Bay 12 Games Forum

Hazeron sounded like it might be neat to do co-operative empire-running, or having a player run a fleet of ships as an admiral or the like (I wasn't interested in running a colony, myself), but I wanted to see what the initial gameplay was like first, and if it was possible to set yourself up as a merchant or whatnot, and so I joined the Tyranical Suns (which was posted about in the other thread), did the tutorial (having great difficulty in picking up the torch, as the tutorial dragon was standing on it and I had to stand directly on top of it myself in order to even be able to pick it up - and normal movement would not let me get close enough to it to grab it), and then after I finally had the torch, I walked off to see what I could find. (I read most of the webpages in the hazeron manual prior to starting the game)

Unfortunately, my impression of the game so far has been thoroughly negative. I've found it pretty much impossible to find any given building in a city except by randomly wandering into it; although the buildings have icons (when you're in the 'backspace' view) that indicate what kind of building they are, they don't have names, so I was left guessing as to what the icons actually meant (most are rather blurred and vague, but a few made sense, such as apartments... which I didn't need to be able to find). Even if I knew what the icons were, I don't see any way to zoom out in the backspace view so I could see all of them at once (and then hunt in the field of icons which I would then be looking at, to find the one that I wanted). It's incredibly frustrating, when they could have simply provided a list of buildings and let you click one to GO DIRECTLY THERE - it feels like they want you to waste time running around the laggy city to no purpose.

Similarly, I have no idea what most of the different items/actions I can mousewheel-scroll through are, since they all have icons instead of descriptions!

From what I've seen so far, the gameplay as a player-citizen of an empire seems to consist of sitting in a building and waiting 7 minutes for it to pay you for waiting while the building researched something which it would not have researched without you (for example, better police technology!), and wasted city money which it would not have wasted without you (It doesn't seem that you can use your own money; it wouldn't pay you enough to make back the cost anyways).

I didn't see any way to spend the money which I had (You would think I could just order items like the buildings can), or sell the rocks I picked up (having no spaceship, I couldn't trade with any space stations), although I knew that if I found a particular kind of building I would theoretically be able to design a spaceship, have it saved to a disc, and then have it constructed elsewhere and go flying off into space to do merchanty stuff. Finding said buildings proved impossible in the 2 or 3 hours I played, however (I did wander into the airport after seeing a likely-looking icon in the backspace-view, however, but there didn't seem to be anything to do there).

Alternately, you can presumably run off into the wilderness and play a survival game by yourself, assuming there are trees, animals, and rocks on the planet. I was almost tempted to, but the game was too annoying for even that to be fun - the lagginess and inability to reliably activate objects without being right next to them were a bit too much. (In order to be able to activate anything, I had to go prone to make movement precise enough to get next to or on top of the object.)

The last issue I have is that I take a step and the framerate seems to drop to around 10 FPS for the next second or two, and the character continues walking/running in that direction even if I turn while holding down that movement key. It's like the thing is suffering from extreme lag, and that's somehow slowing down the graphics when I move as well. (I don't see how it could actually be the framerate dropping due to the graphics, considering it's smooth when I'm not walking, and I have yet to find a game that I couldn't run on the maximum possible settings with 8xAA and 2xAF without the framerate being capped by my refresh rate (60, due to an LCD monitor) at 1680x1050. (Though I haven't tried anything that uses PhysX yet)

and C++ doesn't support multithreading natively IIRC (although maybe Intel's library might fix that)

Boost has multithreading stuff, I believe. I haven't used it since I haven't done anything major in c++ in years, and even then I don't usually pull in extra libraries if I can avoid it.

Since I haven't been around due to my computer having died, I'll see about answering some of your questions now that I'm back.

2. Reading the manual, it was unclear whether ~[block] and ![block] could be combined. Please clarify, or if you're still at the stage where the syntax can change, I suggest replacing

Code: [Select]

~[block]with

Code: [Select]

?[block]
~It seems clearer and more consistent to me.

Hmm. I have no idea what would happen if you mixed ![stuff] and ~[stuff] lines together (You couldn't write !~[foo] or ~![foo]). In all likelihood, it would not be pretty.

3. It was also unclear how you could add new blocks to a file. (I know in general it's better not to, but sometimes it might make sense.) Perhaps a specific command for appending new blocks to a file would be good.

