Cool Additions and Theft Protection

Theft -
People can steal textures from any source illegally, and the same goes for models. Perhaps a web-page database could be maintained by SL that could write some snap shots of your texture and or model (with a wetmark) to a user page to allow for a content copyright functionality that dates your creation whenever a product is "finalized" or imported. If it is stolen from another source, anyone can refer to the web-page and complain to the thief and enter a grief with that person and prove that they created it before or somewhere outside SL. Perhaps access is given only to the creator, to use as proof of creation date and ownership, but I don't see that this is necessary when you can see it in-SL and take a snapshot in-SL. Anyway, if this was done then SL can't be in anyway accountable for copyright infringement(not that they could be anyway for that individuals theft - see Marvel vs NCSoft, where users were making Marvel characters with the open-ended tools available in-game and texture importing) but it would make those people accountable. SL should make sure that the amount of times something gets sold is kept tallied also.

-Facial Animation/Shapes
I would really like to see facial morph shapes, or at least animatable facial textures, at least. So much of communication relies on the face, and we rely on our avatars to convey our emotions, not just our words. A very easy to use gui for making facial animation in SL is needed.


-The rest is Refering to Importing Meshes from outside SL (obj, ect..)


LOD(Level of Detail)-
can be done while preserving uv information, there are real time methods used in maya 7(built in) as well as available as a plugin for earlier versions called Progressive Mesh http://www.pojar.net/ProgressiveMesh/)
The source code is available
It's released under the The GNU Lesser General Public License.
http://www.pojar.net/ProgressiveMes...Mesh_V0_6_7.zip
Full source code (To build the source code, you'll also need Michael Garland's QSlim source code and the boost libraries.)
http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/~garlan...ware/qslim.html
http://www.boost.org/

-Capitalism
The hassle of modelling with the prim engine, is really the biggest downfall in my opinion. It is way too slow of a process and limiting. I don't have the time to go about modelling in this archaic method. I could make so many cool things in very little time if only you would untie my hands. Limiting the amount of polys that can be imported will force people to get very good at efficient low res modeling. The idea of capitalism is that, people with better skills to make the best products should be allowed to make more money, not the people with the most time.

-Lag
I think it would be possible to limit the number of polys that are imported. I think the allowable amount to be imported should correspond with the prims. You have to own the land or be given permission by a land owner to upload meshes into a sim, and it needs to stay on that grid, if it is part of an environment, and takes away from the total poly/prim total that can be created on that land to keep the interaction clean. . If it is part of a character or for a vehicle then there should be a set amount each person can use, that they can take with them anywhere, and have ownership to.
You should limit the amount a character can wear or "rez" at any given time, and limit the number of people that can be on a grid(if this isn't already done) Lag can be controlled very specifically.

Physics -
If the Physics Engine Uses the Rigid Body Technique they could just use bounding box information or the simplied (lowest LOD) version for this purpose or stand-in-prims that could be associated with the shapes. Bounding Boxes would be most likely the most feasible and would require breaking your model down into smaller chunks, which is a good suggestion either way to keep the size and poly counts down(as fore-mentioned).

-Normal Mapping Support
If SL is going to spend that 3million$USon something. Consider putting it towards this. Ideally, an engine that supported real-time normal mapping would make for a huge jump in the amount of detail that could appear on lower res geometry. You could even have an option to automate this. Create a standalone program used oustide SL that can use a hires geometry and its simplified version and create a normal map, if packages like zbrush or maya aren't accessible. It's not that hard.

/108/f5/104051/3.html

The examples discussed might help clear things up.

Let's say you make a texture and import it into SL, it gets date and time stamped with your username and posted (in miniature form with wetmark) to the next available slot on the web page that has been designated for this database alone and controlled by the Lindens. Now some chump uses GLIntercept or the like to snag your textures in perfect detail right from his graphics card with no watermark months later. Well you end up seeing them with your design or slightly modified or someone tells you about it and takes a snapshot of the suspect and mails it to you. Well now that you are aware of the theft you can report them to SL and point out that your texture was published on this specific date by you by referring to the web-page that has all the "copyright" (date/time/creatorName) information about your original upload. The other user can't show an earlier publish date, in fact filtering his publishes would reveal that he uploaded the texture months after you did and there it is on record for SL to deal with. The number of times this jerk sold an item with this texture is kept tallied(in my proposal), so now he owes you money that he must be held accountable for, it will be taken from his characters and alt's $L total and given to you along with a penalty. The jerk has learned his lesson and never does it again and you just made all the money for that guys hard work selling your product and then some (or the guy is permanently kicked off if he can't pay the full sum).

I rather like the idea of a virtual Copyright office...

What if LL watermarked ALL uploaded textures with the

1. Avatar's UUID
   
2. Date
   
3. Time
   

All textures would also be scanned for these watermarks during upload. If someone tries to upload a snagged texture, the system would simply refuse to accept it.

In theory, you could watermark the textures yourself, but I've found that the watermark certificate is rather expensive and therefore impractical. But if LL did it, it would apply to every SL user. Spread the cost around, as it were.

The texture watermark scheme would be dissected and broken within a week. There is no way to prevent a determined person from infringing a copyrighted work. A virtual copyright office is an interesting idea and more within the realm of the possible. But what if the copyright infringer is the first person to upload a texture to SL? How would the actual rights holder invalidate the infringer's registered virtual copyright?

Adjudicating copyrights could easily consume more resources than LL can spare. I think it more realistic if some enterprising SL resident setup a virtual copyright office today, without any support required or expected from LL. Just like LL is not involved at all with the virtual notary. I wouldn't even bother storing the texture with a wetmark. Just give the registrant a digitally signed cryptographic hash of their image.