Set to "Buy One Only"?

I have a project that's been giving me a brain bleed. I'm trying to emulate a real world project called "Peace Tiles", where a mural is made up of a number of small squares, each individually decorated by a different person. To do this in SL, I've created a large, blank mural made up of a series of single prims/squares. What I'd like to do is allow someone to click on a square and "buy" it. The square needs to remain intact with the mural, but once purchased, it will give the purchaser permission to drag a texture onto the prim.

I can get this part of the way. I have a script that allows me to drag things into objects (e.g., notecards, and I'm pretty sure I can apply this to textures too). From there, I can have the prim read the texture and change the face of the prim to display that texture.

Here's where I'm stuck: using the money functions, I am able to set the price of each tile so that a person can pay for it, and have it then display their name above it. What I can't seem to solve is the problem of telling the prim that it can only be bought once. Once a person has bought the rights to that prim, I don't want anyone else to be able to come along and buy it again, or change it.

I know there's a way to do this, because I've seen a vendor object that will limit purchases to one instance of an item only, but I'm not sure how they're accomplishing this.

Another important point: while each square is meant to allow a person to pay it to claim the rights for dropping a texture into it, I do not want that person to become the owner of the prim itself. The prim will remain intact as part of the larger mural, which will be auctioned off at the end of each project to raise money for real world projects (e.g., women's empowerment projects in Africa, child soldiers, etc.).

Would be tremendously grateful for any wisdom folks might be able to share on this, especially if there's a better strategy for trying to do what I've described above.


Cheers :^)

Sue.

Wowza that's a great question... I'm fascinated by how this will turn out. I wish I knew a solution to this!

Change states. The new state won't have a money() event, and in fact you'd probably just have it make the changes you want in the state_entry() and then stop.

sorry, i missread the question

Sue - they way to do this would probably be through allowing people to pay your tiles, rather than buying them. This way you retain ownership. The problem with this is that you can't control how much people pay, so in each tile's money event you need to check how much they paid, and refund it if it's the wrong amount. (If they pay too much, you could just refund the difference)

To refund, objects need permission to debit your account. Rather than having to grant each and every tile permission, you could link them all to a back-board, and have the tiles send a link message to the board. Then only the board needs debit perms.

As Jill says, when a tile has been "bought", it should switch to a new state, but this new state should have a money event that tells the person it has already been bought - and then refunds their money. This is due to some funny behaviour in linked items accepting money in states that do not have money events if they just came out of a state that did.

I don't know your level of experience - and I've tried to keep this as short as possible for now - so if you need more specific details, please feel free to ask.

I wish I wasn't such a novice at scripting, because then I could repay some of the generosity that constantly visits these forums! (I will in time ...)

Thanks so much for these great ideas! Can't wait to give them a try. The idea of linking them to a backboard gives the added advantage of creating a single object that can then be sent to the new owner when the finished mural is auctioned off.

BTW ... if any of you are curious about the real world project that this is based on, it's something that my friend Lars Hasselblad Torres launched a few months ago at omidyar.net, and it's really taken off:

http://www.omidyar.net/group/peacetiles/

(pictures and examples here)

Lars created it in his basement with his little girl, then turned it into a sidebar project at a deliberative democracy conference, and ended up spawing it as a global event for World AIDS day. Now it's crept into projects in Uganda with kids in IDP camps (internationally displaced peoples / refugee camps), heading to India, and continuing to spread. It's a wonderful project, no matter whether you're doing it as a unique present for someone on a personal level, or tackling a bigger project with an NGO or other organization.

If you want to see the virtual version I'm cultivating, it's in "La Paz" (The Peace Tiles Center) at the newly "Better World" island SIM I just opened today. There are two of the blank murals in the lobby downstairs, and one upstairs.

Island launch party is tonight at 7pm SL time if you want to join us:

Better World (85, 63)
secondlife://Better%20World/85/63

If you bump into me out there and I'm not very accessible, I'll ask your forgiveness now as I'm still working to migrate content in from the project sites.

Thanks again for your help, y'all

Sue.

a shout-out to Jillian Callahan ...

who is a script goddess

That girl has given me so much help inworld it's obscene. She's kind, generous and tenacious. Threw a real curve ball at her a few weeks ago and she came up with gold.

The thing I've come to appreciate most about this place is that there are so many decent, innovative people who don't hesistate to reach back.

I wanna be just like Jillian if I ever decide to grow up

Don't grow up , only aspire to grow up.