retroengeneering and idea stealing

And until I am enjoying SL too, I will.

With what?

Going on topic, which is something that clearly none of you know about, I'll gladly say I've been inspired by certain things, and made similar objects after said inspiration. However, it's been my work when I've done so, and there's generally enough difference to tell.

For example, I'm probably not the first to have though a certain AM's sculpted gems were awesome... and also not the only one to have balked at the price tag he's put on it. I mean, when you're talking a few thousand L$ and it's really only one cut (a very common one) that's caught your eye, that's a completely outrageous amount. And later, I found that the bottom part wasn't quite 'right' either, and the only one that had a proper lower half had a non-standard upper part.

So, what did I do? Well, I loaded up Wings3D, and worked at my own version. Took longer than I thought, and even more when I found that the inverted version I wanted to make wouldn't work right, but I had the beta grid to test with, and did so, until, finally, I got everything to a point I was happy with.

Did I do wrong? I don't think so, presonally. What both of us did was simply copy something from the real world. Hell, our methods don't even match. He used an image editor only, while I used a modeling program.

Later, though, and actually just recently, I was inspired by seeing an image on SLEX of a different gem. On this one, though, the goal behind it was both challenge, to see if I could recreate it somewhat closely, and to do it without having vertextes in funky places (which was visible with the image I'd seen). On both counts, I believe I succeeded.

Thing is, being inspired by what you see around is something that's happened for ages, and can't always be wrong...

It's easy to sympathise with both sides of this question.

If I had been the person who invented the wheel, say, you can bet that I'd be more than annoyed to see other people not only copy my idea, but profit from it. And I'd be fully justified in my outrage...because after all, I was the one who thought of it. (Hypothetically.)

But on the other hand---if humans DID have some mechanism by which to prevent ANYONE making, say, wheels, except that first inventor and whatever children he might have had....then where would we be now?

We wouldn't be posting on an online message board, I can tell you that. More like pounding out signals with big rocks.

#194 was where Yumi stated you didn't have to argue, you could command. #206 was the first time a command was actually issued (mine).

Not to put too fine a point on it.

Which you have proven is never going to happen.

You're one mixed-up, strange chick and I've had enough of this....welcome to mute city.

Message #194:
A ferret has stolen your socks.

I haven't proven anything. I've made statements that lead to it but all of them can be disagreed with if false.

They have been disagreed with. I command you to read and understand those disagreements.

Good point! It is a repeating issue in game and discussion in forums. We have a large sports organization that has been copied numerous times now, all the way down to the most unusual rules. Such is life in SL. Fortunately, as an unexpected benefit, it's provided another incentive for us to keep improving what we have and that's how we try to see it, though it can be irritating. The end result is that the existence of competition, and the motivation for us to continue to be the biggest and the best, the quality of our product stands out far beyond the copycats. But you also have to continue to improve not just for the sake of competition but pride in what you have.

Most of the disagreements either applied to the past or applied only to the person posting the disagreement.



Which is great, for some things. But when we're talking about the original example here - scripted waves - it's much more problematic because, well, a wave is a wave. You can make it look better, but even that will reach the limits of the SL engine at some point, and beyond that adding much extra functionality to a wave is just what, I'm told, RPGers delightfully call "lasersharking".

Jojogirl was kind enough to send me her notecards and a class log in world, and I had a similar discussion with her which I think showed a bit of a misunderstanding; if you're making art objects like houses or pillows or clothes then there's almost always scope for improvement or for a different style, but if you're writing scripts, then sooner or later you run out of features that people care about, and the improvements become increasingly technical and thus hard to market ("now has only 2 clicks in the menu system instead of 3!".

I think some oldbie scripters still remember the "JEVN incident" from 2006-ish, where a major brand of in-world vendor was discovered to have a security flaw. Many, many other scripters immediately started securing their vendors tightly and advertising this. Yet, all that happened was that JEVN fixed the bug, issued an update, and stayed right where they were in the market. At least 2 brands of scripted vendors were closed down as a result because the message was clear: customers, being non-technical, don't care much about technical improvements, and as a scripter that is all you can make.

Humanity evolve by building new idea over the existing ideas, if you want to be a greedy bitch and prevent anybody to piggyback on your findings, you might aswell delete any of your creations that is remotely inpired of something that already exist.

Like I said, you haven't actually understood them.

