Tarius Auxarmes

Skunk Spaatz wrote: WELL it seems EA has replied to my email about using their relic and you know what they said? NOTHING they send me a trailer for a new game. i dont think they care LOL Its because they don't. Yes, there is all this legal mumbo jumbo stuff, but what it comes down to is if whoever originally made/owns an object really cares about other people doing things with it or even hears about someone using it to begin with - and - cares enough to go after them. Personal use can be considered a grey area, but typically no one cares if money or distribution isnt involved. One of the most copyright obsessed companies around is probably Games Workshop. I once sent them an email about people making Warhammer 40k models in SL and got no response. This is the same company that stopped distribution of a fan film made in Germany because German law says that a creator always retains rights to something regardless of any contracts removing/abdicating/etc those rights. Essentially this would have meant that saying yes to this would allow anyone to circumvent their copyright. The SL is based in the US, not Germany though. Then there is Nike(I think) or some other company that decided to stop people from making and selling items in SL and did it themselves instead. Would they have been able to track down someone who decided to make their own pair of shoes and keep it to themselves? No, likely not. People mention about all this harm caused to people when you copy their stuff. Well, amount of harm caused is one of those grey areas when it intersects with personal use; obviously distribution and/or selling are generally considered bad here. If half the population decided to make their own copies of something from scratch then yes, that is definitely not a good thing and would provoke a response. If a single person decides to make a copy of something, will anyone even notice or even care? Is EA in SL selling replicas of their Marker? No, probably not. So I typed out alot of stuff but in the end, it all comes down to whether you think someone will care enough to come after you if you make a replica of something or if anyone in SL will care enough to bother notifying anyone of it. Also, nice work on the Marker, I wanted to get a model for myself because they look cool. PS. on the moral stuff, its not morals that you can dictate or decide, its ethics; morals and ethics are not the same thing. The question here is: "Is it ethical to make a replica of an item from a game for personal use when there are currently no alternatives other than making said item yourself?" The question by extension to this is: "Will making this item for myself cause any harm, ie, will the company lose any money?" Seeing as he got the response in the form of not caring, it doesnt matter for this case now.

In regards to the original post I am somewhat suprised I havent seen very many blobby AVs. Mesh uptake has been a bit slower than I thought it would be, or I am not in the right places. I will switch to firestorm once they come out with their next viewer though.

Ishtara Rothschild wrote: Ceera Murakami wrote: I'm using the Firestorm Mesh Beta or Viewer 3 from LL, but NOT because of Mesh! I'm using them to be able to make up to 64 Meter prims, which is FAR more important to me than Mesh, which many people still can't see properly. I can do that in Phoenix 1.5.2. I was really surprised when I accidentally stretched a cube beyond 10 meters It seems that this is server side, not client side. You and me both. I was in Sandbox Wanderton when I went to stretch a prim to 10m and it flew past up to 21. I was quite suprised and found it to be hilarious. Actually the ability to stretch the prims to sizes larger than 10 seems to be a combo of server and viewer code(tho mostly server). I had a friend who was unable to make larger prims for a while while using V2 while at the same time I could go all the way to 64m(using phoenix). After a while she was able to stretch them to 40 something meters and finally now she can make them the full 64m. Perhaps they simply put a block on V2 from doing it at first. Whatever the case, if it indeed had something to do with viewers, it doesnt really matter much now because everyone can do it. As for mesh use. It will take a couple months before it starts truely becoming widespread because of the lag in the 3rd party viewer development; this isnt that unapparent. Mesh will eventually be in use everywhere and theres likely nothing to stop it. Anyone who has been around a while knows that once LL decides to push something, its a rare thing that they will take it back/admit they were wrong.

I am sorry you are so misinformed. You make me sad. I would be willing to bet that you never bothered looking into what exactly a copyright violation is. I have. Dont worry, I doubt you can find something that says making something generic from scratch is illegal. Just to be clear, I never advocated making an exact model from scratch and uploading it to SL, although you apparently have that impression. I am sure I could have worded things more clearly, but that wont stop you from being misinformed. Go educate yourself some: http://www.bannerwitcoff.com/_docs/library/articles/Katz%20and%20Cardy%20Innovation%20article.pdf

Well you certainly have no idea what you are talking about. I had to laugh at your post. Not that I think you will, but, go look up Morrowind modding if you think I am somehow going to get sued. There is nothing wrong with making stuff from scratch. You seem to think however that if someone makes something it has to be completely different from anything out there which many people will tell you is simply not true. Oh, and Linden Lab has policies in place for this stuff and will do whats needed so they are not held accountable. I would like to see you try and sue an ISP because someone is using it to destribute stolen content. I will wait for your results on that.

