Chic at Ebbe's Place

As of December 4th, the free land on Aviworlds will be discontinued in favor of the land baron business model. This got me thinking about land in general and the prims to land connection.

Most virtual citizens live in Second Life or at least started out there. Before mesh came into the picture counting prims just wasn't a hobby, it was a necessity -- at least for folks on their "first land" 512 plots.  Land barons were firmly entrenched in the economy when I arrived seven or so years ago. Chung was a name in the real life news long before that.

Since the amount of STUFF you can have has always been directly tied to land size and seemingly what it could hold, we have always been at the mercy of the prim. People bought more land in order to have more pretty things or to expand their business. Mesh has in some ways buffered that by lowering the land impact on many good. What would have been 41 prims (my new outhouse) can be as little as 4 with half way across the sim LODs.

Even with the advent of mesh, we can run out of prims. LEA7 is close to full and I took down a build the other day in order to make way for new releases for the holidays. Now even though I am a careful land impact watcher, I am at the mercy of those darn "prims".

So what happens when you have MORE prims per parcel?  Well the need to count prims goes down. Many grids have a typical 45,000 prims per parcel ratio; some grids let you choose your prim allotment up to 100,000 prims. We used to think (in SL) that a piece of land was only ABLE to hold that many prims; we now know differently.

Indeed, even with MOSP filled with layers and layers of displays, the frames per second are still stable and good. There is little difference than when it was born a couple of years ago, possibly due to better server performance -- but still. The sim where my shop is hosted in Inworldz is using over 35,000 "prims" and has no unusual performance issues.

So while mesh is working on its kingly status in Second Life, it is not so well embraced on OpenSim and other grids based on the OpenSim platform. It has taken me almost a year to actually "get" that at a gut level. The idea was there but the ingrained prim counter in me still wasn't accepting that prims didn't count.

I have been a builder all my life -- even in real life *wink*. Currently I make mesh. Not a lot of mesh; I make things when I need them and then stick them up on the marketplace and sell some here and there. When I go to new worlds they are often begging (yes, literally) for content. A few discerning or perhaps newly transplanted consumers are happy to buy nicely made mesh items, but not because of the low prim count.

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So let's fast forward a bit and see how the shift to land baron status might play out and change the economy. It's an interesting exercise after all.

Currently in Aviworlds you can have one residential lot and one commercial lot (each a quarter sim) for free PER TYPIST (read the TOS folks). You may not combine lots with family members or build out over you neighbors land (well natch). 

Right now there are no smaller parcels that I can find. There are a few apartment looking places but they are not for rent -- really, what would the point be?

So as the year closes some entrepreneurial folks will no doubt buy up some sims and either divide them up into plots or build communities where folks can rent parcels. People will no longer have 3750 prims to play with, they will have 234 or 937 or whatever -- just like in Second Life. Prims will once again become precious for some.

You might think that mesh would become more popular at that time like it has in Second Life, but looking at Inworldz as a model, that hasn't proved true at all. People are still making and buying primmy stuff ala 2008; sculpts are actually king in all their laggy glory.

I took out one of my old installations the other day in order to port it over to a grid (more on that in another story) to find that I had made a ticket booth that consisted of an unbelievable amount of prims (like 80 maybe). This was from when I was given a 1/8 of a sim to play with and I was feeling very prim rich :D. Most of the rest of the build was good.

I imported, added some new mesh faux buildings and I was set. I could not in any way live with that 80 land impact ticket booth. I made it over in mesh -- better of course with a nicely cut out space for tickets and money to be exchanged as well as ambient shadow textures. It is one land impact. In OpenSim all single objects count as one no matter their size or complexity - and the physics work!

So I suspect that in 2015 SOME folks will take note of the possibilities that mesh adds when you are on a prim budget. Those on bigger parcels can happily build with prims.

And I have a secret -- I have been building with prims lately, giving myself a challenge to see what I can do with NO MESH.

It actually has been fun; I had forgotten.

Not as pretty, but BOY is it FAST!!!!