Show individual prims' position/size with Select Individual

It'd be nice if the editor would show the size and absolute position of prims that are part of a linked set and selected with "Select Individual", rather than only displaying size/position of the root prim and nothing for child prims.

The quick and dirty solution. Might have bugs since it's written out of world:

state default
{
touch_start(integer total_number)
{

//Displays global, prim-based position, rotation, and size. Note this does not work
//on attachments!
if(llDetectedKey(0) == llGetCreator())
{
llSetText("Pos: " + (string)llGetPos() + "\n Rot: " + (string)(180.0 / PI * llRot2Euler(llGetRot())) + "\n Size: " + (string)llGetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_SIZE]),<1,1,0>,1.0);

//Note if (string)llGetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_SIZE]) does not compile, you might need 
//to pull list data from it!
state next;
}
}
}

state next
{
touch_start(integer total_number)
{
//Shut off text when touched again
llSetText("",<1,1,0>,0.0);
state default;
}
} 

*Code edit to be creator-usable only. Ardith is absolutely right on the "copy by numbers" thing.

It's my understanding that this is how select individual used to function, but that it was changed to hinder copying by numbers. If I'm mistaken about this history, feel free to correct me. However, if this were to be (re)implemented, then it would need to work only for items which you have mod perms for. Otherwise, it would be easy (though tedious) to rip off designs.

OMG you have got to be kidding. no no no i've heard some insane ideas in my life but

well i just don't know what to say. you're probably right. a few whiney butts cried in the forum that thier designs were being copied so ll placed a great hinderance on us all to accomodate them.

no i take that back. that is insane. they're not that foolish. surely. please tell me it's some sort of technical glitch.

Given it's painlessly solvable at the creator level (see script example), and I could personally believe people ripping off vehicle designs, I can still see why this is the case.

People just do the darnedest things, ya'know?

So does this post mean that you don't mind if I ripoff everything you've ever created?

if you can effectively backward engineer and reproduce it, no i don't mind. i'm well aware that there's no enforceable patent for object designs created in sl. i'm also well aware that the permission system doesn't work properly so you can likely find a way to just copy my textures.

if i was seriously designing things over which i wanted to retain creative rights, and with which i wanted to make serious cash, i damn sure wouldn't create them here. i'd use maya and bryce and market them in the real world. this is a game.

I don't sell my stuff to become rich. I sell my stuff to subsidize in-world expenses. If people come along and copy my stuff without reimbursing me, then there's no point in building anything because I'm quickly going to run out of money. If I don't have any money, then I'm not going to buy anything, which means other content creators aren't going to be selling as much. After three or four dozen iterations of this, there aren't going to be as many builders in world. This of course means that the greatest strength of SL (the vast quantity of interesting user-created content) will be weakened. And if that weakens too much, we'll just be using a glorified instant messaging client.

People aren't altruistic enough to just give away their stuff. After having devoted hours of work to something, people deserve more recompense than a couple of accolades. Otherwise, they might as well just sit around playing Tringo.

turning this feature off only costs me a few extra minutes duplicating prims in your objects. prims are too easy to reproduce for this feature to be deactivated. the inconvenience it pushes on builders is far more harmful than the problem it doesn't solve.

the keys to unique, sellable items are proprietary textures and scripts. those are difficult to reproduce from scratch.

Really? Is there yet another prim bug I hadn't heard of? I sell my items as no mod, which means you can't drop scripts into them. As far as I know, this leave reproducing the item by eye, which doesn't produce an exact copy anyways.

Scripts are astonishingly easy for a competent programmer to reproduce, and textures only go so far. You can spend a month developing a new texture, but you still need a good model to use it with. The key to making unique, interesting items are good models. The model is the alpha and the omega.

this is what i'm talking about doing.


as are objects for a competent builder. it's astonishingly easy to reproduce music cds and sell them underground. more people don't do it simply because it's enforcably illegal. using feature deactivation logic, we should make cd units not play albums unless the unit is properly encoded for each session. i suppose we could call that itunes or something; or is that what the DMCA is supposed to do?

I agree with the original point of this thread. Most importantly, though - Ardith - I think you hit the nail right on the head in your first comment. It sure would make a lot of people happy if they re-implemented the feature, but have those numbers display only if you have mod permissions.

Travis

Ahhh... I should have known where this was going. However much our freedoms may have been infringed by the DMCA, that doesn't give us carte blanche to violate the copyrights of others. No matter how easily it may be to copy something, that doesn't mean that it should be legal, nor does it mean that no one should protect against it. The ideal situation is one in which the rights of the producer and the rights of the consumer are equally balanced. If this requires copy-protection, then so be it.

If you'd like to argue that the select individual feature is flawed, go ahead. I agree. I think that it should show the individual prm properties, so long as you have mod rights to the object. However, if you don't have mod rights then you should not be able to view these properties. If you think this is such a great injustice, then perhaps you also believe that we need to reimplement the texture preview function for every prim, regardless of mod rights.

I don't think it would be very difficult to implement this proposal, either. Now if only we can persuade the Lindens...

i'll go along with that. i'm only arguing that it's a terrible inconvenience for developers to have the feature arbitrarily flipped off. the idea that it was done to protect against copying simply doesn't wash. having the feature off doesn't serve that purpose at all.

But it does protect against copying. It may not prevent all forms of copying, but it does make it more difficult. It is not simply a casual matter of clicking on every prim and copying down the numbers. Even a protection method that is only partially effective is better than nothing.

Any reason one would use llGetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_SIZE]) instead of llGetScale()?

Yeah. Force of habit.