Put the wish list for porting projects HERE...

[Svartalf]

BTW, intestesting thing you mention about Tekwar, probably it's ok too, since i dont think that shatner guy owns any rights to that game.

Heh... Wrong answer- from several different angles all at once.

William Shatner owns the rights to the storyline of TekWar and any trade dress associated with the novels he wrote.

Even if you presume that the game was a differing deal from the Novel series, the rights if the publisher of the TV series was defunct, would devolve to the producers...Ron Goulart and...

Wait for it...

William Shatner.

Even if you presume that the producers were defunct and Shatner wasn't one of them, since he's doing a goodly portion of the cutscene acting, since he's the one doing the acting, it'd devolve to him, yet again.

You've got to be CAREFUL about your presumptions of who has rights involvement in these things. You can't make assumptions like what you just did- ever... If you do, you could be on the wrong end of a lawsuit.

Having said this, if we can revive the game with some improved stuff, he MIGHT be convinced to allow it to go- or maybe with a deal on proceeds of a commercially sold remix of the game. That, however, would be a bit of a stretch because while it was a better game than many Capstone came up with, it's still not a "great" game a' la GoG's stuff.

And BTW, Tekwar seems to be a pretty good game, probably better than witchaven. It had NPCs you could talk to, that wandered around. If you pointed your weapon at them they would go, dont shoot me, and if there were any cop NPCs around they'd draw their weapons and tell you to drop yours, GTA-style.

It was a little weaker than it ought to have been and got mixed reviews- that doesn't mean we ought to not look into this one further. I just recently got an assets disk from Half-Price Books for $2 that should allow it to live again one way or another. We probably ought to find the precedent, etc. we think covers this and get Les to at least officially "start" the projects. By the by, he can't GPL the stuff because it's a derivative of the BUILD engine- but he can make "official" versions of the source available for the games.

[Dragonlord]

Wait a moment... If the Build engine is involved isn't this endeavor already jeopardized? As far as I remember from an older post the owner of Build is not that GPL happy after all... more interested in royalties according to my impression.

[xav1r]

Heh... Wrong answer- from several different angles all at once.

William Shatner owns the rights to the storyline of TekWar and any trade dress associated with the novels he wrote.

Even if you presume that the game was a differing deal from the Novel series, the rights if the publisher of the TV series was defunct, would devolve to the producers...Ron Goulart and...

Wait for it...

William Shatner.

Even if you presume that the producers were defunct and Shatner wasn't one of them, since he's doing a goodly portion of the cutscene acting, since he's the one doing the acting, it'd devolve to him, yet again.

You've got to be CAREFUL about your presumptions of who has rights involvement in these things. You can't make assumptions like what you just did- ever... If you do, you could be on the wrong end of a lawsuit.

Do you think it would be possible to contact Mr. Shatner? I dont know if his publicist if he has one, like usually celebs do, would forward an email of mine to him.

By the by, he can't GPL the stuff because it's a derivative of the BUILD engine- but he can make "official" versions of the source available for the games.

Well, wouldnt it be similar to when 3D Realms released the source code of duke3d and Shadow Warrior under the GPL? To my understanding what they released under GPL was the game-specific code, that depends on the .OBJ files generated from compiling the BUILD engine, which itself is not GPL, but is under a weird license by Ken Silverman. 3D Realms didnt and doesnt own the rights to BUILD and therefore they couldnt GPL it, but they did own the rights to those games, and so they could GPL the game-specific code to them. Wouldnt Les Bird, if he owns the code specific to the capstone games that use BUILD, be able to release only that code that needs BUILD (as of now) as GPL?

BTW, im all for a makeover to those games. It'd be great to write an improved, much better engine for them to run on, than the old build engine.

[Svartalf]

Do you think it would be possible to contact Mr. Shatner? I dont know if his publicist if he has one, like usually celebs do, would forward an email of mine to him.

Dunno... Need to get a bit further in this before pulling that trigger. I'll check into it. I suggest you do too just in case I run out of personal bandwidth for a stretch.

Well, wouldnt it be similar to when 3D Realms released the source code of duke3d and Shadow Warrior under the GPL? To my understanding what they released under GPL was the game-specific code, that depends on the .OBJ files generated from compiling the BUILD engine, which itself is not GPL, but is under a weird license by Ken Silverman. 3D Realms didnt and doesnt own the rights to BUILD and therefore they couldnt GPL it, but they did own the rights to those games, and so they could GPL the game-specific code to them. Wouldnt Les Bird, if he owns the code specific to the capstone games that use BUILD, be able to release only that code that needs BUILD (as of now) as GPL?

Perhaps. Technically, they couldn't have released it under the GPL proper without some provisos as BUILD is a requirement and you can't give away all the source needed to MAKE a binary with what was given away. It's, in theory, possible for Les to do something like that, but even with the provisos, it's going to have "issues". We'll need to do more checking on what 3DR actually DID there.

BTW, im all for a makeover to those games. It'd be great to write an improved, much better engine for them to run on, than the old build engine.

Heh... That's a bit more work than one would find useful in most cases. BUILD with Polymost and improved textures would accomplish most of what you're reaching for. If you don't leave it at just that, you're implementing a game over again from scratch for all intents and purposes.

[Svartalf]

Wait a moment... If the Build engine is involved isn't this endeavor already jeopardized? As far as I remember from an older post the owner of Build is not that GPL happy after all... more interested in royalties according to my impression.

