>HiFi horrified Second Life content creators. It downloads assets from HTTP. There's no grid. There's no central asset server. There are no mandatory user accounts. So anything you sell can be quickly copied, hosted wherever, and duplicated with complete impunity. SL will kick you off the grid if you misbehave, but HiFi was made in such a way there was no grid to ban people from.
That sounds amazing. I had no idea something like this existed. I never encountered anyone mentioning it on HN, reddit, discord, etc. Maybe marketing was also an issue for them?
> HiFi horrified Second Life content creators. It downloads assets from HTTP.
So does Second Life. It's just that the asset formats are unusual.
You can't really prevent people from downloading game assets. You may be able to prevent them from reselling them as their own, by recognizing duplicates. The Open Simulator people are working on change-tolerant hashing algorithms for this.
All true, but there's a vast difference is in the degree of control.
So say a SL avatar maker spends 40 hours making an avatar. At say $10/hour they'd like to make at least $400 to make it worthwhile. So if we sell at $5/each that's 80 copies to be sold. (just making up some plausible numbers here)
Here's how things square up:
SL: Buying stuff is the normal, encouraged mechanism with a well integrated marketplace and currency system.
Ripping an avatar requires additional tools. Ripping an avatar may be fairly difficult due to baked textures.
If found, you may be banned and lose everything on your account. Some things you own may not be replaceable. If you distribute your ripped avatar, LL could conceivably trace its movements and remove it from the inventories of anyone you gave a copy to. All in all, a considerable amount of pain you can get into for saving yourself $5. Most people wouldn't use a ripped avatar out of fear of endangering their account.
So, it's certainly not perfect, but on SL things are very manageable. If LL cares, misbehavior can be punished to the point it's not worth the risk to anyone who actually has anything invested into SL.
HiFi: There is a marketplace, but obtaining the HFC currency is bizarrely painful, requiring obtaining Ethereum, setting up an in-world meeting with a company representative, and exchanging ETH for HFC. Seriously, that's how it worked.
Ripping an avatar is trivial with basic knowledge of the scripting system. The actual avatar is stored on a completely normal HTTP server you can get it from with wget or a web browser. It's in GLTF or FBX.
If found, sure, HiFi can ban your account, but you don't need one. You don't really have an inventory or anything to lose. There's no grid, you're able to visit every part of the universe you're not specifically banned from. You can trivially host your copy of the avatar on any hosting service. You can share it with anyone and the system can't prevent it in any way.
It's possible the avatar maker couldn't even sue you easily if they wanted, because you can just keep using non-official servers hosted in some place that doesn't care about US law like Russia.
It's very much possible for a ripped avatar to spread far and wide with it being nigh impossible to stop. There's no real central authority, so it's pretty much your word against theirs.
That sounds amazing. I had no idea something like this existed. I never encountered anyone mentioning it on HN, reddit, discord, etc. Maybe marketing was also an issue for them?