Currently you would have to have every line preceded with a +, and that assumes that they get placed in the correct place (if you have them at the end of the file, that would be to also put them at the end of the file... I don't remember if that's what would actually happen, or if they would end up at the beginning of the previous block).

4. Finally, what would really make this take off IMHO is if it could generate a change file from a traditional mod. I realize that's kind of a tall order though.

It would, but it's something that I'm probably unlikely to do myself.

5. Another thought, as I sit down to actually try and make a mod using this... Since +[stuff] (add) and [stuff] (change) are different commands, does that mean I have to know whether a given tag already exists? What happens if I try to add a tag that is already present or change one that isn't? This is fairly important for mod compatibility.

Not necessarily. If you use +[something], then you will always add the line, no matter if it exists already or not. If you use [something] without a +, and the line does not exist yet, it will create the line anyways. So you really only need the + if you want to NOT overwrite existing lines with the same name [foo:] or whatever.

I really like uristmod, it's a great idea. But I think that two things need to be added before it will be used widely.

- A diff-like function, which compares two sets of raws and automatically creates a .changes file. I think most modders will still modify the raws directly, writing the .changes file will then be additional work. Just running the program and getting a .changes file would probably increase the acceptance of uristmod by modders. I suppose creating this would not be much of a problem for you.

It's a bit more complicated than that, considering things in the file can be moved around, etc. Look at how inaccurate WinMerge manages to be most of the time.

- A 'better' interface would probably increase the acceptance by users. I haven't worked with haskell for a very long time, so I don't know what it is capable of today, but I suppose creating an (non text) interface is still not possible. I would volunteer to provide a typical wimp interface (a window with file/folder selection, lists, buttons, etc.) that then starts uristmod.exe. To make this possible uristmod would need to be able to take arguments (e.g. uristmod.exe 1 /mymodfolder ). So just let me know if you are interested in that.

Anyone who wants to contribute to it is welcome to do so (It is open source). Haskell actually should be capable of using a GUI using TCL/tk, IIRC, I just didn't want to spend 80% of my time messing with that (seeing as I've never used it before) instead of actually working on Uristmod.

Dumb question: Can uristmod, as it stands, be used to edit sub-things like entity positions

Not really. It won't see POSITION as a block start tag because it isn't the tag specified at the beginning of the entity_default.txt (ENTITY is), so it won't treat it as a block beginning - although that could be forced by modifying the code to specify that POSITION really is a block start tag. If that were done, then it would see anything under a ?[POSITION] or ![POSITION] or the like as part of it. The same could be done for other sub-block token names. (I'd rather not hard-code them, but if they aren't listed anywhere in any raw files, there wouldn't be any other way)

There was Historyline 1914-1918, a DOS turn-based tactical game with hexes and units in said hexes, etc, by Blue Byte software, made before they went on to make the Battle Isle series of games. I wouldn't necessarily call it accurate, insofar as you could actually beat your opponent, but the not-so-bright AI might actually be considered realistic - it tended to do mass frontal assaults, etc.

It also had a multiplayer mode, although I don't remember if it was only split-screen (which is all I had used) or if it might have had any other kind of multiplayer as well.

For a game which felt much more WWI-like, you would turn to Stronghold: Crusader, which wasn't even set in WWI (it was in medieval times). You could get in hours-long stalemates with each player trying to assault the enemy castle/walls and failing to break through, over and over.

Steam's launcher says I've played TF2 for 82 hours, and TF2Stats says I've played for 31. I'm more inclined to trust steam's launcher.

If someone actually wanted to sue us for the source, they'd have to prove that the AI code/whatever code you think we are copying, is actually copyrighted, and not original/from a different source.

All of the code (and art) is copyright(ed?) by whoever wrote (or drew) it. And the person who wrote it, if it hasn't significantly changed (the airlock hacking especially hasn't) can tell that you are using their code because it possesses certain quirks (for example, until this was fixed in the past few days, the fatal repeat electrocution when using a multitool on an electrified airlock) and all the same behavior (except for what few things were changed for game balance, to improve it, to fix bugs, or whatnot). Anything implemented from scratch would far have more differences.

I'm not sure what legal standard you would have to meet, but I wouldn't care to bother anyone over having anything I wrote in the game, so you don't really have to worry about the AI, airlock hacking, etc, or that multitool art which I drew, for instance. (I don't remember if I had made any other art for my version - for example, the AI's health art - or if the rest of the art I made is only in the merged openss13 which nobody has used anything from, AFAIK).

