Doom Legacy is Illegal

[Mr. T]

Well if Carmack has said it's fine, then you're just wasting your time aren't you?

[Quasar]

Mr. T said:

Well if Carmack has said it's fine, then you're just wasting your time aren't you?

He said it was fine as far as he was concerned, but that it's really Zenimax's say since they bought id and all of their assets. So a rewrite wouldn't hurt, you know, just to be on the safe side.

[Cjwright79]

Would Zenimax have any reason to care though?

[Gez]

Quake's source code is GPLed now. This makes it legit retroactively IMO. Kinda like the Raven code issue.

I mean, you can just delete all that code to remove the code that came from an unlawful leaked version. Then revert that code back in, this time saying it's from the lawfully-released version. What does it matter?


The real issue is not about the legality of the Quake-derived code; it's about the suspicion this casts on the legality of the rest of the new code.

[Graf Zahl]

Gez said:

Quake's source code is GPLed now. This makes it legit retroactively IMO.

But according to GhostlyDeath's post the leaked source is noticably different so it's not this clear.

[Quasar]

Yeah in the Raven case the GPL code is identical to the EULA code, so it's automatically "grandfathered," in effect. In this case there are differences.

[kristus]

There's a difference NOW perhaps. But not at the time it was added.

[RestlessRodent]

Gez said:

Quake's source code is GPLed now. This makes it legit retroactively IMO. Kinda like the Raven code issue.

I mean, you can just delete all that code to remove the code that came from an unlawful leaked version. Then revert that code back in, this time saying it's from the lawfully-released version. What does it matter?

I did this with the Heretic code, but the code from Quake is different as I said. It would be like using Doom 1.1 source code then making the switch to 1.9, it's similar but it is not the same (1.1 to 1.9 is a 1 year, 1 month, and 16 days difference).

Gez said:

The real issue is not about the legality of the Quake-derived code; it's about the suspicion this casts on the legality of the rest of the new code.

I have not found anything else infringing so far for now.

kristus said:

There's a difference NOW perhaps. But not at the time it was added.

Legacy changed the code over the years (4) and ReMooD also (2), however the base code was still the same pretty much.

[ReFracture]

Interesting stuff.

I loved Doom Legacy back in the day, but it really was a poor engine in retrospect. Everything about it felt like it was duct taped together.

The only features I miss are the bots and the 3-d floors (Though the floors as I understand exist now in GZDoom to some extent..)

I don't know what it is, but the bots in Doom Legacy (DM) are so much more fun to play against than those clumsy piss easy bots from Skulltag. (Stopping to chat, seriously?)

I would presume that with the cluster-fuck that Legacys code is, it may very well be far too much to ask any source port maintainer to port over those bots.

[Graf Zahl]

Mike.Reiner said:

(Though the floors as I understand exist now in GZDoom to some extent..)

GZDoom's 3D floors support a superset of Legacy's features.

Although I used Legacy as a guideline when implementing them, to ensure that the feature set is complete, I wasn't really able to use much of Legacy's 3D floor code because it was - like much of the rest of the engine - poorly integrated with several serious problems which often resulted in clumsy patching code (duct tape indeed... ;)) to work around the shortcomings - and it still didn't do some of the necessary game physics right, for example monsters could see through 3D floors.

[Gez]

Aren't the Legacy bots based on the same thing as ZDoom's? The "cajun bot" that used to live here?

They're still available in ZDoom and derived, except Skulltag which replaced them by its own bots. Though they're an unsupported feature.

[kristus]

You can make the bots in Skulltag smarter or dumber at your own leisure. They are scriptable.

[Gez]

And still completely useless for anything that's not deathmatch. Coop? Invasion? CTF? Skulltag? Forget them.

[Khorus]

I've never been able to relate to the desire for bots in modes against monsters.

[Gez]

Since when are CTF and ST "modes against monsters"? Or, hey, Domination (I forgot to list it earlier).

Coop with bots is rather pointless, I agree, since coop is just the multi-player version of single-player mode. But the other gamemodes are not playable at all in single-player mode. Yet the bots in games like Q3TA or UT are perfectly able to make playing against them in such gamemodes possible and entertaining.

[kristus]

Invasion isn't playable because "all" maps made for it blow goats.

[ReFracture]

kristus said:

You can make the bots in Skulltag smarter or dumber at your own leisure. They are scriptable.

I may have to look deeper into that then.

All I know, is that on maximum difficulty, 1 on 1, the skulltag bots provided next to no challenge compared to a legacy bot.

If there are options I can customize to make them stop doing stupid shit and be more aggressive, they might be more fun.

[kristus]

Granted, most bots are made challenging by simply having superhuman aim.

[ReFracture]

kristus said:

Granted, most bots are made challenging by simply having superhuman aim.

In general, yes.

[iori]

It's 2010.. why does this thread exist?

[Graf Zahl]

Maybe because Legacy still exists?

[entryway]

kristus said:

You can make the bots in Skulltag smarter or dumber at your own leisure. They are scriptable.

The only known to me really scriptable bots are FrogBots for Quake1.

[Spleen]

kristus said:

You can make the bots in Skulltag smarter or dumber at your own leisure. They are scriptable.

While they are technically scriptable, Carnevil lost the compiler due to a hard drive failure, so the only usable compiled scripts are the ones that are included in skulltag.wad. Until someone reverse engineers the parser to make a new compiler, it will be impossible to make any new botscripts.

[Super Jamie]

entryway said:

Sorry, but doom2.exe with DOSBox is 10x better then ReMooD. Hence, the sense of deriving from Legacy eludes from me. Ghostly is mad with the choice.

I would have laughed out loud at this post if I was not beside myself in disbelief. You are a true gentleman, Andrey.

[Maes]

For that matter, there are certain sourceports which I won't name that can use PWADs with the shareware version of Doom. And certain editors that will allow you to create maps for it. There, I said it.

[Quasar]

Maes said:

For that matter, there are certain sourceports which I won't name that can use PWADs with the shareware version of Doom. And certain editors that will allow you to create maps for it. There, I said it.

Since the source is open now, there's really no way to effectively guarantee that this limitation remains, and so some ports have chosen to do away with it.

As a courtesy to id, and to maintain an authentic experience even for registered users loading the shareware IWAD, Eternity has maintained shareware limitations, and has extended them to some of its new features. For example:

• The GFS wadfile command is disabled.
  
• No wads will be loaded from the base/game/autoloads directory.
  
• The addfile console command is disabled.
  
• The file choosing dialog in the menu system shows a "The registered version is required to load wad files" message instead of the file listbox.
  

EE *does* allow the application of DeHackEd/BEX and EDF patches in shareware games, however, as do more or less all other ports.

[printz]

Users can load up Freedoom anyway, which kinda defeats the point of barring access to PWADs using Shareware, for marketing purposes.

[Graf Zahl]

Freedoom's legality is fishy at best, too. It tries too hard to replicate copyrighted stuff from the original to be completely on the safe side.

[RestlessRodent]

Graf Zahl said:

Freedoom's legality is fishy at best, too. It tries too hard to replicate copyrighted stuff from the original to be completely on the safe side.

Every idea in everything is stolen.

[wildweasel]

Graf Zahl said:

Freedoom's legality is fishy at best, too. It tries too hard to replicate copyrighted stuff from the original to be completely on the safe side.

The most legal issue that could be found is the use of the name "Doom", which probably would not stand in court. Then again, I am not a lawyer.