Reply To: Open gaming mini license

[timchubbKeymaster 3166xp 0]

Interesting thread as usual i am late to the party…

Few thoughts:

1. GW (Or any one with their own universe) will NEVER offer STL’s unless they shutter there manufacturing business, it makes no sense at all from a business point of view, the whole industry relies on premium luxury good mentality, they would never give the keys to their IP’s to the world the profit margin is none existant when it relies on an honour system, as it would be viewed as opening the doors to the recasters, as soon as one STL is sold, its available for free, if they put drm on it, then its a speed bump but utterly ineffective, and would only work on certain models of printers which supported the drm. All you would need to do is data log the print session over usb, and that’s pretty trivial with an off the shelf usb data logger, in a hobby (3d printing) rife with boffins in sheds, dicking about with raspberry pi’s, if the system did the drm on the printer it self, then you would just data log the impulses to the steppers and reverse engineer the STL from that (effort, but not that hard, you could probably co-opt the design checker in autocad to do the bulk of the work)

   Also it would be a rights nightmare so lawyers, nonsense, chapterhouse 2.0, divide by 0 error, the board would never even entertain it after every none copyrightable word had been changed, otherwise we would still have eldar/dark eldar, imperial guard and the old world (i will never believe that it was the rules, or even dwindling sales that prompted that change but the use of orc, dwarf, elf more than anything else)… thats the cold hard truth of reality smashing against the dream im afraid.

2. I have been dicking about with home/diy cnc since the early 2000’s its getting better but i just dont think it will ever become a ubiquitous tool in peoples homes, but printing services will fill this niche, but then adds costs and delay to the process
3. I do think there will be a halfway house solution though, sprues of cheap styrene armatures which you print the accessories for
4. The real kicker from a practical point of view is a lack of clear standards for printing capacity and capabilities, for it to work in a mass market ALL 3d printers would need a standard like paper sizes i.e. A4/US Legal, otherwise its pot luck if you have the capacity to print anything larger without modifications to the design
5. In order to get 3d printing suitable for mass adoption it would require giving up most of what makes hobby 3d printing and CNC fun for me and instead just buy into annother money printing scam for the usual printer manufacturers, i enjoy the freedom currently i have and wouldnt trade it for the pricefixed mess home/office dead tree printing is, basically i think that the promise of 3d printing would be forever limited and held back by the likes of HP/Cannon/Lenovo if they define a standard and bring an affordable printer to market subsidesed by the refills (ever wondered why the ink refills costs 2/3’s of what you paid for the printer [im assuming £30 tesco/pc world/argos “special” offer here]…)

Makes me feel like Moulder “I want to believe”, just think it will be like linux on the desktop [OSX does not count nor does android, the kernels are sufficiently different not to be linux]v(as much as i would love it to be my primary environment, its always been my secondary OS on my PC but thats a different story mainly crappy hardware dongles various FPGA and PLC compilers demand), works great if you put the effort in but will never gain the mass adoption outside of technical circles, would love it if i get proved wrong but i just dont think it will ever gain enough traction to become more than a niche in a niche