That's not BYOND code, it's the LGPL license file which was included with openss13 which I still had a copy of from april 2008.

Hell, what would be easier and saner would be if you looked at the svn history for the openss13 repository on sourceforge. You can see it in their svn history all the way back to the first version that's in that svn. (Since, logically, all that file proves is that I have a copy of the file from april 7 2008, or know how to change the modification date on files. But looking at the openss13 repository's svn history proves that it was actually in their svn then.)

Apologies for continuing about this after you've all gone back to talking about something else (But that's what happens when you're not at your computer 24/7), but apparently people seem to think copyright law and licenses work completely the opposite way from how they actually do. Or maybe they think we're living in bizarro world. That makes me .

I am hoping not to have to say anything else on the subject, but perhaps I shouldn't be so optimistic.

I'll make this easy.

When we ("we" being the current dev team) came into possession of the code, there was no license file, and no license mentioned to us.  I don't really know (or honestly, care) who stripped the license as I've never met them.

Hello? Yes, you have. Like I said, in the forked version of openss13 which I made, I inadvertently omitted it from the source package which the goons based their fork on, and from what I understand, you based your fork on some version of theirs (you have the stuff I added, without the stuff I added after they forked their version off). I am not $ALL_THE_PEOPLE_WHO_MADE_OPENSS13_AND_THE_ORIGINAL_AUTHOR_OF_SS13, just one person who created a fork which added the AI and other stuff which everyone's version of SS13 nowadays is based on, so I don't have the authority to blanket relicense all the source code! So, the license on the code and on the compiled version of ss13 itself did not change or cease to exist when I accidentally omitted the one file in which the openss13 devs had bothered to write what the license was.

All I have to say is, by the time we got it there was no license and thus we never did and also can't break it.  As such, status quo.

I'm sorry, what? You think that removing a file makes the license on the source code disappear, and makes it possible to modify them freely? Haha. No. That's not how the law works. If that was the case, I could take random GPL'd programs by the FSF, delete the license file, delete all mention of the license in the files, and relicense them as whatever I wanted and make them closed-source. The FSF would be throwing a fit and wouldn't be able to do anything about it, if that was how the law worked. You'd see it happening all over the place.

Of course, you CAN choose not to agree to the terms of a license on some program or source code, which is similar to the license not existing, but that wouldn't mean you'd be able to freely modify the source code. Far from it. It would still be protected by copyright law, which would forbid you from modifying the code, or redistributing it, etc. The way copyright law works is that any permissions you haven't been granted, you do not have. The GPL or LGPL grants you permissions which copyright law wouldn't normally give you, so long as you abide by the conditions of the license. Other open-source licenses do the same kind of thing. BSD-style licenses grant you pretty much every permission possible, so with one of those you WOULD be able to switch between open-source and closed-source at will (without having to change the license). But that's getting off topic, because you can't arbitrarily change the license on code that someone else wrote unless you possess the copyright to that code (you don't).

My concern here is mainly the fact that the whole "it's not licensed" thing is a misunderstanding resulting from a mistake I made, and I would like to see it corrected, and that "we can do whatever we want because it's not licensed" is a massive misunderstanding of copyright law in general (not to mention that it IS licensed, regardless of whether you're missing the file which said what the license was or not). And I would be very happy if people actually understood how copyright law and open-source licenses worked, rather than merely ASSUMING they work completely the opposite way from how they actually work.

Of course, the openss13 devs really should have added a note to the beginning of every source file stating that it was LGPLed, but they didn't bother to spend the effort to do that, and instead just put one file containing the license terms in the main ss13 folder instead...

Quote from: Shadowlord on May 13, 2010, 12:44:25 am

DURR IM AN IDIOT IMA SUE YOU ALL SUCKAERS HAHAH GIMME MONEY U ALL SUCK U GO JAIL

You know, I never said I was going to sue anyone, and obvious troll is obvious, but here, munch on this cluebat while I respond anyways. You must not have the first idea how the LGPL works either . You have to have the binaries for the LGPL to require that you be able to access the source.

I was concerned for the devteam's sake that giving out the binaries (to the current version) would let other people demand the source (but only the source to that specific version, IIRC), which the devteam doesn't want to give out. Right now as long as everyone who is hosting is also on the devteam then the devs aren't violating the LGPL (except for not stating that it's LGPLed anywhere).