When Is A Prim Not a Prim?

By now most all of us know about Land Impact, the replacement to Prims in our virtual accounting budgets. A 512 starter lot used to come with 117 prims, now it isn't so clear. Do prims still count? Well, sort of. Here's the scoop and my holiday present for those of you that had no clue you may have the option for MORE SHOPPING.

Most of us, even builders, don't pay all that much attention to all the info in the new build menu. Been there, done that, we know what we need to know. But along my mesh learning journey I came across some very interesting info -- not only for builders.

If you edit an object (any one that you can modify for those of you that don't build) you will see that the traditional looking build menu tells you the number of objects selected and the land impact (in the case of my photo the numbers are 1 and 1 and I have a mere 18 "somethings" left to use in my shop.

If you click on the More Info link (in bold to the side of the "Remaining capacity" text) you get an advanced menu that tells you more about the object. In the photo above you can see that the item selected IN THAT MENU says 1 object and 2 prims. But the land capacity only takes away 1. In this case it is because the item is mesh. But wait -- it gets better.

Many of our older prim items can be TURNED INTO Land Impact units from prims. There is a choice under Features in the build menu. The Prim you know. Convex Hull is the default mesh physics shape. "None" hides the item from the server physics-wise, helping your sim run better; it also turns the item phantom as a consequence. This can work for many things, but certainly not all.  By changing from Prim to Convex Hull, this street photo prop went from 26 prims to 13 land impact.

Now there is a BIG CAVEAT here. Sometimes changing from prim to convex hull can raise your land impact, costing your more. Not our plan. A friend and I did a fun test this eve and found many things were cut in half accounting wise when changed. Some however increased. So you DEFINITELY need to experiment on a sandbox where there are plenty of prims so that items on your land don't get returned for overwhelming your land capacity. You also want to try this on COPY items and you will of course need MODIFY permissions in order to make the changes. 

Sculpts and complex shapes like the torus, are not good candidates for this trick. Scripts count in the land impact equation, but I have no idea about the formula or reasoning.  Still, with a bit of work, you might save enough prims to add some new homewares to your environment.

My lead photo illustrates the point that a cube when in convex hull form can ONLY count as .5 land impact. Any two cube shaped prims can be turned into convex hull physic shapes and linked to get ONE prim. So all is not equal in the cubist world these days.

And that is my tip for you for the new year.



Pose by: PosESioN