Leaky Buckets

[DJ]

Somebody should contact Atari (try keep spring out of it as we don't want to bring attention to ourselves) and just find out if they're open to negotiation on the Total Annihilation stuff. I bet they would be, imagine the publicity for Atari if they were prepared to give something to open source. The exposure on somewhere like digg would be huge.

Forgive me for being thick but how does abandonware work?

[Neddie]

Abandonware works because nobody bothers to enforce copyright. It is still illegal.

[Erom]

Forgive me for being thick but how does abandonware work?

One of two ways. The most common, is that the legal trail on who owns the copyright went dead for some reason - the company went out of business completely (and didn't sell off their old IP to someone) for example. Unfortunately, this _almost_ happened with the TA IP, but Atari ended up with it instead.

I believe they've been approached about selling it a few times, but one the more OTA oriented vets around here might be able to shed some more informed light on that.

The other way is that the game is just really, really old, and no one thinks anyone will care. TA is sometimes categorized as such. The problem is, this isn't a legal definition, and if the company decides to get their IP back, they could fight for it. HOWEVER, and this taps into what I was just talking about, the longer the company has let their IP be distributed as abandon wear, the more likely it will be declared as undefended and become public domain.

Basically, a lot of abandonwear is abandoned simple because it's been called abandoned for so long that the company would probably lose the legal battle to get the IP back, so they don't bother.

The upswing here is, so far Atari hasn't stepped up to the plate with Spring... if we keep making TA based mods for long enough, the crime will eventually legalize itself. The downside is that that takes a long time, (think decades, a bunch of em), and until it happens they have a big legal hammer they can smash us with at their leisure.

-Stardard IANAL disclaimer on this post-

Poscript- the idea of Atari releasing the TA IP to open source would be AWESOME. Five years ago, I would have said, no way, can't happen. But now companies are slowly coming around to the idea that GPL can be really, really good press. Man, this is probably a pipe dream, but I aggree with you, it would be damn cool!

[AF]

Unlikely, Atari were still selling TA gold edition boxes on ebay as recently as last year and may still be doing so now. That and the plans in the last 2 years of TA 2 that fell through show atari still has an active interest in this IP after ten years. Ten years is more than enough time to start a new btu better game from scratch free of Atari IP.

[smoth]

Abandonware works because nobody bothers to enforce copyright. It is still illegal.

something is only as illegal as the other person's will to enforce it. That being said some abandonware is just that abandoned.

[Erom]

I agree, the legal fact of the matter is that the future of Spring needs to be free of TA IP. Just the same, I'm not about to go demanding that because,

A) If I ever "demand" anything the devs should just tell me to piss off.
B) I wouldn't demand things from people doing this in their free time anyway.
C) A lot of the players and devs are here for the 3d TA. I'm not about to try to push the project away from that when we would alienate what little playerbase we have left.

So, in the end, to tie all of this back around to the original topic matter, we need to get some other mods done (Check: see SWTA and especially Spring'44) and they need to gather players from beyond just the current player base - Spring '44 in particular has no string attached _at all_, and once it's done we as a whole community should push really hard to gather players from all around the internet.

PS- I wonder what happened to that Chinese/Asian spring community we talked to that one time. They may have grown for all we know.

[Pressure Line]

Firstly lets deal with this Atari crap. No large scale games company will care about a small open source game using content from a ten year old game. Look at the bottom line, IF spring became very successful then Atari could build on that success and use everything the community has done to make a quick buck. We are acting in their interests keeping their intellectual property alive.

I can only imagine the angry reactions I'm going to get to that last paragraph but hey. Bottom line is we could always contact Atari and ask permission to use the TA stuff on a non profit basis. let Atari advertise on the site for free and they may go for it.

Atari dont answer requests like this. not even a "Hi, we got your mail."

How have a community with the massive amount of design talent that we have ended up with a site that looks like this? Yes I know there's a project to redesign it but have you been in that forum? I don't know who is running that project so I'll go easy on them and say they couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery. What a monumental cluster f*ck! You cannot build a website by comittee. For a project like that you have to ask for volunteers to build it, elect ONE of them and then let them do it. Otherwise you end up with a typical 1000 designer mess! The website is our marketing, our way of capturing players and should be treated as such.

Agreed. 100%

Lets also bear in mind that Total Annihilation is the reason most people find the Spring engine. Most of those people will only ever play TA based mods, that's just the way it is. This means the website needs to be heavily biased towards TA, this makes sure that the user knows they're getting what they want. Each mod should have their own subsection and an equal amount of exposure to the incoming traffic but the landing page must have a TA feel.

No. Despite common perception, Spring is not just 'TA in full 3d', the fact that over 75% of its use is precisely that is irrelevant. The Spring main site simply needs to be good looking, and kept up to date. building content used illegally (no matter how much you attempt to sidestep the issue its illegal.) as the main selling point of the engine is just asking for a CnD.

These forums are quite an intimidating place. As this is an open source game the tendancy is for it to be played by people who have above average knowledge of computers. This does not excuse the behaviour towards new users asking stupid questions. Most users will look at the kind of answer other users get to questions before posting, if they see trails of abuse then they won't ask they will just leave! There are people who spend alot of time on the forums and who do help but there is an under current of elitism that reduces our chances of keeping new players.

Agreed. But, the way Spring works currently requires some knowledge of how to operate a computer beyond that of using IE and WMP. Have you ever guided someone through the complete setup of Spring only for them to go "i dont like this game" and quit?

Spring is a small communtiy which means most of the players who play it are at a reasonable level of play. This makes it very difficult for new players as there are very few games at their level to join. This makes a decent, easy to use single player option all the more important. Spring SP is a superb tool for this yet its not included in the install package, why is this? include it with spring and call it singleplayer.exe. Roberts your mothers brother....

No argument there.

We seem to be having an argument about what is causing people who download spring to not play the game? Why is this? Surely we have all the stats available... Lets just look at the people hitting the site, then the number who download, then the people who create a username, then the people who play a game. See where the percentages are going missing and make some educated guesses about where the problem is? All this reasoned debate and posturing is fine but why not actually use some logic?

Bottom line is I think Spring is ace, when I show it to my friends they think its ace so why so small a player base? see above I believe

9001% (OVAH NINE THOUSAND!) someone should have been doing this a year or two ago.

[AF]

Everyone save 1 person I introduced to spring gave up almost immediately because of the hassle of the website, and tasclient. Its too much effort.

[REVENGE]

lol @ Spring, I'll take TA3D in the future if I want to play TA in 3D kthx.

[clumsy_culhane]

Everyone save 1 person I introduced to spring gave up almost immediately because of the hassle of the website, and tasclient. Its too much effort.

same here.. except none stayed on i have introduced 6 people to spring, only 2 actually ever played a game, and only one played a multiplayer game. then he decided it was all too hard and left.