Protecting Blueprints, and alliance docking.

[Rodentsnipe]

When someone in my faction entered my ship several days ago, I was distraught by the fact that he had copied a blueprint of my ship. That ship took days to build, and all my effort was taken away in an instant. Whilst I still think that ships should be able to be stolen, their blueprints should not. The ship's blueprint should be protected from anyone else who gets in it, apart from the owner of course. Perhaps a ship could be set to be owned by a single person, which prevents anyone else from copying a blueprint of it, yet still allowing it to be stolen.

Secondly I think that alliances should be able to dock on each others ships, since some factions are mercenaries with small fighters, which would match perfectly to other factions who use mainly large ships/carriers.



I would love for these to be implemented, because rather than a server having a million factions for individual people, there would be huge factions/alliances and epic wars waged.

 

[MrNo]

This is incredibly easy to counter. Just join a faction, and put a faction module on your ship. No one outside of the faction can use the ship, meaning they can\'t blueprint it.



Alliances being able to dock with each other would be interesting, perhaps allow a UI for docking modules, and an option to enable/disable allied/neutral docking.

 

[Cheetah606]

well the problem for him was inside the faction as he mentioned it atleast. :p

is\'nt there an option so only the owner of the blueprint and the admins of the server you\'re on can use it and save the blueprint??

 

[Zeveryn]

Mrno, if u had read the whole text not the just topic text then u had read that it was about a faction member taking the Blueprint.

 

[Rodentsnipe]

The main reason I haven\'t joined up in a large faction is because I have put a lot of effort into my blueprints, and I would hate to have them stolen. I\'m sure many others feel the same way, and I just know that if blueprint protection was better, then the game would be a lot more fun, and there would be awesome battles, rather than just 1 on 1 random encounters.

 

[vabese]

when you get on a server and upload stuff like i most of the time do, just go click on the thing and set permisions to no-one.

 

[D-Car]

The problem of having people basically never designing their own ships because they can just steal blueprints of ships they find won\'t ever go away unless the game starts locking who can edit and save copies of a ship.

In theory, say I built the coolest ship ever and I want to show it off. Somebody in my faction gets into it when I\'m not piloting it, saves a copy, and starts using/selling copies of the same ship. Suddenly my ship is commonplace and there\'s no more \"wow factor\" in it for me when I go to show it off because the blueprint my faction member saved isn\'t edit-locked to just our faction since he\'s a dunce and forgot to check those boxes.

The only way around that scenario is to disable people other than the creator from making copies of that ship, even if they edit the ship to make it not \"the same ship\". This, of course, leads into mechanics dealing with ownership of blueprints, selling/trading them, and making blueprint copies for people to buy. Even if you get into blueprint copies, there\'d be a second can of worms opening up which deals with whether the owner of a copy blueprint can resell additional blueprints of the original ship.

Lots of things to think about.

 

[Rodentsnipe]

Vabese I\'m well aware of that, but that doesn\'t solve my predicament.

D-Car, I think that a market for blueprints would be awesome because it would encourage trading between alliances. What should happen is that there should be a way for an owner to sell the blueprint to someone else, allowing them to buy the ship, but there should also be a way for an owner to sell a license to another person, allowing them to sell the license to others. So selling the ship directly would give them a one time use, giving them the blueprint would allow them to create that ship, and giving them the license would allow them to sell the blueprint to others.

It might seem complicated at first, but I\'m sure people could get the hang of it.

 

[KuramaFox]

Not an issue for me at present.

But I agree with most of the posts here. It would be nice to have a bit more control over who can copy your ships.

 

[D-Car]

The license idea is almost exactly what I was thinking, except for a couple things. Assume I created a ship I want to market, here\'s my ideal set of rules for that:

1. I have the blueprint. I can build this ship as often as i want.
2. I can create another \"original\" blueprint or I can choose to create a \"copy\" blueprint. Having an original blueprint grants all rights of ownership, while having a copy blueprint means you cannot create additional blueprints, but you can create the ship itself - perhaps only a limited number of times.
3. You cannot create a blueprint for a ship which you did not build from scratch unless you\'re duplicating an \"original\" blueprint from one you already have.
4. Blueprints are not items which go in the inventory of ships, they\'re assigned to a player\'s profile. Therefore, I can have an original blueprint of a ship and sell ten \"copies\" for zero money (or a billion money, whatever) to my buddy so he can create the ship ten times. If I sell full ownership rights to that same buddy, then his \"copy\" rights go away since they\'re redundant at that point.

The idea could be integrated into the already-existing GUI where people go to buy ships. Just add another column to describe whether you own the ship design or whether you have a number of times you can buy the ship.

Of course, it\'d need to be integrated into a proper trade window ... which I believe has yet to be created. So, trade windows first, then this.

 

[shadowcrusnik]

Heres my summation of what yall just said, plus a few \"clear-me-ups\" and simplifications/additions.



In-game Blueprint protection.

Add a checkmark option to the ship core similiar to the bluepritn menu, so peopel cant just go into your ship when you ain\'t looking and create a \"semi-copy\".

this, with proper usage of other, currently existing features, would entirely solve this guys problem.

Implement a sort of person activated \"trading window\" similar to the shop window, in astronaut mode you can press T(since it is currently only used in flight and build modes for weapon management) to open/activate a trading screen with the player you are looking at(or open up a list of players to offer trades with, clicking their name then a confirmation button would open up the previously suggested trade window). You can then drag items from your inventory or blueprints you OWN from your catalog/Personal Ship Bluepritn Database, along with credits if you are the buyer. When both parties have agreed to commence the trade the window will be closed, and the blueprints/items/credits will be traded.

In addition, the \"supplier\", i.e. the owner/creator, of the blueprint can set the traded blueprints properties, such good for 10 uses, ten hours, ten days, permanently, etc. so as to allow a sort of \"supply/demand\"

Of course, the buyer of the blueprint would NOT be allowed to create new blueprints from the ship core of whatever ship he built from an unowned blueprint. This core could be renamed to duplicate core ID # or some such, so it can retain this property, even when destroyed and replaced.

However one COULD copy the ship from scratch in order to save, but that would be hard work, and more of an \"espionage\" thing.

 

[D-Car]

Yeah, more or less. That\'s a reasonable approximation.

The only bits I think you missed are that I wasn\'t thinking of keeping non-owners of the ship from being able to enter it, just to not save a blueprint of it if they aren\'t listed as having full \"access rights\" to it. After all, if I blast your fancy ship and i want to drag the wreck of it home so I can take it apart, then I\'m going to need to pilot the thing. At that point, I\'d pretty much be forced to reverse-engineer a totally new ship based on your design, but that\'s the whole espionage thing you mentioned.

 

[shadowcrusnik]

Salvage canons!

And tractor beams, if the darn things were implemented.

 

[D-Car]

Salvage cannons are for cheapasses! I want to take that thing apart so I can figure out how you made it or maybe get an idea from you for my next design.