Yes people copy content. No, there is no way at this point in time to completely stop it. This will always be fact for the foreseeable future regardless what it is, whether mesh, sculpty, whatever. In the end, I dont think the companies care that much if someone copies their content as long as said person isnt making money and as long as they arnt doing widespread distribution. Depends on the company, and depends on how said copy is used really, so dont go thinking I am saying its ok. Let me tell you a little story. I am involved with making models(for mods) for a certain game. The company who made said game has ruled that we cant import models or textures from the more recent sequal to said game for any of these mods(in other words, copy). Guess what though, I can make something from scratch that looks practically identical to the original models and its completely ok to do so. I get no trouble about it at all and I post in their official forums with pictures and all. From what I understand, its usually ok if you make stuff from scratch, its a definite no-no to just copy something; but of course most people agree with that. Oh, and one time I contacted Games Workshop legal department about people selling space marine models in SL.(this was a couple years ago and the owner of said sim was generally cosidered an idiot) Guess what happened? Nothing, they didnt do anything at all and anyone who knows what they are like, knows they are quite lawyer happy when they want to be.(heck, they forbid a fan film from being distributed because of a quirk of german copyright law that allows artists to retain some rights to what they make regardless) It also helps that SL is a small environment with money amounts being tossed around of only millions(couple hundred million for all SL). If I was owner of a company and I saw people copying some content from one of my games to SL, I would likely find out that chasing these people and bringing them to court would probably cost more than its worth. A single good game can bring in more money than all that exists in SL so its hardly worth spending any to stop this sort of thing when the impact is quite small(as opposed to torrents but thats another story). Plus, it makes for good free advertising anyway. I am sure not all companies would feel this way, but you should get the point.

I am sure this is like those people who screamed that sculpties would be the end of the grid, and then after that, voice would be the end. Look how far that got them. I really dont know what the big deal is. LL offers a mesh enabled viewer, whether people decide to use it or not isnt their fault(ok, it is, haha, but thats not the point). I havent decided if I should wait for firestorm or go ahead and use the LL viewer. I am fine with waiting because I know that mesh isnt going to take over the grid all that fast because there are people waiting just as I am. Mesh is an important new part of SL. The time LL takes to roll out bump maps will be used by the third party teams to get mesh working on their viewers. I am hoping they have that out before the teams get their viewers up to date so that way once mesh really starts spreading, it starts spreading with bump maps.

Actually I think they may still work. I believe just a couple days ago I saw a new person with a first ad last name.

I am not implying everyone is an idiot although I suppose I should have made my statement more specific in that its the people who dont bother seeking help on whats good and instead barrel forward thinking they are great for having done something when in reality its terrible. Sure, try stuff out and learn things, but not taking the time to at least take a look into things is just lazy.

Baloo Uriza wrote: As with every other building tool so far, it's not the tool that creates the lag. It's idiot builders who think "efficiency" was taken out of the dictionary and don't understand why fewer polygons is better. I imagine these are people who go golfing and try for the high score for basically the same reason. This exactly. Its not mesh thats the problem, its the idiots who dont know any better and in alot of cases, load stuff down way beyond whats needed. Just like the person who was using over 9000 polys for like a 20 step spiral stair mesh and over half of those were all in the railing. That thread is on the second page now and has like 6 pages if you wanna go read it. Mesh can be far more efficiant than prims or sculpties, but it requires the person who makes it to know some basics. As for drawbacks, it will take bandwidth just like you say, but not as much as you want to think. So, whats the drawback if I take a single tylenol for a headache? Thats usually all I need and as far as I know, there is only benefit and no drawback.

Did you know that you can make regular prims change their shape with scripts, and not have to bother uploading whole separate meshes for each possible change you might want to make to that prim's shape? At least we can re-size meshes - that at least makes clothing possible. Of course, if there's some inconvenient part sticking out, we can't resize just *THAT* part of the clothes, like we can when we buy mod-able clothing. Yea, know all that, been around a while. At best it wouldnt work and at worst it would crash or something. You do realize that alot of people make no mod clothing and hair anyway right? Hence the bain that is the resizer script. Oh, and you're not even supposed to change mesh shapes by applying a new mesh to them - you're supposed to create all the parts, and use alpha changes to make them visible or invisible. Real big advantage there I will assume this is sarcasm and just say that you should obviously get something thats right for the task to begin with rather then juryrigging something. I admitted to start with that I didn't know how many faces a mesh would have, as far as in-world counted, but - Oh, wow - 8 different textures. So my d10, d12 or d20 is out of the question. And I'd certainly have found that info from the SL Wiki page on meshes - it's in the link marked "Uploading Multi-face Meshes" - oh, wait, nobody ever put that link there, and the link for uploading meshes at *all* goes off-site. And still no answer to flexi meshes - the best I can find says "no", but then again, apparently they can be "rigged" to work with the skeleton of the avatar mesh, which is fine for *clothes*, but misses the myriad other uses of flexi. I will just say that I could make a d100 work without 100 different textures, why cant you? What brought me to SL was being able to build things and see right THEN what I was building. Not build something in one program, and then see it in another one. I could do *THAT* with POVray, with much better rendering. And I'm sorry that Philip Linden has been gone from SL so long that you don't even recognize the original slogan for SL. One of his original ideas was that person X could have a build in-world, and others could make suggestions, and see the changes made as they happened. That certainly won't be happening with meshes. I don't want, or expect, the in-world editing tools to be the equal of the stand-alone programs. Hell, the stand-alone programs aren't even the equals of each other. Meshes remove the "Hummm... What if I?" of SL. You are kidding right? What do you think happens when a person makes a 3d model, they wear a blindfold or something? You do realize that prims arnt going away right, what you said is still true, people can still build stuff with regular prims. Nothing is being taken away here, anyone can still come and make stuff out of prims. SL is gaining something very important and all you can do is say this somehow stops basic creativeness? I have a feeling I could say a glass is half full and you would say half empty. Well no matter, you dont have to use mesh if you dont want, so have fun with that. Ya know what, I am going to note your name down and as part of learning to get a mesh into SL, I am going to send you a full perms d20 mesh with texture and all, just for the heck of it. hahaha It wont be tommorow, but I garuntee you will receive something named d20.(not sure if I should wait for firestorm or get the LL viewer yet)

