Land Impact Hits The Main Grid

I’ve discussed the issue of land impact before, however that was when the feature was on the beta grid, now it has arrived on the main grid. First of all, another complaint about the blog, I found out about this because I read Darien Caldwell’s post on SLUniverse, I’d have found out about it soon enough from looking at my parcels but why oh why have Linden Lab buried such an important blog post here? This hasn’ even made featured news, come on Linden Lab, this is important stuff.

Now moving on, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, those of us who use the official Linden Lab client got an update yesterday, there also must be some server side jiggery pokery going on, but if you look at a parcel you will notice some changes:

Don’t panic …. well not yet anyway, they’ve just engaged in some rewording when it comes to parcels, the real devil is in the detail of what it all means.

The example parcel I have posted is a mainland parcel, my group land holdings allow me to have a land impact score of 4929, in old money this is the prim allowance, same goes all the way down there, it’s a 256M parcel I’m on so it supports 58 prims, I have 65 prims on there, which I can do because I have spare capacity in my group land holdings. However there is a reason for the word changes, when it comes to Mesh (in particular) a prim isn’t a prim, they have a funky formula that means a mesh object can have a land impact score of a lot more than one prim, the change to how we view objects is needed due to this change, but don’t panic yet, standard prims are not changing when it comes to the new score.

Confused? Ok here are some pictures to try and help me explain a thing or two, first of all there are three physics shapes, prim, convex hull and none, if you’re using a normal prim with a physics shape of prim, there’s not too much to worry about:

Now when it comes to Mesh, things can change, if you link two basic mesh objects together, they can have a land impact score of 1, even though it’s two objects, this is where land impact is important, however for standard prims, even when linked, they count as we traditionally expect:

Note that the physics shape is prim, now if I change the physics shape to convex hull, the new land impact scoring system comes into play and we can see in my example that two basic prim cubes with a physics shape of convex hull, actually have a land impact score of 1, not 2.

However if I add a script, and all I do here is add a new script which creates the hello world script, my land impact score increases to 2:

At this moment in time, don’t worry about this too much, prims are legacy items, so nobody is going to login and find that their 200 prim home now has a land impact score of 300 and got returned to their lost & found because it went over the land capacity limit. Linden Lab have rightly decided that the new counting system doesn’t apply to legacy items, whether they will always have this view is another matter but they are right to do it this way because otherwise there would be chaos, land impact scores can go up as well as down if you change physics shapes, so don’t try this at home with existing objects kids!

If you want some under the hood technical information, there’s a good knowledgebase article here.

Again, I have to point out, the new scoring system only applies to Mesh, whether that’s full Mesh or partial Mesh and any legacy objects where someone decides to change the physics shape to something other than prim, so if you don’t touch existing items, you won’t have any problems …. in other words, don’t piddle around with these settings unless you are absolutely sure you know what you’re doing.

I can foresee some issues with the new system, as I pointed out, just adding a basic script increased the land impact score in an item that didn’t have a physics shape of prim, but as nearly all items on the grid today do have a physics shape of prim, this isn’t something to get your knickers in a twist about.

However even with prim objects you can get some information about the load your items are placing on the server, the more info link on an object’s edit window gives you this information, the two items below are firstly two basic untextured prim cubes and the second is two resized cubes that I have textured, note the difference in the display score:

So it looks as if we can get a bit of information, even if we don’t need to worry about prims and land impact scores for the time being. The what is all this link, explains all …. I think!