Mac_Fife wrote:Hoikas wrote:... I can only assume that means our ideas were unacceptable to Cyan.
I think that's a big assumption.
I agree, and I generally dislike assumptions myself. However, in this case, I'm explicitly stating my assumptions so we can be clear on how things are perceived by me and some others.
Mac_Fife wrote:On Rand's Mysterium comments, there were other things he said during that interview that I know he wasn't entirely accurate on, so I'm less inclined to take those remarks as definitive (is it heresay to disbelieve Rand?
). However, a thought is that while there may be nothing that Cyan wants to hold onto, we don't know what holds former backers/publishers may still have. We also don't know how much liberty Cyan may have in being allowed to discuss such matters with us.
I have a theory on all this (and somehow I missed Branan's earlier post where he suggested different licenses for ages and assets): Possibly Cyan are uncomfortable about an "open source" license on content, i.e. "open" in the conventional sense that you can use the material however you like. Maybe they want to say "Yes, we want you to have this, but we want it only to be used for MOUL/Plasma/CWE in which case you can use it freely. We don't want it to be used with any other engine or in any other context. We also don't want you messing with our age designs in a way that changes our stories or that makes us look bad". That would be a much more difficult license to construct.
Rand has a history of making "inaccurate" comments, so I can believe you (yes, we are committing blasphemy
). Again, without a truly open dialogue we can't know for certain what the situation is. I don't think any of us would be adverse to signing the big scary NDA
sell-us-your-soul if it meant a truly open dialogue on the matter.
I can definitely see the point about wanting to restrict uses of the Uru content. This is Cyan's content after all, and they invested a lot of time and effort into it. I certainly don't expect free-for-all content. We're interested in being able to use it to improve the game, not make our own game
. Constructing a license for this case would indeed likely be difficult, but I expect with all of us working together, we could do it. Indeed, if we knew for certain what Cyan's concerns were, we could craft the license for them, and Cyan could assist us in revising it in the case that it doesn't address all of their concerns.
JWPlatt wrote:My thoughts on a next step are simple. A brief intro stating concerns and reasoning like Adam's, even if it's been said a thousand times before, about why Open Uru needs this to thrive, though I would leave out "do this or it will be hacked anyway" as unconvincing, and a question: What would it take to get content licensing and the right to serve MOULa data? That way you're not spending a lot of time on aiming at an unknown target that possibly can't be discussed outside the company anyway, and you encourage Cyan to define the conditions instead. I suppose that's a dialog. The help Deledrius asks about is to write a compelling intro. At that point, it's something that can be submitted as a team.
I would be tempted to leave it out as well because it sounds like a threat from me. We know that I'm not malicious enough to post
MystOnlineDecompiledMaxFiles.rar to The Pirate Bay, but it's still a possibility that we can prevent by having an official content license and release by Cyan. Aside from that, this plan of action seems good to me. We would need to have you guys who are in closer contact with Cyan to keep following up to ensure that the issue doesn't get lost in the pile
.
Somewhat off topic:
branan wrote:The problem with doing these sorts of fixes currently is that they requires a lot of programmer/artist interaction. An artist makes a texture or model and exports it to a common format. The programmer then has to go in and hack the PRP and send the updated PRP to the artist, who can then tweak his/her texture or model and send the updated version to the programmer. Repeat until it looks good. This happens across the internet, and sometimes across timezones, severely limiting how quickly these updates can be iterated. Having a proper content license with the source files would allow artists to make these fixes on their own, reducing the time it takes to make updates like this and freeing up programmer time for other engine/server work.
I think Branan is understating how much prgrammer effort goes into importing fixes and/or changes like these into the PRP files. An artist would provide me with an updated model, texture, or PRP file. I would then have to merge in manually (oh, remember, libHSPlasma has XYZ bug so you have to hack around W edge case!), write a patcher script (debugging time... oh, and if you decompile a plHKPhysical, it won't get saved correctly!), and then test (why is the new lamp *black*???). Rise, repeat, then go scream in anger/insanity. Those new lamps you see in that image? Yeah, those took about 2 days to get into the game--I was lucky that they didn't require any artist revisions. [TL;DR] We would really benefit from max file access
.
