Chic at Ebbe's Place

The Second Life grid is tied to the prims and land standard; 117 prims per 512 lot, 15000 per sim.

In the olden days, before mesh, it was tricky living on a "free" lot. People were forced to buy land in order to have prims to expand their businesses. Islands (1/3 more in cost in most cases) became available and the mainland exodus began.

Over at Inworldz and most Open Sim grids, there are three times as many prims per sim. Rental stores are frequently low on prim allotments, but the sims have plenty to spare.  Other grids have different rules; in some prims are dear still, in others they are given freely.

I ventured over to Inworldz last December when someone waved too many real life dollars in front of the typist's screen. I stayed, brought a few friends over and made a few new ones. With several businesses there (free uploads so there are no costs but time) I was very much enmeshed in mesh. After spending most of the previous winter learning, the skills were GOING to be used.

This summer I visited a large number of Open Sim grids, staying at some -- saying good-bye to others. It has taken me all this time to finally get that prims don't matter there. I knew it intellectually of course, but it wasn't a part of my natural belief system -- living so long in a world of prims to land mass limits.

Ebbe has stated that land prices will be lower in The New World. Also stated, content creators will be king. Mesh will be portable so we can surmise that much of the building will be centered around mesh. Prims may no longer be part of the equation.  There will be a new paradigm of course. I am wondering what it might be.

Cloud party had the "once it is on the server there are no more streaming costs" method and that worked well. Since TNW will most likely be on hand held devices as well as computers, the world will need to be "lighter" in many ways. So no avatar rendering costs in the unbelievable range for example, a good thing.

In the meantime, rediscovering prims has been fun. I have been taking some of my older buildings over to The Great Canadian Grid. With new textures, better mapping and normal and specular maps they look pretty spiffy! And since even the free places get 1000 prims (pretty much a 512 lot size although they are all different), worrying about the prim count isn't a problem.

After all the effort of learning Blender, it will be a companion still. Both are useful -- at least for the present.