Switch`` on 16/9/2007 at 23:41
Quote Posted by The_Raven
If reverse engineering is explicitly mentioned in the EULA, which it normally is, then you've broken your agreement with the copyright holders, and therefore forfeit your ability to use the copyrighted work. That is simply a breach of contract, nothing more.
In some places we have rights to reverse engineer, which explicitly cannot be waived contractually.
The_Raven on 17/9/2007 at 00:31
Which is most certainly true. Anyway, when it comes to certain clauses in a EULA, or EULAs in general, there is a fair amount of doubt about how legally binding they really are.
Volca on 17/9/2007 at 07:48
Quote Posted by William Dojinn
Even though I'm completely uninitiated in coding and such. Is there any way I could help? I've a few friends that know C++. Don't know how willing they'll be given they code professionally(burnout being the problem here).
If nothing else what would I need to start learning to have any chance at contributing?
I'm trying to get the codebase ready for people with less C++ knowledge, I think writing scripts would be one place to work on even with a little or no c++ knowledge, but first the bindings have to be written/generated (I'd like to use (
http://www.swig.org/) SWIG, but then, I'd like to use (
http://squirrel-lang.org/) squirrel language, which is not supported). So much to work on! :tsktsk:
Quote Posted by The_Raven
Reverse engineering, (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design) if done properly, in and of itself isn't illegal. If reverse engineering is explicitly mentioned in the EULA, which it normally is, then you've broken your agreement with the copyright holders, and therefore forfeit your ability to use the copyrighted work. That is simply a breach of contract, nothing more.
Thanks for that link. I knew there is an approach that works, but didn't know the name.
Quote Posted by The_Raven
Which is most certainly true. Anyway, when it comes to certain clauses in a EULA, or EULAs in general, there is a fair amount of doubt about how legally binding they really are.
The problem here is that you'd have to be rich to go to the court.
Nameless Voice on 17/9/2007 at 10:20
How are you planning to do the scripts?
The original scripts are .dlls loaded by the game, that use certain functions that the engine exposes to them.
Ideally, ODE should be able to load an interact with the old script modules, unless you want to rewrite all the original and custom script modules specifically to work with it.
Volca on 17/9/2007 at 10:51
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
How are you planning to do the scripts?
The original scripts are .dlls loaded by the game, that use certain functions that the engine exposes to them.
Ideally, ODE should be able to load an interact with the old script modules, unless you want to rewrite all the original and custom script modules specifically to work with it.
Good question. I've tried to use wine's code to load dll's under linux, it worked (OSM initialization at least), but the need to do all the interfaces in the Dark engine compatible way seems too strict (all the COM and stdcall). Then there are non x86 machines, which would not run the original scripts at all, so it seems the best way is to rewrite the scripts in some scripting language, although it means a LOT of extra work.
I understand your point about loading original and custom scripts. It could be done anyway through some compatibility layer, although some things would be very hard to implement. I'll try to design the script loader so a new type of scripts will be possible to load only by adding the bindings into the engine.
The_Raven on 17/9/2007 at 17:08
Since there has already been a decent number of replies to my previous posts, I'll just post this here. It has been brought to my attention, via PM, that I was oversimplifying and insinuated that improper reverse engineering doesn't fall under copyright infringement, which it most certainly does.
I just thought I would throw that out there.
Kolya on 18/9/2007 at 02:45
I don't know, discussing the legalities of this may be of theoretical interest to some people, but IIRC the copyright holders have a copyright on the plot, characters and names only. That's what they are likely to protect in any case. What do they care about the effing dark engine?
William Dojinn on 18/9/2007 at 03:29
Because it is also intellectual property that could have, in theory, bene lisenced out to other companies to use.
Displacer on 18/9/2007 at 03:30
I don't believe they care about someone poking about in the code for informative purposes, what they care about is someone reversing their code, and using that to make their own games and profiting from them. For example, if I released a game after I finished reversing system shock 2, suspiciously called "Sistem Shawk II" which ran, and looked very close to the original, and at closer look contained quite a bit of code from the original, I would be in a lot of trouble.
demagogue on 18/9/2007 at 04:11
I think even if the game were very different, but you were still using basically the same reverse engineered engine it would be a problem. The "look and feel" doctrine and the "code" doctrine are independent things in copyright law, although they can be mixed like you say.
But anyway, that's at least one thing fortunate about the Dark Engine being so dated. No one in their right mind would try to make a commercial game out of it when there are such better options to go with (as opposed to the "look and feel" stuff, the characters and plot, etc.) And they know that. So that works in our favor.
