An outside perspective on two features of this community

An outside perspective on two features of this community

Various things about Spring that do not fit in any of the other forums listed below, including forum rules.

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BaNa
Posts: 1562
Joined: 09 Sep 2007, 21:05

An outside perspective on two features of this community

Post by BaNa »

I had two experiences with other games recently that made me understand and appreciate two features of this community more. Long post with rant, you have been warned.

First of all: intellectual property fears and zealous licensing. I admit, I used to think the whole IP thing overblown and the discussion going on about it was useless (not just the taip but also using a model or map without attribution or permission and the butthurt that would ensue from that). Also, we have a problem with ease of installation, right? Then I installed simcity 4 and decided to look into the modding scene for it. You have no idea how dysfunctional it is. I will try to outline what it is like to install one of the leading mods there (CAM):

You install the main mod, this is a fairly painless process. You soon realize that the mod by itself does not have a lot of things, if you want the special new buildings that you craved so hard, you need to install things called lots. Cool, there are lot packs with a lot of different lots, a bit of extra work but it should be worth it. You download the lot mega packs and find out that the five lot packs each have about 10 archives in them that need to be unpacked and installed. OK, I can deal with this, they did say this shit is hard to install. So you start unpacking and installing. At one point in this process, you realize that the installer is throwing you readme files for a reason, and that reason is that EACH BLOODY LOT PACK HAS A LIST OF DEPENDENCIES AVERAGING ABOUT 5-10 FILES. So for the circa 50 lot packs you are installing, there are minimum 5 dependencies EACH. To make things better, a lot of the dependency links are outdated because fuck you. And the reason for all this? The reason why no one makes a one file install? IP rights and licensing. You cannot pack the models in with the lots, because the modelers apparently don't give anyone permission to pack their models into releases.

All in all, this has made me reevaluate the ease of install of spring (it isn't commercial game easy, but at least it doesn't have bloody dependencies) and the occasional licensing kerfluffle, cause compared to those guys, even the most ardent license-watcher and IP knight is a dirty hippy living in a commune, having unlicensed sex with other peoples IP. And I am grateful for that, because what they have over there is clearly beyond the limits of sanity.

Second experience: We got together for a LAN party with some friends and after a while ended up playing unreal tournament (the original). Since at first we couldn't get LAN play to work, we went online, only to discover that UT apparently has a fairly large community playing it still! How silly it is that some people are still playing 13 year old games :D.
Now, imagine a group of six total noobs trying to play against each other in an empty server. Obviously, some doods joined up soon and beat the shit out of us. We asked them to leave and then votekicked them, and I was surprised to find an admin warning us in no time. Apparently this is frowned upon in public servers. We had to endure the company of pros and it was so unenjoyable that I ended up messing around with the router so we could just play on LAN and all was well.

What has this shown me? Well first of all, I had forgotten what it is like to play a game like a noob. I play a lot of games and it usually isn't hard for me to acclimatize to new ones. My friends however had last played games in high school (8 years ago) and for them everything was a confusing mess. You don't bloody appreciate that the other is skilled, you just want to have fun, hopefully with your friends. Since you are unaware of the rules of the community or indeed, most of the rules of the game, you are woefully unprepared for the beating you will get or the torrent of abuse you will get in chat. Worst of all, I remember myself playing vs people like this in spring and quake live and even though I was trying to give them helpful tips, I was probably just as frustrating for them as these doods were for our group. I am happy it is relatively easy to host passworded games in spring, and I regularly see groups of people from the same country set up and play these games.

That's all folks.

TLDR: The spring community is less dysfunctional on the issue of licensing and rights than it may sometimes seem to be and even our nazis are merely boris johnsons. Also, have some love for the noobs because the world is a frightening and confusing place for them.
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SanadaUjiosan
Conflict Terra Developer
Posts: 907
Joined: 21 Jan 2010, 06:21

Re: An outside perspective on two features of this community

Post by SanadaUjiosan »

The second part of your post applies rather well to me.

I don't care at all how good or bad (usually bad) I am at a game. I want to have fun, with friends. I feel like a disturbing % of people out there don't really look at playing games this way.

I love Spring. It is great. Sure it's not perfect, but nothing is. I'm happy it's here and I'm happy it is still going reasonably strong.
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MidKnight
Posts: 2652
Joined: 10 Sep 2008, 03:11

Re: An outside perspective on two features of this community

Post by MidKnight »

I like this post! It offers some perspective! I like perspective!

I'd write more, but that's all I really have to say!
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SpliFF
Posts: 1224
Joined: 28 Jul 2008, 06:51

Re: An outside perspective on two features of this community

Post by SpliFF »

I recently looked at the modding scene for "Rigs of Rods" and noticed an interesting difference. In RoR there is a large amount of hostility around the concept of "skinning" - which is essentially the idea of using the vehicle physics files from another users vehicle mod to make your own vehicle. I find this rather odd since the config variables are so arcane that the probability of a noob being able to build a vehicle skeleton from scratch is close to zero!

This would be like the Spring community going apeshit when a new mod uses gadgets from another mod. It's not a license issue because both projects are GPL, it just seems to be the case that vehicle mods are so competitive that the idea of reusing another user's vehicle is basically heresy.

There are even a large number of finished vehicles that are unreleased or available only by befriending the author and the justification is the fear that their vehicle will be skinned. It seems to be a case of "I spent a year on my car but he did his in a month by copying me! - he's stealing my thunder!"

I'm glad this isn't going on in this community. It's a rather poisonous environment to work in and ultimately hurts developers and end-users.
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smoth
Posts: 22309
Joined: 13 Jan 2005, 00:46

Re: An outside perspective on two features of this community

Post by smoth »

SpliFF wrote: . . basically heresy. . .
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DID SOMEONE SAY HERESY!
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SwiftSpear
Classic Community Lead
Posts: 7287
Joined: 12 Aug 2005, 09:29

Re: An outside perspective on two features of this community

Post by SwiftSpear »

SpliFF wrote:I recently looked at the modding scene for "Rigs of Rods" and noticed an interesting difference. In RoR there is a large amount of hostility around the concept of "skinning" - which is essentially the idea of using the vehicle physics files from another users vehicle mod to make your own vehicle. I find this rather odd since the config variables are so arcane that the probability of a noob being able to build a vehicle skeleton from scratch is close to zero!

This would be like the Spring community going apeshit when a new mod uses gadgets from another mod. It's not a license issue because both projects are GPL, it just seems to be the case that vehicle mods are so competitive that the idea of reusing another user's vehicle is basically heresy.

There are even a large number of finished vehicles that are unreleased or available only by befriending the author and the justification is the fear that their vehicle will be skinned. It seems to be a case of "I spent a year on my car but he did his in a month by copying me! - he's stealing my thunder!"

I'm glad this isn't going on in this community. It's a rather poisonous environment to work in and ultimately hurts developers and end-users.
I hate this kind of thing. I honestly believe if you spend an absurd amount of work on something, the worst thing you can possibly do it hoard it to yourself. Improve the world for the next generation. Especially when you look at a project like spring. You gain nothing by "beating" other mods. In the end, spring has fewer players and everyone loses. If we push the project forward as a whole, it helps you, even if XYZTA which you made and you're so proud of has fewer players than some other mod who ultimately uses your scripts. I'm very proud of the open sourced nature of most of the projects that use spring as a basis.
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