I Am Leaving CA

[smoth]

I will not get embroiled in some idiotic debate about this. The "alternate" "mods" aka the games or the guys behind them are not responsible for any of this our concerns are that the *A projects will eventually cause a legal issue that would outright kill spring. You guys trying to put this on us is not even remotely fair.

Players can just move to another game to play in another engine. However content developers cannot do that. Even if I wanted to move to a new engine I cannot without causing a near fatal delay to grts. It is the same way for other projects, we are stuck with this engine now. So of course we care about the skakey at best legality of the ta mods you players love.

This is an open source project the guys running it and most of the people developing it are going to look down on theft. It is not morally acceptable, it never has been and people avoid the engine because it is coupled to ta and the community only wants that in reality, in fact all you guys really want are TA with different skins.

We can discuss plans to advertise our projects or build up player bases. The *A community has in the past and I suspect will in the future throw shit at anything unfamiliar. Like a bunch of howling monkeys, I have seen it happen with changes made in the *A mods and I have seen it in the reactions to but not limited to my project. It happens and the players create a large schism between "alternate mods" and whatever the "popular" mod of the time is and I say mod because as it stands only ta derivatives are acceptable for you guys.

So in short don't blame us, your shit is stolen. We can discuss the development and communities of our projects, no you cannot say otherwise. Finally it is this attitude and embrace of illegal content that makes content devs further shy away from the *A projects.

[Sheekel]

If I require totala.hpi and ccdata.ccx for use in my mod, IE from the TA CD-ROM, does this not cover my ass? I'm only distrubuting a way to modify the content, not the content itself. It is up to the user to provide the textures/sounds/everything to run the game.

I dont see how it is any different from creating and distributing units for OTA, which, if you check out unituniverse.com, is still a popular activity.

[smoth]

If you want to do that you need to find a way to auto add alphas to the ta textures as the alpha is needed for reflective. You will also need your team color panels to be in the range of 0,0,0 to 1,0,1 so they can do the custom colors.

the solution seems sound enough if you can do the above so you can keep the current texture functionality.

the problem with the ta content is the whole sale rip of it. Although honestly it also goes into models and scripts also. I think you could get away with the scripts as there really is only one way to do some of that stuff.

[imbaczek]

on unituniverse you're not distributing OTA content, just content compatible with OTA. makes a difference.

[smoth]

that is true but what about skeekels suggestion of a program that grab the ota content from your ota copy?

[KDR_11k]

If I require totala.hpi and ccdata.ccx for use in my mod, IE from the TA CD-ROM, does this not cover my ass? I'm only distrubuting a way to modify the content, not the content itself. It is up to the user to provide the textures/sounds/everything to run the game.

I dont see how it is any different from creating and distributing units for OTA, which, if you check out unituniverse.com, is still a popular activity.

That's fine if you really only use the TA material from those files and don't provide any of your own. But e.g. if you want another weapon on the Peewee you cannot modify the model for the unit and include that new model, you'd be distributing copyrighted material then. It's fine if the data you upload contains absolutely no TA material.

[SpliFF]

fwiw, the Metalstorm mod is going to be 100% legal IP. It doesn't depend on ota and if I can't trace the authorship of any data or code, no matter how insignificant, it doesn't go in. I'm not worried about being sued, this is about ensuring there are no issues with distribution and packaging on platforms that are strict about that sort of thing (ie, Debian). There are other benefits like having a truly original look that you don't get by borrowing from TA.

Having said that I am borrowing heavily from warzone2100 for the weapon models, however that is all 100% legit now due to the rights holder (Eidos) publicly confirming GPL on the code AND data.

[TheFatController]

We can discuss plans to advertise our projects or build up player bases. The *A community has in the past and I suspect will in the future throw shit at anything unfamiliar. Like a bunch of howling monkeys, I have seen it happen with changes made in the *A mods and I have seen it in the reactions to but not limited to my project. It happens and the players create a large schism between "alternate mods" and whatever the "popular" mod of the time is and I say mod because as it stands only ta derivatives are acceptable for you guys.

This is a bad attitude in my opinion, if a project doesn't go well my first reaction would be (aside from surprise and disappointment) to step back and think about what caused the negative reaction and how it could be resolved - it's easy to shirk personal responsibility and blame the players but it's not going to get you a popular game.

And as for the divide, recently this has been driven by the CA team themselves who for some unknown reason think that harping on incessantly about how "BA sux!!" will get them players, I mean i'd like to join some CA games but at this point I feel like i'd be crossing some kind of line*.

And back to my first point, if you can't take feedback from players without dismissing them as "Howling monkeys" then sensible players will stop giving feedback.

[BaNa]

We are moving more and more off topic here, but i honestly dont get why (esp now, with separate installers) the truly free mods (EE and KP) don't have a much bigger linux following. As far as I see most available linux games are ... fail. Why do ppl not flock to that part of spring?

[Pxtl]

We are moving more and more off topic here, but i honestly dont get why (esp now, with separate installers) the truly free mods (EE and KP) don't have a much bigger linux following. As far as I see most available linux games are ... fail. Why do ppl not flock to that part of spring?

