4500 BAYC owners had a party in the metaverse

[ComradeIT]

On 8/5/2022 at 5:46 AM, dizmo said:

Have you seen the deep dive a person did into BAYC? It's quite brilliant, and shows that it's either very racist, or one of the most elaborate trolls the Internet and ever seen. Leaning more towards the latter than the former. 

While true, I think it's part of the massive trolling that it is. It's very much in line with the 4chan "humour." 

I didn't see that one big video that got popular recently, but I saw all the accusations a while ago. I'm not 100% sold on it. The creators have since been doxxed though, so if there's new information about who the creators are and what they represent, then that would convince me. 

 

But I kind of don't really care anyway. If BAYC is neo-Nazi dogwhistles, that's bad, but a lot of people in that community don't stand for that anyway. What it represents now, I think, is perfectly disgusting already. The exclusivity and the conspicuous consumption and the idea of wealth as a symbol of status, all those things, are already gross to me. So I think it's more impactful to criticize it based on what it definitely does stand for. 

[Sauron]

On 7/28/2022 at 10:39 AM, Kisai said:

In theory this doesn't work because there is no standard game engine between any of them. If everything was derived from Unreal Engine 5, that would be less of an issue, but most of these systems are proprietary, and extremely underwhelming and unimpressive compared to what has already been out there for 5 years, let alone 15.

Even if everyone used the exact same engine there's no way to guarantee the properties of each item would easily carry over. How would you determine how a rocket launcher from quake 3 should behave in a top down RTS, even if you could import the exact 3d model?

 

More importantly, NFTs add nothing at all to this concept. To the extent that this can be done, it can be done more conveniently without NFTs.

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, Sauron said:

Even if everyone used the exact same engine there's no way to guarantee the properties of each item would easily carry over. How would you determine how a rocket launcher from quake 3 should behave in a top down RTS, even if you could import the exact 3d model?

 

More importantly, NFTs add nothing at all to this concept. To the extent that this can be done, it can be done more conveniently without NFTs.

If it was Unreal or Unity, there is standard animation sets, which is the actual concern. NFT's don't solve anything, they just create more problems.

 

Like, play any game made in Unreal Engine, and every single one of them adheres to the same biped animations. Likewise in Unity. Like this is one of the key ways I recognize what game engine is being used is how the default walk and run animations look like.

 

But let's go further, let's assume, that some evolution of the VRM format was used for "player characters", and something similar for props evolves. What about other properties of the game world? Let's say a rocket launcher in Doom has a kickback while a rocket launcher introduced into a Final Fantasy behaves like a magic missile or something. FFXIV has the ability to "skin" it's gear and weapons already, but there is division between "this is what the gear looks like and behaves like" and this is the actual math the game uses. For example a weapon that has unique sound effects... well where are those sound effects going to come from? Are the sound effects cleared to be used in Final Fantasy if they were licensed from a sound library used by Doom?

 

That's the proverbial gordian knot. Assuming we could solve all the data-standards necessary to make two games by different developers, different game engines, and different priorities in animation and physics. We will never be able to solve the actual license clearing for everything that goes into the asset. Remember MIDI's ? Despite people not using the original sheet music to create a composition, rights agencies like JASRAC, went full M.A.D on games that use MIDI's or can play any user-generated music, because they "might" play something improperly licensed and copyrighted (and they all did.) So how people get around it now? they use external macro programs and just play it anyway. And that is going to be the problem. A character is not just a 3D mesh, it's textures, and many "3D models" out there used as avatars are re-colors or kitbashes of other 3D models. When you add props, and add music and sound effects to complete the avatar, it might be made up either a dozen "licensed" parts licensed from different rights owners. 

 

There is no way to clear those rights, and someone who changes a single pixel will also change the fingerprint, so the recolor or kitbash avatar will foul up rights claims just like they already do on youtube between music and music remixes/covers.

 

NFT's, could, "in theory" have solved the rights management, but good luck on anyone wanting to spend $100 in fees to create a kitbash of 10 items. NFT's don't create scarcity, they create serial-numbered conformance. Like how the apes all look effectively the same, because they aren't capable of being anything else, they're procedurally generated equivalent of kitbashes. What happens when the procedural algorithm manages to create two apes that are identical in all but one color used? Sure, digitally they're different, but the "owners" of said NFT might claim the other stole their apes, despite them just having a different shade of brown.

