Friday, June 20, 2008

Copyable Animations

Most animators do not sell copyable dances - I don't understand this. I like to have a copy in my inventory and another in my AO in case of the dreaded inventory loss. If they think transferrability is so important, why don't they use some of the very nice vendor systems that allow you to buy for other people and have it sent directly to the gift receiver?

In general, I dislike "no copy" anything. I like to mix and match, wear a set of shoes with more than one outfit, etc. And I like to put an entire outfit into a single folder, where a quick "Add To Outfit" will put the entire thing on. No rummaging through my shoes folder, trying to find the pair that I know works perfectly with the outfit, no trying to track down which folder that piece of underwear that I'm wearing is hiding in, nothing like that. I put it all in one folder along with sub-folders and happily don't care.

Except for the "no copy" objects. If I want to use a single piece with something else, I have to always go track it down. But maybe I'm strange, I don't like hunting through tons of folders trying to find the one piece I can readily see in my mind but that I can't remember the name of.

The maker of the Huddles animation tool is keeping a list of animators that sell copyable animations. She receives tons of requests for how to recover animations lost through inventory bugs.

I for one plan to patronize those merchants who sell copyable animations and outfits more and more. I'm tired of it. When I lost an important piece of inventory, it included L$20,000+ worth of animations, *poof*. And very few merchants are willing to give you another copy, that is if you can even remember all of the animations you had, which I did not.

6 comments:

Melissa Yeuxdoux said...

Well... it's a tradeoff, and the way SL does it now is a big waste of resources, precisely because it encourages people to have lots of copies of the things in their inventories for that convenience of putting on an outfit with a single drag and drop.

What the client needs is something like what in Unix/Linux are called "links", so that multiple folders can point to a single object. There are some JIRA proposals about it, so I hope you'll vote for one.

Tiessa said...

Actually, the item in your inventory is almost exactly like a unix link. It is merely a pointer to the actual resource. The actual resources are not duplicated unless they are modified from the original.

When you copy things in your inventory, you are merely copying the pointer to the resource, not the resources themselves. They are no more a waste of resources than the links to which you refer.

Melissa Yeuxdoux said...

Interesting... but if that's the case, then having two links to it shouldn't be considered making a copy, and hence shouldn't violate the "no copy" permission. Only giving to somebody else should be treated as possibly making a copy for IP purposes (and the giver reminded that doing so will eliminate all links to it from his or her inventory).

Tiessa said...

Unfortunately, the "no copy" is on the inventory resource, not the underlying resource.

How I first suspected this, was in sorting through textures from multiple freebie packs, I came upon similarly named textures (and exactly named textures). After loading one of them, the other one would load instantly, as opposed to waiting for a full download from the server. The texture was the same, even if it was from multiple different sources. But it was obviously in multiple different spots in my inventory.

Recently, Kelly Linden on the developers list outlined that it does, in fact, work this way.

The resource in your inventory and the underlying resource are two different things.

C said...

I'm finding more stores will give you the option to buy a copyable or transferable version of the product, and I think that's a great idea.

As often as I find myself wishing I could copy something, I find myself wishing I could transfer another item.

I haven't seen this on animations yet though.

Izzy said...

Thanks for the heads up about the Huddles list; that will come in handy.

I, too, long for copyable items so I could make folders for easy "drop & wear" of favorite outfits. It would, without a doubt, make my second life easier.