Well, in the case of some of these titles, heh, you're probably right. In the case of some of this stuff, a "remix" of things like Redneck Rampage (Interplay's STILL alive and licensing out electronic publishing of that and their other back catalog to subsidize their new endeavors, so....) and a few other titles (like perhaps TekWar and Powerslave...) would actually make sense and handing Ken some coin in exchange for the trouble might not be a bad thing, really... Even if it doesn't work out that way, the freebie re-works would still be "okay" because his license only really is restrictive in that you can't make money off of it and have to distribute via the Internet. I'm sure we can talk w/him on that one and see what he has to say- once we've verified the tortured path we've walked on these to this point.

[xav1r]

Dunno... Need to get a bit further in this before pulling that trigger. I'll check into it. I suggest you do too just in case I run out of personal bandwidth for a stretch.

Will do, i have plenty of bandwidth to waste.

Perhaps. Technically, they couldn't have released it under the GPL proper without some provisos as BUILD is a requirement and you can't give away all the source needed to MAKE a binary with what was given away. It's, in theory, possible for Les to do something like that, but even with the provisos, it's going to have "issues". We'll need to do more checking on what 3DR actually DID there.

Yea, a similar opinion was reached on another board regarding this. Apparently the GPL requires that all derivative work made with GPL licensed code be also GPL. So maybe 3DR is breaking the GPL. What they "did" was just slap the GPL tag on the source code they released, i dont think they made any special provisions.

Heh... That's a bit more work than one would find useful in most cases. BUILD with Polymost and improved textures would accomplish most of what you're reaching for. If you don't leave it at just that, you're implementing a game over again from scratch for all intents and purposes.

Yes, but then Ken Silverman would have to be brought into the equation, since he has a free-for-non-commercial use for his build engine, and for Polymost. Here it is

He'd definitely ask for some monetary compensation.

[Dragonlord]

The GPL is tricky. Noticed this myself since I'm in a similar situation but other way 'round. I have a GPL engine but want to allow people to use it with more restrictive licenses since many platforms are not GPL happy.

Now what goes for this case we have a closed source engine which is used to make GPL game content. As far as my research into the GPL went it says that when your game is GPL but the engine closed it is not allowed because the game "can not work" without the engine and is there an important part of it. Therefore if there is no alternative to using the Build so that the game still works it is not valid to make a GPL game with the close engine.

As mentioned, it's tricky and if they put a disclaimer in it they can modify the GPL ( where it is then though no more a pure GPL but a lesser GPL ). But asking the FSF itself about that would be better since they know their license way better than I can do.

[xav1r]

The GPL is tricky. Noticed this myself since I'm in a similar situation but other way 'round. I have a GPL engine but want to allow people to use it with more restrictive licenses since many platforms are not GPL happy.

Now what goes for this case we have a closed source engine which is used to make GPL game content. As far as my research into the GPL went it says that when your game is GPL but the engine closed it is not allowed because the game "can not work" without the engine and is there an important part of it. Therefore if there is no alternative to using the Build so that the game still works it is not valid to make a GPL game with the close engine.

As mentioned, it's tricky and if they put a disclaimer in it they can modify the GPL ( where it is then though no more a pure GPL but a lesser GPL ). But asking the FSF itself about that would be better since they know their license way better than I can do.

Yep, your explanation pretty much sums it up. 3DR didnt release it as LGPL, but complete GPL, so apparently theres a problem there. I tried contacting the software freedom law center, which works for the FSF, but got no reply. Maybe you'd have better luck contacting someone else, Dragonlord? BTW, have you considered using a less strict free software license like the BSD? Unlike the GPL, it does allow closing of some or all the forked code for commercial or non-commercial uses.

[Dragonlord]

As the original author I'm allowed to put my work under as many licenses as I see fit. So the idea is to place it under GPL. Then for required applications where this does not work additional, more restrictive licenses can be done. The customer can then pick the license he wants to use. This way all people have access to the engine in GPL no matter if it is used in a closed form. After all the basic design is that nobody else than the engine development team has to touch the engine code. All the magic happens inside the modules which the player chooses not the game designer. Hence you can use the engine as GPL while still doing a closed license game with it. Reason is that you do not link against the engine library itself ( which would require you to GPL yourself ) but you are run by a launcher. The launcher is GPL but the game content he runs can be closed. I made this extra layer in between to avoid these problems. Another topic though are closed source modules with the GPL engine. I want to allow this too since this way hardware manufactures could also participate in the game market in that they can sell own engine modules. Players are free to choose free modules or closed modules ( as is with nVidia/ATI drivers for example ). Here though the problem is that module do have to link against the engine as else they can not resolve the symbols they need. I don't know how exactly this situation ( GPL => dlopens module(closed => links to engine(GPL)) ) is handled by the GPL license. To my understanding a safe bet would be to provide an additional LGPL license since this one should allow this situation for sure. That said I never contacted anybody at the FSF yet. I have also no idea if I would have better luck getting an answer out of them. This might sound now a bit harsh but while I'm for the FSF as a guardian over the GPL they can be rather... particular ( see some of their page contents about what should happen in informatics regarding openedess/closedness ). But I guess the GPL is more violated nowadays than one might think. After all it's a rather large license if you want to live up to it in it's entirety.

[Svartalf]

Yes, but then Ken Silverman would have to be brought into the equation, since he has a free-for-non-commercial use for his build engine, and for Polymost. Here it is

He'd definitely ask for some monetary compensation.

Unfortunately, Ken's going to be involved in this little project at some level because I don't think 3DR has a license from him to utilize Polymost for Duke and Shadow Warrior- if we do ANYTHING with Polymost (and we're going to want to, honestly... It'd make Duke and Lo Wang POP on a Pandora...), we're going to have to work with Ken on that score.

I'm under the understanding that he's not TOO unreasonable on this little aspect of BUILD/Polymost, but I could be mistaken there.