samdeane
commented
3 years ago From an original forum post.
Open samdeane opened 3 years ago
samdeane
commented
3 years ago From an original forum post.
samdeane
commented
3 years ago
I've seen quite a bit of discussion around the problem of people being able to sell constructs they've made, but protect their IP.
The new owner needs to be able to customise it, which means they need to be able to edit it. But if they can edit it, they can copy & paste the voxels into something else and start selling that.
The solution I would propose is a new kind of core with these properties:
you can deploy elements and voxels into it, just like the existing cores you can pick it up and put it into a container you can protect it, then sell or exchange it you can deploy it by placing it into another core
Essentially it's a grouping mechanism.
It would allow people to build pre-fabricated components that they could sell as completely protected read-only structures. If you want to sell something that's partially locked down, you can put the locked bits into a sub core, and put that into the main core that you're selling, along with any bits that you're happy to keep editable.
This also has many benefits for people who are just building stuff for themselves.
They can now build a collection of re-usable elements and deploy them multiple times.
Need a wall? Here's one I made earlier. Need four, no problem, just deploy four copies of the sub-core.
Want to make sure your ship is symmetrical? Just build the shell in a sub-core and deploy it twice, with one mirrored.
Made a really good ship, but crap at making smooth voxel wings? No problem, just buy a sub-core that is just the wing voxels, and drop it into your ship.
Sub-cores could also form the basis of a mechanism for protecting and sharing Lua scripts. If you can attach scripts to a sub-core, and then call those scripts from the core that you put the sub-core into, you've basically got a library mechanism.