 

[Sauron]

4 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Like, play any game made in Unreal Engine, and every single one of them adheres to the same biped animations. Likewise in Unity. Like this is one of the key ways I recognize what game engine is being used is how the default walk and run animations look like.

I'm not referring to just animations; depending on the game type, balance and behavior for an item would have to change.

4 minutes ago, Kisai said:

NFT's, could, "in theory" have solved the rights management

Well not really because NFTs do not override copyright law.

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, Sauron said:

I'm not referring to just animations; depending on the game type, balance and behavior for an item would have to change.

Yeah but that's overthinking what the player actually wants. Because, let's say that you could take the BFG9000 from DOOM (original DOOM BTW) , you know how it works? you fire it, and it kills everything in the room. Now that weapon, imported into another game engine, is clearly NOT going to do that, because it would only ever be imported as a skin over an existing game mechanic. You firing a BFG9000 in Final Fantasy, would probably be casting Ultima or Meteor in the underlying game mechanics.

 

6 hours ago, Sauron said:

Well not really because NFTs do not override copyright law.

Copyright Law is not Licensing, and because certain industries (music, in particular) have their heads so far up their behinds, it's literately impossible to ever license music in any shape or form that would be possible to play the game in every part of the world, in any language. All that NFT's would solve in this scenario is the right to use it the asset, by basically keeping the receipt of the 100's of assets that make up a "character" in the game so that when the character as a whole is transferred between Game A and Game B, the developer of Game A and Game B don't have to sit down and negotiate the rights. It's been done already.

 

In practice, it will simply never happen. Corporates getting into NFT's are seeing this from the greed angle in a "perpetual revenue through constant smart contracts every time the item is resold or transferred to another party", when the reality will likely see the NFT receipts stripped from the assets, and new "self-ownership" receipts (eg like buying your own ISBN numbers for your own self-published books) saying you own it outright would be the actual result. Because that is exactly what has happened with pirated media since the creation of the printing press.

 

It's less effort, cost and time to ask forgiveness than it is to ask permission, when not wholesale ripping something off, because asking permission means you will be liable should they say no, rather than using it without permission and the "rights owner" generally being unaware, or silently ignoring the infringement. This is exactly how corporates behave with each other, why should end users behave any differently? Corporates will just steal things off twitter and use them in their films and advertisements without looking for the creator to ask at all.

 

The difference between someone copying "Star Wars" DVD and calling it "Wars of Stars" is what DMCA style infringement was intended to solve. It was not intended to go after every incidental and accidental use of copyrighted works in a larger work. American "Fair Use" gets this idea fairly right, but it runs into walls because other foreign countries have no concept of it, and even some countries (eg in Latin America) can pretty much steal your work, and lay claim to your own work on Youtube. 

 

A NFT solves none of that.

 

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

Yeah but that's overthinking what the player actually wants. Because, let's say that you could take the BFG9000 from DOOM (original DOOM BTW) , you know how it works? you fire it, and it kills everything in the room. Now that weapon, imported into another game engine, is clearly NOT going to do that, because it would only ever be imported as a skin over an existing game mechanic. You firing a BFG9000 in Final Fantasy, would probably be casting Ultima or Meteor in the underlying game mechanics

I think that's the point. It's impossible to make a cross platform cross genre item system, so developers would spend developer time to port items the players paid to another game or another publisher seeing none of the revenue, right now developers only spend time in things that make the game better or more money, this model would achieve neither.

 

In order for this businness model to work, the "ingame item blockchain consortium" should pay money to developers who port the items in from their blockchain to the game, similar to how Nvidia basically subsidised games that implemented RTX in order to bolster adoption of the technology. Even then it becomes an exponential problem.

• If you have two items that work in two games, that four items to implement with players paying two items.
• If you have one hundred items in ten games, that's one thousand items to implement with players paying one hundred items.
• If you have one million items in a thousand games, tha'ts one billion items to implement with players paying one million items.

The systems is anti-scalable, the more popular it becomes, the more "free" developer time must be used to implement new items in older and newer games. It promotes the kind of "make ten thousand procedurally generated ugly pictures" model used by the NFT ecosystem, and I think no gamers would want that model to infest game design, with millions of variation of a weapon or a wand for the sake of artificial scarcity.

