Schattentänzer on 15/2/2013 at 20:15

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It may not be so simple. If GOG contracted someone (maybe Night Dive, who now hold the rights) to make the game release ready, and it turns out all they did was to release a third-party modification, things may get ugly because there was certainly money involved.

I can see three scenarios:
- Night Dive is behind the unofficial patches
That's a bit problematic, from what I've seen NewDark is also used for the Thief patch, ie the same source stem- which certainly isn't the property of Night Dive.

- They just used the fan-made patch without further ado
Then they're claiming work they haven't done. That's rude, but what could an author of a legally ambiguous patch do about that?

- They're claiming authorship to shield the patch author
Possible. That patch is a little on the grey side of things, so maybe they're just saying it to keep things under wraps.

tldr: If GOG payed someone to fix the game for modern PCs and it turns out all they did was apply a fan-made patch, it could again place the IP in a legal lockup :/

Thiev on 15/2/2013 at 20:58

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Evening all. I cannot address those questions you obviously (and rightly so) have, but TheEnigmaticT can. Since his account is currently in moderation queue, he asked me to relay this:
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Howdy all;

I'm TheEnigmaticT, A.K.A. the head marketingbot at GOG; we've heard the comments from you guys here and, after investigating, wanted to get back to you with a reply. Apologies it took so long, but what with some of the involved people being in Poland and some being on the West Coast of the US, there's a long time lag in getting answers.

1. About the patches from this community that are in use in our build of System Shock 2: Whenever we receive a build from a publisher / developer on GOG.com, that's the build that we have to use. Night Dive provided us with a build for us to use when we signed the game with them, and it worked pretty well out of the box. Armed only with the knowledge that it contained some "community fixes" for the game, we made a few changes on our own and then, after testing, found it was as stable as any 13 year old game is likely to be. Absent the knowledge of what those fixes were, we couldn't really request permission / get acknowledgement for the fixes from the community here.

Many of you guys here know us; we have worked with some of you before on a paid basis to develop patches and fixes for games that we sell,. We're not bad guys and we're sorry about the fact that we've upset you all and caused this uproar. We're open to suggestions from this community on how we can address your concerns about the community-created content in the build in a manner that's fair to all parties. It's worth noting that any changes that we want to make to a build have to go back through the approval process with the publisher (Night Dive) again, however, so anything that we decide to do together will take time to go into effect.

You guy seem particularly angry about the wording that Guillaume used in the interview he gave with RPS (There are some user-made mods out there which do phenomenal work on the game’s stability, but none of them were quite perfect, so we took the game to our expert techninjas to analyse and swat the remaining bugs). I think this may be a case where you're focusing on the negative excessively here. Guillaume explicitly acknowledges that you guys have "done phenomenal work on the game's stability" (it's a direct quote!); that said, our build engineers did make a few changes that, in our tests, improved things enough where we decided that they were worth committing to our version of the GOG.com installer for System Shock 2.

Again, I'd like to apologize if you guys interpreted this as a slight. It wasn't intended as such.

So what can GOG.com and TTLG do together to help make you guys happier about this release? I've got a few suggestions, and I'm willing to hear yours as well.

1. Giving credit for the community-made mods in the build notes is certainly possible, although problematic for everyone because as I understand it, patch 2.4 was developed by someone whose real name is unknown and who appears to somehow have had access to the source code. For the rest of the content, we're happy to move forward with including some kind of acknowledgement for you guys.

2. Including a reference to the the community contributions on the gamecard + a stickied thread in the GOG.com community subforum for System Shock 2, giving credit and telling people to come check you guys out and systemshock.org out..

Also, possibly:

3. Generate a new build that does not rely on SSTool. This is a little tricky for us, as it will require that we both retest the whole game again once we've made our build and also resubmit the build to Night Dive, since it will not be the one that they gave us. I'll admit that it's probably not our preference--SSTool works quite well, from what the build team has told me--but if you guys would prefer that we don't do that because you feel it's stealing from you, we understand it and we'll try to work with you all on this issue. Do keep in mind that if we decide that this is a path to take, it will take some time to accomplish. Remastering, retesting, and reapproving are, none of them, things that happen overnight or even in a week's time.

That's all I can think of to help address all the concerns you guys have. What are your thoughts?

Note: I'll be in a meeting for the next, like, four hours, (and my account at TTLG is in the queue awaiting mod approval :P) but I'll check back in as soon I'm done with it.

voodoo47 on 15/2/2013 at 21:22

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yeah, that pretty much what we have thought has happened.

can't speak for everyone, but I guess a mention in the readme and on the gamecard that the GOG build uses NewDark (to avoid potential confusion - people might think the GOG build uses something completely new and different, when it fact it's normal NewDark). plus mentioning that the build has been created via ss2tool. I think that would be more than enough.


//checked the build again, the only two differences I can see is disabled intro (will not play automatically on the first run as it should), and enabling of full crash dumps. even that tiny misconfig with the video cropping (the crop set for thief is active, not for shock) that has been present in ss2tool 4.0 is still there (maybe that's why the intro is disabled).

Stargem on 15/2/2013 at 22:25

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Just giving credit would be enough, in my opinion. Considering that we don't know the real name(s) of the 2.4 patch developers, perhaps we can use "Le Corbeau" to credit them, as that is the name they used for distributing the patch.

MegaBrutal on 15/2/2013 at 23:01

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Hi Thiev and TheEnigmaticT,

Though I'm not being anyone of the mod authors, I can't say anything in their name; but as a fan, I see no problem with distributing a modded version with proper credit. So your solution for re-re-releasing the game with crediting the mod authors sounds plausible. :)

There is still one thing I don't understand. In the interview, it is said that "techninjas" have done notable modifications to the game to fix bugs... it sounded like you (or Night Dive) optained the source code and modified&recompiled it... But seeing how Shock2.exe is the exact same as V2.4 (New Dark), and the entire installation is just like a normal installation with SS2Tool applied... I wonder, what exactly is what the "techninjas" have done? To be quite honest, it seems they did exactly nothing.

I would be curious to hear Night Dive Studios about this.

Anyway, I suggest you to include SHTUP as an optionally downloadable extra, I guess this is a mod that many players would be glad for; but it's likely that most of your buyers don't even know about it. And somewhere there is a remastered version of the cs2.avi cutscene which is also awesome, I'd also include that! (I think (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=112595) this is it.) Also it would be awesome to link to TTLG & systemshock.org to let people know where they can get even more mods. ;)