Dragon45, stop the insults on imbaczek, because, he's not that wrong.
The SY are not the one who cracked HPI and COB. If you look at
visual TA, the people credited for reverse engineering
- TNT are Kinboat, Saruman & Bobban,
- For GUI it mention Dark Rain.
- For HPI it hails Eric DeZert.
- The 3do format mentions Dan Melchione.
- For cob there's no credits, but I once heard Brave Sir Robin was the fist to hack a cob to change the penetrator turret turn rate.
- FBI uhm.. that doesn't require any cracking.
- GAF format decryption is credited to Saruman and Bobban.
Not any Swede in there.
So the SY didn't cracked the TA data, instead they are the ones who cracked the totala.exe to make such cool feat as the TA Hook and the demo recorder. I don't know exacly how far they went, maybe they just reverse engineered the memory layout of the RAM used by TA and not the exe itself. But people like Xon (formerly ggs) and Prognosis (formerly Mafia) who are the continuators of the SY do their crazy hacks by dissassembling Totala.exe, that I know for sure. So I guess the SY did the same to gain the intimate knownledge of TA that allowed them to code the TA Hook, the TA demo recorder, the 3D TA demo replayer, and Spring after all is only a 3D TA demo replayer that allow to play and not just watch (ok, don't hit me, it's not, it's much more, they rebuilt everything, they had no access to TA code, etc.. etc..).
So imbaczek has point.
Actually I don't believe the SY really reverse engineered and copied TA, I believe that after years of going through hoops and loops to patch an engine they had no source of, they just decided it would be easier to write their own engine, by until the TotalA source is available and we can compare, which will be never, it'll only be beliefs whether or not TA was reverse engineered in order to make Spring.
SwiftSpear, like D45 said in last post, Cavedog never released their scripts into public domain. Cavedog never intended TA to be moddable by anyone but themselves. Technically modding TA is illegal, and Cavedog (well, Atari now) still holds copyright over all their scripts.
However, even back in the days when Cavedog was a well alive company, they were well aware of TA modding community, and never did anything against them. And when you see things such as Boneyard publishing a column by Brave Sir Robin, the author of the most influnencial TA mod ever, UberHack, or when you see some ex "TA files hacker" such as Kinboat being later hired by Chris Taylor, well, it's clear Cavedog was aware and ok with modding. Just, they never officially supported it. And now, about ten years later, Cavedog's script have been re-used so much we tend to consider as being, in practice, public domain . But legally they aren't. Any time Atari can sue for using scripts Atari still holds copyright over. It hasn't happened so far, so I don't think it will happen, but legally, they can stop Spring this way.
Argh's goal with nanoblobs was to save Spring from this legal hole, by rebuilding everything from scratch, free of any Cavedog IP.
This was a very noble task, and very good goal that would benefit everybody and help make Spring more legal. It would have severed what still legally tied Spring to TotalA. It would have protected Spring from Atari lawsuits. So, I would applaud at his annouced goal of replacing Cavedog copyrighed IP by his own IP released under GPL.
Only problem is, he has not done what he claimed to have. By looking at the files inside nanoblobs, I saw he didn't rewrite anything, but merely swapped Cavedog copyright notice by his own, while keeping Cavedog content, down to the spacing in the comments. Hence my shock, horror, and alarm.
Of course I know that most of spring is not reverse engineered and imagine that I know about DMCA. I also am aware of spring's origins and was there when TA came along, though not online, so kinda lost interest in it.