It gets worse the more you delve into the model: What when an item is added in 2040? Developers should go back to a 2025 game to add the item? What about balance, if a game has a good balance with five items, what effect it has having tens of thousands of items? Do you make them all cosmetics? At very least every game interface must now account for the player to be able to select amongst potentially thousands of items in the inventory It's never going to work, and it gets less doable the more the system is adopted.

 

It gets worse the more you delve into the model: What happens to a small studio if all promises come to pass and the "ingame item blockchain consortium" becomes a thing?

• Ten developers for one years to make the game
• Ten developers for one years to make the game, plus developer time to implement hundreds of thousands of items from past titles and different genre, making it more expensive to implement items than implementing the game.

Because at the end of the day it's not a database technology problem, it's a businness model problem. Having a database that give serial number at great cost does nothing for you.

Something that works is implementing an item resale shop for ingame items, developers lose some sales, but gain speculative value from the secondary market, and we already have that, it's steam workshop.

[Sauron]

9 hours ago, Kisai said:

Yeah but that's overthinking what the player actually wants. Because, let's say that you could take the BFG9000 from DOOM (original DOOM BTW) , you know how it works? you fire it, and it kills everything in the room. Now that weapon, imported into another game engine, is clearly NOT going to do that, because it would only ever be imported as a skin over an existing game mechanic. You firing a BFG9000 in Final Fantasy, would probably be casting Ultima or Meteor in the underlying game mechanics.

Sounds like game mods with extra steps

[Kisai]

12 hours ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

I think that's the point. It's impossible to make a cross platform cross genre item system, so developers would spend developer time to port items the players paid to another game or another publisher seeing none of the revenue, right now developers only spend time in things that make the game better or more money, this model would achieve neither.

 

...

Something that works is implementing an item resale shop for ingame items, developers lose some sales, but gain speculative value from the secondary market, and we already have that, it's steam workshop.

 

Those secondary sales only came about because people were doing it anyway on eBay, with real money, before games made it utterly maddening to trade items between players without the developer's own auction/store system being invoked.

 

9 hours ago, Sauron said:

Sounds like game mods with extra steps

More or less.

 

I like the idea of "maybe" being able to bring my character I've spent 10 years playing in Final Fantasy into another Fantasy MMO, and have maybe some kind of unique appearance that FITS that game because it was imported from the other game, including the costume, skins, colors, hair choices, normalized height, bust and butt size, etc. Yet most "character creation" options in one game do not exist in another.  Most game players would be satisfied with being able to import their appearance and costumes so they can retain one brand or identity between games, instead of having to use the cookie-cutter appearances that some games have. If you can import the exact model geometry and textures, you start getting into people sneaking characters into the game that can disrobe, by accident or on purpose.

 

Like think of a game like OverWatch or Valorant which have fixed character designs. Now imagine you could just import your MMORPG character instead. Fortnite has pretty much proved this is what players want. Who cares if Darth Vader doesn't have their canonical weapons, they don't exist in the game... sometimes. So take it one step further.

 

Like there are game mods for for several unity games out there, assuming the developer hasn't done it themselves, that allows players to use their VRM models (eg ones they'd use in VRChat) from one game in another.

 

Raft

Valheim

Craftopia (official support)

Blade and Sorcery

Beatsaber

 

https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/valheim-mod-lets-you-play-as-characters-from-the-witcher-3065287

 

This only works because the internal game logic is using the standard Unity humanoid, IK's and springbones when present. It also attracts certain kinds of players to the game who would not play the game otherwise if they couldn't play as their character. Because nothing has actually changed in the game (except in Craftopia), it's all client-sided, so everyone has to have each others characters before playing the game if they want that to work.

 

Presumably, if more players demanded to be able to use their "models" from other games we may eventually see a standarized avatar format that permits that. but "VRM" as it is right now, falls short of that because it doesn't store animation data, only geometry, texture and humanoid IK data. So physics, sounds, lighting, all have to be applied externally. VRM does store "lighting" in a way, but when you see VRC players use such models, they are often glowing in the game because they're self-lit instead of allowing the game world to apply the lighting.