WADE1 Jya wrote: I would just like to see something (which to my nontechnical mind) seems like it would be simple to implement. More materials allowed per mesh than 8. Somebody else earlier was asking for this & I disagreed it was useful at the time, but now I'm thinking it would be highly beneficial. Maybe it is just set this way because parametric prims ever only had 8 faces max (and mesh co-opts this), or maybe there is a very very good reason not to implement this, but to me it seems like a good idea now :matte-motes-impatient: I'd also like to see a fuller materials system so we can do things like make realistic ice, snow, frosted glass, diamonds etc (whatever the technical jargon for that part of materials might be). Oh and lava too. I wanna make elemental fantasy animals. Sorry I can't explain what I want better in proper terms... the way I work software I am like one of those weird musicians who can play the song but can't read the music. While limiting to 8 faces is...well...limiting, that many is enough for even moderatly complex things that might be created. Even the professionals dont use tons of textures per object and in many cases, they shove a bunch of stuff into one texture to optimize the amount of memory used. With the materials like ice and frosting, you mean overlays which is basically a texture layer. Yes, it would be nice to have something like this rather than needing to use another prim.(although, thinking about using one of the mesh faces here...) I supposed you could think of clothing as the closest thing to this. I understand the logic of software, but dont ask me to write code.

DanielRavenNest Noe wrote: If they want to limit the number of render passes (to maintain performance) just having a second map, and a selection dropdown to use it as Ambient occlusion, additive detail, normal, or specular would be a big step forward. Additive detail means you add the two texture maps, possibly with different UV tiling ratios. And low shiny is still too shiny for many items, make that a number entry (% shine) I was just thinking the other day how shinyness needs to be a value and not restricted to a mere 3.

Not even LL is so dumb as to allow something that would terribly lag the entire grid and yes, they have the PE value to help stop people from making overly complicated things. So its no wonder people are ignoring you when you sound like you have no idea what you are talking about.

So what does happen when you apply a cut path, or hollow? How about twist, dimple, etc? Whee - you can resize, and rotate. Texturing is iffy at best, as they only have one side, I'll bet, like sculpties. The only way to change their shape is to have a script apply a *NEW* mesh to it. Can you make flexi meshes? Oh, well - enjoy your mesh-flavored Kool-Aid. I'll stick with what attracted me to SL - "It all starts with a box." Well, talk about harsh words. There is plenty of info you can read on this if you arnt lazy and simply look it up. First, why would you want to apply a pathcut or hollow or any of that stuff? When someone makes a mesh, they can take into account what they want the mesh to look liike. In this way its just like a sculpty. Whether you actually can apply any of that I do not know and dont really care to; when I make something I am going to account for how its supposed to look anyway when I make it, then I dont have to edit it much in world. Second, meshes allow up to 8 different textures on them, so I know you are speaking about something which you have no knowledge of when you say "iffy" and betting its like sculpties. Go learn about that which you are speaking of before proclaiming criticisms. Third, stuff like mesh is used all over the place(technically, your AV's body is a mesh). This is simply LLs adaptation of it so we can use it in SL. It may have all started with a box back in the past, but it hardly has to nowadays. I dont know exactly what kind of thing for boxes you have, but what brought me to SL wasnt a box fetish, it was the ability to build things and adding mesh greatly expands this. They have tacked on enough prim count penalties to mesh so that you will still see regular ole prims and sculpties around, but any properly made meshes will still be far superior in appearance to anything made from prims or even sculpties.