m2 land, is there a limit on how tall it can be?

768 Meters, or when you have used up all your 117 prims that come with owning 512 M2 of land. You can't use normal building methods above 768 Meters, nor are builds above that altitude stable. A prim can't be more than 10M in any direction, the tallest structure you could concievably build on 512 M2 if you owned nothing else would be a stack of 10M cubes 1170M tall.

6) What does "HUD" mean?

Heads Up Display. It's a gadget that you can see in one corner of your screen, and no one else can see. Frequently used to control animation overrides, avatar controls, defense systems, dance controllers, or other gadgets. My Furry avatars has a HUD that allows me to control facial expression on the prim fox head, and to wag my prim fox tail.

512m2 allows 117 prims, not 177 easy mistake to make

Quite correct. An error on my part.

Thank you Ceera and Anti, you guys helped me out a lot. Your detailed answers were just what I needed.

Thanks