Spring RTS Engine

It does look better, but fundamentally you're constrained by your source material - most of the Feddy mobile suits are very similar in structure. The fact that much of the differentiation is in their heads might explain the creation of Super Deformed Gundam.

sd gundam was a short cartoon series with a lot of jokes that only gundam fans would really laugh at. Super Defender gundam was a CGI show which was meant to get a younger us audience into gundam. The decision for chibi form was because of japans kawaii culture.

Joke, smoth.

And don't mock the SD gundams. They'll kick your butt...



...at dodgeball.

oh christ one of those mix and match games! devilman should have to fight master asia! BAAAAAAAAAAAAW!

Play Xta.

Pardon me for my ignorance, but my belief is that the worst thing Atari would do is send us a C&D and we could just do a purge of TA IP then?

the reason most of the "non ta" guys are trying to deal with it is they might not be so gracious. We have years invested in our projects and are would have to add month->years onto our respective projects if the engine was abolished some how. Where as the *a guys can just go back to TA or get another rts to play.

Engines that are good for rts games with minimal work are rare outside of spring, no glest sucks, westnoth is turn based. so if we lose spring we will see years of our time and effort wasted.

Also if you lot want to keep your *A which some of us would like to see in a non illegal version we have also been brain storming on how the projects can some how stay. By setting the ta shit apart from spring that means the ta projects can just morph when sent C&Ds and spring will be safe because it will be independent of all of that. That would buy time for the *As to replace content.

Spring as an engine is free of Atari IP. *A mods getting a C&D from Atari will not destroy your hard work as it is not related to said IP.

REVENGE wrote:Pardon me for my ignorance, but my belief is that the worst thing Atari would do is send us a C&D and we could just do a purge of TA IP then?

The worst thing they could do is file a lawsuit against all distributors of OTA-based material which would include pretty much all of our file hosts. Of course that's not going to happen but well, you said "the worst".

KDR_11k wrote:

REVENGE wrote:Pardon me for my ignorance, but my belief is that the worst thing Atari would do is send us a C&D and we could just do a purge of TA IP then?

The worst thing they could do is file a lawsuit against all distributors of OTA-based material which would include pretty much all of our file hosts. Of course that's not going to happen but well, you said "the worst".

There's my ignorance, I assumed there were procedures regarding having to serve DMCA's before filing lawsuits (at least for a gray area situation like ours'), but I guess I'm dreamin'.

Even if that's true, *A isn't DMCA (or did you mean "C&D"), it's straight up old fashioned copyright violation.

And if we're talking about DMCA, Dmitri Sklyarov was straight-up arrested.

I find it interesting that a press release from 2007 is considered "recent". So, in the year and a half since that press release, what have Infogrames actually done with the TA IP to get people into yet another tizz?

Anyway, we now return you to your regular demonising of TA-based mods.

Simply put, it's a threat because, we, as a project, have zero resources to hire a lawyer. If spring gets a C&D, spring as we know it probably disassemble, simply because, there really is no part of the content distribution we are responsible for, the only thing we can do is shut down the site and servers.

Not to say spring really goes away, but there will be some serious questions in the minds of many of our developers and contributors weather they want to be involved any more once big comany X starts tracking down names of people they might have some spec of legal dirt on.

Legally, in most cases we're probably in the right, but being right doesn't keep you out of court, and independently it doesn't convince a judge.

In the end it all really just depends on the if and how. If we are legally attacked, and they go straight for the balls, the more tangled up in TA content we are as a project, the more difficult it will be to dodge.

One way or another, as long as spring is still being used for games where TA content is being used, we're not completely clean. The dirtier we are, the worse it is for the project if someone ever decides to lay the shit down.

As if anybody will actually sue the Spring project. The file hosts you may have a point about, but all they'll need to do is delete otacontent and any copies of mods that bundle it, job done. If they actually do sue, they'll use past behaviour as evidence, in which case Spring is already tainted and there's bugger all you can do about it.

So, split of, new site, new server, own repository for the engine code, mention of Total Annihilation forbidden under threat of death ?

Or just replace the content and keep the gameplay.

1) Spring installer still lets you access TA IP
2) Both TASClient and SpringLobby allow access to TA IP and servers which host TA IP.
3) Spring website allows unrestricted "communication" and dissemination on its forums of TA IP.
4) Overall there is little effort to stem access to TA IP on the part of Spring.
5) Has the base engine code even been modified enough from TA that an Atari-hired programming analyst couldn't pick it apart and see the clear indications that Spring still has TA at its roots?
6) All of these factors and others combine to make for a very bad case for Spring's independance from TA IP.

The (5) isn't a problem. The Spring engine has no Atari IP built-in - it was written from scratch, and simply re-implements Atari's model and scripting formats, which is legal and common all over the world. The Spring Engine itself is no different from OpenOffice or any other open source application that can read private formats.

That's the thing. While many of the Spring sites are at risk, the engine itself is not. The problem is that Atari could take a shotgun approach and throw paper at everybody in a 10 mile radius, and the legitimacy of Spring would be irrelevant.

With the US and similar legal systems you don't actually have to do anything wrong to be sued. Uzi Nissan was sued by Nissan (repeatedly) for 10 million dollars because Nissan wanted to steal his domain. The catch? - when he registered the domain Nissan Motors were actually known as Datson.:

Nissan Motors vs. Nissan Computers

Trying to do the "right thing" helps but lawsuits are basically "law of the jungle", only the strong (ie, rich) survive because even when you lose you can just keep appealing until your opponent goes broke or settles.

Nobody is gonna sue anybody..LOL...
The worst that might happen is a request coming from the IP holders to stop distributing any illegal material.
they will not care about the spring engine nor about other mods that are not related to the specific IP.
Assuming anything else is pure paranoia.

If The IP holders decide to Make TA 2 they will first have to know spring even exists than they will have to also care about this 10 year old content that cant compete with anything past warcraft 3...a discussion about OTA IP,strictly from the legal point of view is just outright silly.
Moral dilemmas are a different thing...

Maybe the next big discussion can be about how to prepare for an asteroid hitting earth?