Baba Sucks

So lots of people seem to think IRC is the place to find true character. Let’s talk about what I knew about CopyBot, Second Life, and you.

People seem to think CopyBot was developed to cause the destruction of Second Life. That’s simply not true. Am I saying it wasn’t going to cause a lot of discussion and worry? I knew it would, because it’s something that’s important.

The issue isn’t CopyBot. The issue is what real protections you can expect in Second Life.

Nothing will prevent copying. You can only react to it after the fact. Trying to stop it will only lead to failure, and it will have the effect of limiting fair use.

We’ve seen the same words from Linden Lab, from Robin and Cory. We’ve all been saying the same thing. I’ve been saying it for months, others have been saying it for just as long if not longer. A lot of people are aware, and it still seems that those who would be effected by it, the content creators, do not hear us.

CopyBot isn’t a very good copier. It’s inefficient and buggy. One good thing about CopyBot, and also mirrored in my comments taken from IRC, if it can copy an avatar down to the last prim and with the same appearance it will have HUGE visual impact. That’s the kind of thing you don’t shrug off. It almost instantly connected all those disparate dots for anyone that watched it do its thing. What is yours is now suddenly somebody else’s.

I didn’t develop CopyBot, but I was aware that it would cause a controversy. I was glad for that because now almost nobody is not aware of the limitation in the protocol. Happier? Probably not… Do you want to be happy, or rather oblivious of libsecondlife and angry at Linden Lab for something else?

THis is from a blog comment I made to Robin Linden’s blog post on Copyrights and Content Creation in Second Life(still in moderation 11:30 pst)
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CopyBot is not a product that we sell or distribute. It’s a debugging tool and silly demo with a [now] obviously bad choice of name. Hopefully you won’t be seeing copy bot on SLex any time soon..

The issue at hand with copy bot seems HUGE!

“Oh my god why would they do something like that?!”

But our reason for showing this application around was partly we were proud of or achievement, and then on the other hand, if it’s this easy, we should tell people that relying on the Second Life systems to protect content is not feasible any longer.

For a while now we’ve had this project on the back burner that has been asked for so many times by content developers, an ability to back up content to your hard drive and restore it in Second Life. Basically import and export functions.

That’s the basis of CopyBot as well excepting the permission check. The problem is the difference between CopyBot and and import export tool is little more than 1 line of code that is easily commented out by even novice programmers.

What you see in CopyBot is the same capabilities that any import/export tool would have.

It’s not something easy to deal with, and we’re struggling ourselves with the issues that CopyBot has brought. It’s caused many personal conflicts as well between developers and their friends who do not see the merit in what we do.

sceneviewer created by John Hurliman. This video shows IBM’s Almaden island. He just implemented a nice new camera that allowed me to zip around the sim for this video ;0  You will have to pardon the somewhat choppy framerate. John’s video came out a bit smoother.

I was fiddling with the libsecondlife sources earlier today and got sceneviwer all nice and workie workie. Check out this comparison shot of Second Life from both clients.

Yeah I know it’s Super teh hotness! The 3D engine is written using Microsoft XNA, which sadly means it’s not cross platform ;0 OH NOES!

But wait! Here is the good news,

Mono.Xna

Description

An open-source implementation of XNA using The Tao Framework for cross-platform rendering through OpenGL and Mono. The Mono.Xna discussion forum is available here.

Status
Mono.Xna is in early stages right now, but the end goal is to allow XNA projects to be compiled and run on platforms other then Windows, without having to change any code.

Mono.Xna, was initiated by libsecondlife’s very own “That guy who does stuff on the mono project,” and aims to make all your cross platform 3D rendering woes a thing of the past.

^{GhettoTags: CLI, XNA, Mono, .Net, sexy, open-standards, open-source, your-mom}

John Hurliman just posted a great writeup on the recent changes to libsecondlife this past month. Those changes include moving C# 2.0, a new NAnt Build System, super fancy pre-generated code, our new continuous integration server, our plans for NUnit unit tests and more!

Read Big changes in libsecondlife over at libsecondlife.org

The Reuters news, about Reuters the news agency, continues to cause waves. Yahoo has a story on their main page covering the event, as do several other major newspapers and online news sites. The barrage of press(mostly Yahoo) has hit the Second Life web-server like a sledgehammer. 

Meanwhile, the techies seem a bit more apathetic to it all if not downright dismissive, "What's next Third Life? lawl." 

Perhaps they're not aware of libsecondlife ( http://www.libsecondlife.org ) just yet.

 In the case that you don't check libsecondlife.org very often, and you actually read MY blog, check out the latest news I just posted.

Have you ever wondered what Second Life would look like rendered through an open source third party application?

I have, and now, thanks to libsecondlife developer John Hurliman, I know without a doubt that Second Life is a world of boxes flat shaded with random pastel colors! This renderer created for debug purposes is rendering a house using only a box primitive. Future updates will hopefully support more primitive types.

It's just the tip of the iceberg for 3D with libsecondlife. Also in the early stages of development is a 3D engine created by Adam Zaius that will be part of the first fully functional client using libsecondlife, codenamed Slight. Check out the Slight Roadmap to see what is planned for Slight and contribute your thoughts.

I was prompted to write this by Brace Coral, so check her out. 

So, who is Baba? That's hard….

Oldbie? Sure. Genius? That's a given. Totally Sucks? Yup. Why does anyone care? I dunno..

If you read back to the very beginning with my posting habits in the Second Life forums you would see it mostly started with stuff about open sourcing Second Life(login) … My discussions in world between friends(most of them SL super celebs cause I'm FIC )started way before that. I started asking what's wrong with Second Life(login), because we alreayd know what is right .

Why did it all stop suddenly? I didn't lose interest, that is for sure.. I joined libsecondlife . So, libsecondlife? What's that?! Oh, it's hawt h4x … You see we got this library that we are developing that is able to emulate the Second Life protocol. Yeah, so basicly we have the makings of our own Second Life client.

But Baba, isn't that against TOS? Sure, it would be if it wasn't all approved(FETED) and shit by the Lindends.

So, I got this thing going(libsecondlife) with Linden Lab where they are all like "Baba you so cool and sexy" and I've been going with that. Wait til we start emulating their servers.. Someone at Linden Lab might die over that one. You know, that guy nobody likes because he's a fucking idiot. I dunno his name because I never met anyone at Linden Lab like that.

Cool, this is the part where I run out of stuff to say becaus I've just been rambling like a moron for 10 min. I guess some people are better at that than others.

http://www.libsecondlife.org
http://www.URMYDREAMGIRL.com