What? Love didn't disagree, she just said "they're your limitations, so suffer them or leave, but I'm alright Jill", and then continued along the theme of "everyone else has what they want, it's all just your problem". This is hardly disagreeing with my pessimism. You said that "many people" were building living in other places and doing things, but I'm not one of them, so it doesn't address my point. You disagreed with me that people were ignored in SL, but when I presented myself as evidence you agreed with the pessimism ("being you obviously makes you unhappy". Lots of "others, others, others" with so suggestion of who these others are, or any suggestion that what applies to these others could apply to me or even to everyone..



It works this way in the real world, because it seems (or at least, we assume) that there are always new scientific discoveries to be made that drive forward product improvements. If there was ever a time when we could actually confidently say that "everything that will be invented has been" then we would need to start thinking about these issues in RL, but we don't.

Second Life doesn't work that way, though. We only get new abilities when the Lindens add them. There are only a finite number of code paths in the server and sooner or later all the useful ones will be discovered. Which means that every technical development will hit a wall at some point, and when it hits that, the only way left is for prices to go down. But the ultimate result of that is freebie branded cars and Anshe's L$10 furniture, both of which were lambasted for destroying the motivation to create.

And your solution is?

Yumi.

I haven't read all the posts in this discussion with you, but I've read a few and I'm confused about you. I know you to be a clever person, with a 'brain'. Your posts, over time and threads, indicate that, as do the things you have made. And yet you posted in this thread that nobody will take time to teach you how to build, even though building is the easiest of the creative skills in SL, and you have written some excellent script gadgets which are much more difficult to create - brainwise, that is. So you can see how I'm confused. I can't see why anyone with a brain like yours would need someone to spend time teaching them how to build. What am I missing?

I create (build) things, as you know, but I often say that anyone can shape the prims like I do, and that my skill, for what it is, is in the texturing of them. Since anyone can make the same prim shapes as others make, the skill must be in the texturing of them. Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean by "build".

I did, and have, and you keep trying to tell me things that I know aren't true and that I know I've explained, so I figure that either I'm shit at explaining or you just don't want to understand... either way you're simply not understanding.

We are NOT limited to following the Lindens. SL is complex enough, and powerful enough, that it can and is used to create things that are never explicitly added by Linden Labs and are invented or discovered by people studying or playing around with the game. Second Life is Turing-complete. There is, therefore, no practical limit to what you can do with it.

That's not just my opinion, that's mathematically provable. ALL Turing-equivalent systems have the same expressive ability. There might be some things that are unreasonably hard to do, currently, and they can make it easier to do them, but there's uncountable numbers of other things that nobody's even tried that are also possible. People keep inventing new products, using the old interfaces, all the time. That's not surprising. That's inevitable.

I gave you an example of something I've been playing with, in-world, and you dismissed it as an "exploit". IF THAT'S AN EXPLOIT, EVERY PIECE OF SOFTWARE CREATED ON EVERY PLATFORM IN THE WORLD IS AN EXPLOIT. If you can't understand this point yet, I give up.

youre still trying to get someone else to take the responsibility for the dissatisfation you feel in your own life... doesnt work that way...

so you cant point your finger and rez some prims.. then arrange them into something pleasing to yourself... or rather you couldnt be bothered to try..
youre still sitting here months later after your first lament ... waiting for someone to please you..

most ppl i know who create things of beauty .. that please other people.. start off creating them merely to please themselves.. or just a an excersise in logistics.. or sometimes just for the hell of it..

you will never be able to do that until you can actively do something for yourself... instead of lying there in your sackcloth and ashes and berating the world around you in an attempt to get them as depressed as you make yourself feel.

get off your butt and just do it...... whatever it is.

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Huh. I'm completely unaware that I didn't disagree with you. I could have sworn I had...

Oh, I know how to shape prims well enough. But knowing how to cut a prim doesn't answer the question "I want to make a flower, what prim do I use for that?" Or at a higher level, "I want to make a house, how tall do I make the bottom floor and where do I put the windows?" And texturing is a big problem for me too - not just because I always wind up stuck as to whether I should be trying to work out the prims, or trying to work out the textures, first, because they both seem to depend on each other in all sorts of ways that make it hard to get a handle on where to start. And even then, picking the right texture from a collection of 2000-something (I collected freebie ones at one point) when, given loading time, just viewing each one would take 2 hours?

