Link failed Pices Too Far Apart?

I dont understand iv been building on sl for almost a year now and have built lots and lots of houses but now im building a gun and i have it built it is 256 primes and i try to link it and it ses link failed pices too far apart i mean wtf they are like 1.5 meters apart is there a way to make it work without shrinking the whole thing?

I thought the limit on the number of prims allowed in one linkset was more like 225...

Regardless, the problem is almost certainly the small size of some of the parts in the linkset. There is some sort of calculation about center to center distances for the smallest parts that will really reduce the max linking distance.

Try this:

Create 5 spheres, each 0.5 M in diameter. Space them 2.5 Meters apart. You can link them just fine.

Remove the second and fourth spheres, and try again. It won't work. Even though the distance between the outermost pair is the same. And that's only a 10 M spread! (2.5 x 4).

Eliminate the 5th prim, and it STILL won't work! Still too much center to center distance between the relatively small parts. And they are only 5 M apart!

The exact distances are something you'll have to fiddle with, but you can do that simple test to see how it can screw things up.

So what you may well need to do is actually ADD a few prims in some of the widest gaps between your smallest prims! Counter-intuitive, but it may work. I know it did for a line of 0.5 M diameter marker bouys I tried to make. At 5 M apart, I couldn't even link a pair. At 2.5 M apart, I could link a 30M long string of them!

Alternatively, if you have a really small part at one end or the other of the gun, like a front sight, try eliminating that part, or try making the prim for it bigger.

Note: I am not in-world right now, so I can't test the exact distance limits. It will vary with the size of the parts.

I think the calculation basically figures out "If I stretch the object to it's max size, will all the prims be within the required distance?"

So basically if you WERE able to link your gun as it is, and then STRETCHED it to it's maximum size, one of the prims would be too far apart.

I've had this problem before. What I did to solve it was to link the item in parts. then link those links together. That seemed to do the trick.

I run into this ALL THE TIME building high prim jewlery, and there is a simple way to do it.

(its 255 prims in my experience, I think I tried 256 prims once and it didn't work?)

Anyway, this is what you do:

Link the parts into a few groups of linked prims

Select your groups of linked parts and try linking them.

If that doesnt' work WITHOUT LOSING YOUR SELECTION:
Delink everything, watch the general tab in the edit window and wait till its says 250 prims, 250 objects (ie nothing is linked anymore)
Link them again, you should see it count down to 250 prims and 1 object. Works for me every time.

Cottonteil, thanks for that link. From that note I can see why small things don't have this problem, even though center to center distances as related to prim size are 'bad'. If everything is within 1 meter center to center, it will still link.

One caveat, from my experience in building homes. Sometimes you can force a large assembly to link by linking sub-assemblies, then linking those, as one other poster mentioned in making jewelry. But if you do that to 'fix' a house that is giving you a "Link failed, pieces too far apart" error, the resulting linkset may be still unstable.

I have had houses that I got linked, after much fussing, and when I took them into inventory and then placed them out again, what was placed was completely or partially unlinked! I have also had marginal linksets that were fine until you rotated them, and then the linkset breaks and won't re-link.

From what I have seen, looking for small prims too far apart and adding a 'filler prim' to resolve that center to center distance problem may be the better fix.

Sometimes it is also necessary to delete and replace the root prim (or far less frequently, some other prim) to make the linkset stable. I have no idea why that works, but it has fixed quite a few of my buildings that had linking issues.

I have also found that if the root prim is off to one side in the linkset, the result is less stable than if the root prim is closer to the center. I used to make the ridgeline or roof of my homes the root prim, because it was easier to click on. Now I use a section of floor near the center of the build.

I had a similar problem to this the other night when trying to relink a ship. I reiterate, Relink, so I've already linked it before. A lot of people have seen this ship in action in fact. I had rebuilt it with help from my partner, using twisting and supreme prim torture in order to reduce the prim count so I could add more details.

I was only linking part of the structure to work out (2 prims) and got this message....3m apart.

I finally managed to get this to work, but I had to shift copy them and then I could link the new pieces left behind, but still could not link the originals....which were the same prims from the original ship that I've delinked/relinked, flown/crashed, rez/deleted, etc more times than I can remember during all the testing.

My partner said they've had the same issue before and the shift copy always worked for them.

I haven't tested this, but it wouldn't suprise me if you're right. I seem to recall one of the techie Lindens, Cory maybe, a while back say that there's a bug in the implimentation of the physics engine that causes it to subtract one from certain power-of-two calculations, which is why the vehicle limit is 31 prims instead of the proper 32. If the link limit is indeed 255 instead of 256, it would be in keeping with this behavior.