openDarkEngine - TTLG Forums

Haplo on 2/11/2007 at 12:39

Either here or in another thread, it is good to discuss the copyright issues especially at early stages of the project. Before starting our (http://endings.lemonamiga.com) website for example, we had a lot of copyright discussions that led to some important decisions. The sooner the better.
And yes, 0p3ND4rK3|\|g1N3 1s t3h r0xxx0rz :D

OrbWeaver on 2/11/2007 at 18:40

Quote Posted by Haplo

That is true, provided that

(1) the copyright discussions are suitably informed by knowledge of what the law actually says. These types of debates unfortunately tend to attract droves of armchair lawyers with their own peculiar interpretations of copyright law, ranging from the foolishly liberal to the ultra-fascist.

(2) once the issues are decided and hopefully documented, that is that. Having a newbie pop up every month with "hay guys i bet you haven't asked permission from teh copywrite holder!!!1111" gets old very quickly.

The_Raven on 2/11/2007 at 19:05

Quote:

These types of debates unfortunately tend to attract droves of armchair lawyers with their own peculiar interpretations of copyright law, ranging from the foolishly liberal to the ultra-fascist.

I OBJECT!!! :p

sparhawk on 2/11/2007 at 20:51

Quote Posted by phide

The goal is really very simple: to create an open source platform to run original and FM Thief/Thief 2 missions well enough to remove the necessity of the original Dark Engine. This is advantageous for two reasons: A) to immortalize Thief, ensuring that it can run on any platform/OS down the road either "natively" or with end-user modification and B) to enhance and provide features that improve upon or remove the original constraints of the Dark Engine.

The first goal can be achieved with ODE. The second goal can only be achieved if dromed is also be reimplemented. Otherwise you are locked to the capabillities that dromed provides. Nothing with new features, because dromed supports it. So you need either a seperate editor for the new features, which acts like a add-on to dromed, or a complete new app.

I mean, the first goal is already a good one, because currently I also have problems running Thief. After switching several times the resolution, OpenGL locks up. It doesn't happen with other apps, and I use the latest driver, so I assume that it is something in the way that Thief works.

phide on 3/11/2007 at 01:14

Some of the constraints I was referring to are those that don't necessarily require that missions be modified to function. Things like widescreen/high resolution support, enhanced audio (support for compressed formats and higher-precision mixing), large texture support (already present), post-process shader support (think cel-shading, motion blur, color correction, etc.), hardware color/gamma control and so on can be integrated without any need for mission modification, unless, of course, I've seriously misunderstood the relationship between DROMED and the Dark Engine :p

Displacer on 3/11/2007 at 03:03

I think most of the worries, and doubts about this project is recreating how dark works, such as AI behavior, etc., etc.

I can assure you these things will be implemented as close as possible to the original. We are using a reverse engineered dark engine to see exactly how things work, and to stay as close to that as we can.

Of course this depends on if I can get my nose out of Portal long enough to do any work, blasted thing is consuming my life...

sparhawk on 3/11/2007 at 11:49

Quote Posted by Displacer

We are using a reverse engineered dark engine to see exactly how things work, and to stay as close to that as we can.

I certainly wouldn't have mentioned that. ;) This makes the copyright discussion quite pointless, because you bascially confess that you are using illegal (in many countries) means to create the OPDE.

Vertelemming on 3/11/2007 at 12:19

Quote Posted by sparhawk

That's ... a very broad statement for a far more complicated issue. There are many varying methods of reverse engineering, each one with differing levels of legality in many different locations. In addition, generally speaking, there are a few types of reverse engineering that are legal practically everywhere. Depending on exactly how this was achieved, it's quite probable that it is, in fact, legal.

Volca on 3/11/2007 at 15:12

Quote Posted by sparhawk

You're right sparhawk. Thief started to have problems for new HW/OS combinations some time ago, and it won't improve. Will eidos release another patch? Will some VM be able to run the old games smoothly any time soon? I think not.

A dromed/shocked replacement is a must in order to truly immortalize the DarkEngine. As I always planned to start the editor project if OPDE will be a success, I try to write the code so an editor would be quite simple to plug in (the basic functionality, that is).

Sure, there are some more complicated things to be written for editor to be truly usable, such as lightmapping calculator, Pathfinding database generator, and of course a CSG processing code that would create WR from the brushes. This is not required for the engine itself, so it would be an extra work (but a nice and interesting one :) ).

sparhawk on 3/11/2007 at 22:43

Quote Posted by Volca

A dromed/shocked replacement is a must in order to truly immortalize the DarkEngine. As I always planned to start the editor project if OPDE will be a success, I try to write the code so an editor would be quite simple to plug in (the basic functionality, that is).

For me this project is definitley a success. :) I hate to think that I can't play original tThief anymore, just because it got outdated on the hardware. And of course there is always the issue that with an open source code, you can make it run natively on Linux as well. :)

So if you plan to make the editor as well, this is great news, because seeing how much work is still down with Dromed, I think there would be no problem that this gets stale. :)