Actually personally a bigger problem for me with building is that I can't do it for 5 minutes without being utterly frustrated by the user interface, which still doesn't have align, touch, or distribute functions, still can't edit groups of prims on single axes, etc. (And yes I do know there are scripts that do this, I have some of them, but they don't fit into the standard interface and they lag.) It's ridiculous that, 15something versions in, we still have prim drift and prim burn. I have occasionally wished to delve into the Indra source code and try to correct this, but trying to understand that code is probably something I'll never have enough time to do.



No, you and Love didn't actually disagree. You both posted that _you_ (ie, Argent Stonecutter or Love Hastings) can do these things on SL, or that "others" (but it's not clear who) can. Neither of these actually contradict my point that I (Yumi Murakami) can't, and thus by extension that not everyone can. You haven't really said how you do them, or really said anything I could use - although that's probably because it's to do with being a ferret



It's an exploit because it uses a bug in the SL rendering engine that results in effects being applied in the wrong order. And the fact that you had to show it to me sort of supports my point, since it implies that you didn't have (or didn't want to share) any object which uses only the functions that are actually fully documented, intended by the platform owners, and listed in the public SDKs. The fact that people are having to delve into undocumented functionality in order to come up with interesting items is a sign that the useful, interesting applications available with the documented functionality have dried up. And it's bad for creation because you could experiment for four hours trying to find an interesting glitch while someone else finds one on their first try; it makes creation a lottery.



That's a strange thing to say, there's no law of physics against it, it's only people's choices. If you're arguing that I'm responsible for my choices then, well, aren't they responsible for theirs too? And if as a customer I am dissatisfied with LL's product don't I have a right to complain?



As I mentioned, when I asked for help building, almost nobody actually suggested that I build. The resistance to helping me with it, I tend to interpret as a "bad sign" because it means that they are casting their vote for anything I could potentially create in the future not to exist.

lets do this then,....
i have almost zero talent for scripting.. in fact if i were honest.. i could say i had a talent for fssking scripts up...
i could buy a book and learn .. but i feel about as much passion for the act of scripting as i do for cleaning the loo...

BUT... i would seriously love to be able to script the things i build to do the things i want them to do .. without wasting hours looking for a script that might come close..

so.. i like to think i have building talent.. textures and shapes come easy to me.. i work with them in RL as well... if you can see the signatures.. click on mine.. walk around my sim.. and if you like..

you can teach me to be less frustrated with scripting and i will help you be less frustrated with building..

there you have it.. a firm offer.

No, it doesn't depend on a bug in the SL rendering engine. It depends on the SL rendering engine working the way it's supposed to work.
I didn't "have to" do any such thing. I happened to have it convenient at hand when your IM came up, so I sent it to you. It only uses operations that are documented by Linden Labs, and it uses them in a standard way. The effect you see is what you're expected to see when you set bloom to 10x on a 10% transparent object. The brightness of objects behind are attenuated to 10%, and then intensified by the bloom operation to the original brightness, but blurred by the bloom.

You can create a Photoshop or CoreGraphics filter to do the same thing, and get the same result.

Yes, sure, but SL doesn't support filters, and filters are not on the list of things you can create in SL. In SL you can create objects, and if you look into a glowing, transparent object, things that you see through it don't glow. There is no documentation saying that you can place a glowing transparent object in front of another to change its appearance.



I would quite like that

first my waves do not lag , second I do not host 4700 prims but I host 3300 prims So I don't see the reason to invent stories here .... , then my prices are according to the content inside , while other sell one wave for 300 lI usually sell more than 20 for 2000 if I should sell each one individually I wouldnt have the place to put vendors and they would cost even much less but it gonna change this too, .... and yes befoure the innovations I did , there may have been waves in SL but not like mines wich gived a total new revel of realism to Sea ....
Also I have a worst and less powerfull Computer than yours and crap connection but I wonder why then I do not lag in that sim , even with maxed out drag view.... so don't say you had horrible lag couse of the sim or couse is openspace but go check the pecifics of your pc and your performances may be due to a problem to your client side or a moment when there where tons of people in las arenas , and this happens quite often....
and lastly I didnt protested about fair competition but direct compying thorught retroengeneering or copybotting , so fr I have spotted even more than 5 people copybotting stuff from me and this sucks , even couse not only kills markets , it kills creativity above all , and as secondary effects makes drop incomes and so funds to sustains sims ... I am not one that just takes money and I keep prices high to greet myself but I offer 5 sims of places to vit to the people and if you do not like or appreciate it then dont go there...