No playerbase, no promotion, and no real single-player. EE and KP are both run by developers who have better things to do (KDR has his fickle muse guiding him to a hundred different mods, and Fanger is just absent). Plus, Fanger retains his rights over EE, so even while the project languishes unused, nobody else can pick it up and polish it up.

The only ones that have real development are the ones that have "gone dark" while they sit in internal alphas (S1944, Gundam, and IW) and PURE. PURE, right now, is really the only complete original-content Spring mod under active development that a Spring player can actually play.

[smoth]

that is beside the point, it happened when ba took over for aa as well. I was one of the people in main letting people know about ba. Any time the aa crowd felt threatened they did go into howler mod and would troll and or attack your project. It was out of some strange thing about you going an alternate design direction that they would then take that to mean you think their shit sux and they in turn would say your shit sux. Not that you ever said it. Now admitedly I would tell them directly if asked that I didn't like aa/ba for a-z but after a while I would then ask them what they didn't like about my project and they honestly never gave it a shot. So I feel justified in my statement as most attempts at feedback have resulted in a few responses:

- It's animu and I haet animu/they hate the giant robot thing
+ It deviates too far from TA(perfectly acceptable when said outright)
-- they give no reason beyond it sucks and after length discussion tell me they didn't try it.
++ They didn't like it for reasons that make sense and clearly state why(very few of them)

I do listen but this is me say that as someone who has asked for feedback I get honest feedback on a rare chance or I get feedback from one guy who always knows what is best for everyone and to avoid drama storm the name is withheld.

Thing is I can accept the reasons when given a proper response but much of this "community" revolves around trolling. So here I am chatting with a guy and thinking there may be reasonable feedback I continue and after a hand full of questions I realize the guy is just fucking with me. Either because he makes statements that are blatantly untrue or he outright goes over the top. I am not saying there is no room for people getting annoying or anything. I am saying that most people around here just like to waste your time trying to troll you and I get that general sort of feedback.

Now a credit to some of the newer members of this "community" is that they are increasingly better with feedback and less trolling. It might all seem like rubbish to you, I don't know, I am not going to say that you haven't been around or have not experienced enough to know the kind of responses I get. I am going to say that it happens and it has happened to the point that I have lost all patience.

pxtl, i have found if I want less harassment and to be more productive taking the gundam development underground was my only option. Otherwise if I talked about it here I would be subject to the trolls I am talking about above this response. (Not that the moderation staff isn't trying). I don't know so much about sw and 1944, my guess is that working is more important than blogging progress on here. I am just backing your post really, I think you are right and unfortunately pure is not "right" something about it feels "wrong" and I cannot put my finger on it.

I kinda agree with bana, why are people not playing EE? It is a good project.

[Pxtl]

By "gone dark" I mean posting screenshots instead of public alphas. We're here to play games, not talk about them - and "internal alpha" means "not play".

And as for Pure being "not right", they could say that about Gundam. For me, the problem with Gundam was simply that I couldn't figure it out, and that fundamentally most Mobile Suits do look very similar so the unit distinction is tricky (and you've done a great job trying to mitigate that, but you're restricted by your source material). I think any game feels "not right" while you're trying to feel it out.

And EE, good or not, can't get played without Fang being actively involved in it.

[smoth]

-Mods can we have a topic split please -

so you are saying that fang's apparent lack of involvement is a negative factor for players? Yeah I guess it could be that pure is a "new" game to me and that is why I am not feeling it, heh, I guess I will have to try it some more to see.

well as far as unit differentiation having units almost entirely team color hurt it also, I hope some of the newly texture zeon units(zeon had the most like this) will help. I'm learning like all of us .

I have been thinking after 1.2 that gundam might have more public alphas the project is getting closer to the point that I could do more than my > 1 year release phases.

[imbaczek]

so you are saying that fang's apparent lack of involvement is a negative factor for players?

for me, it is. there's nobody to complain to if it's broken and that, um, nobody explicitly forbade repairing and/or changing his stuff. generally there's nobody who cares to fix/promote/whatever.

[smoth]

actually deci picked up maintenance for a bit. The only issue is getting in touch with fang, he has been scarce . Honestly I don't know if he will come back if it wasn't for gundam I would be gone.

[MidKnight]

replying to op:

really sad to see you go. Hopefully we will magically attract a dozen modelers who will miraculously free us from ip within the next 3 months so you could return .

Meanwhile, I'll be keeping my eye on your other projects If only you worked for one that *wasn't* closed beta =P

On a related note, CA should laxen its model standards, so i and others could spam crappy models to rid us of IP. Then we could redo it all over

[overkill]

Horrid idea, you mise well take a bunch of shit from unit universe and finsih redoing the 3do textures.....do it right the first time ffs.

[SeanHeron]

If that means do it right never, than I don't see your point...

[smoth]

that isn't right, you are not asking permission from the authors. It also will still look like ass

[Pxtl]

Well, instead of Unit Universe you could at least shoehorn a half dozen Nanoblobs into CA. I mean, the SpireRook wouldn't make a bad Sumo.