XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

[Yankes]

I dislike the share-alike clause, which forces one to release all the source code, so he/she cannot monetize any investments into it.

Do game asserts fall under GPL? If not you can still sell them and add game engine as free bonus.

For example, you cant take Linux, improve it and sell it, because you don't retain the exclusive copyright (contrast that with BSD).

This is double edge sword, because it prevent big companies on profiting on your work for free. They need contribute back if they want use your work.
Red Hat is not MS but they still can profit from Linux and improve it.

[Nikita_Sadkov]

Do game asserts fall under GPL? If not you can still sell them and add game engine as free bonus.
This is double edge sword, because it prevent big companies on profiting on your work for free. They need contribute back if they want use your work.
Red Hat is not MS but they still can profit from Linux and improve it.

Big companies have big budgets - they can easily hire the best engineers and artists of their own. What they are really afraid of is losing their market monopoly.

Do game asserts fall under GPL? If not you can still sell them and add game engine as free bonus.

AFAIK, GPLed game assets are treated as GPLed DLL files - i.e. the code you load at runtime. Similarly to how you can use GPL-licensed plugin with Photoshop. So they can be good as a value added content, but not something you can really build upon. I.e. you can't take a GPL licensed sci-fi novel and write a sequel to it, because you will still have to publish the sequel under GPL, including the LaTeX source code, and then everyone could print it or get for free - i.e. you have no copyright. That is why people introduced CC-BY license instead, so producers of derivative work still retain their part of copyright.

I think there need to be also a standard profit sharing version of CC-BY, which mandates sharing the parts of profits with the author, if it brought any. That can be some percent or a fixed one-time payment.

[Yankes]

I mean something else with game assets, they are NOT GPL, and my question was is legal to bundle them together with GPL exe.
You own all Copy Rights to it but none to your code. Image selling Piratez as standalone game as it still need OXCE.

Big companies have big budgets - they can easily hire the best engineers and artists of their own. What they are really afraid of is losing their market monopoly.

I mean case as MS long time ago pulled off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
They use it to expand they monopoly by consuming smaller markets.

[Nikita_Sadkov]

I mean something else with game assets, they are NOT GPL, and my question was is legal to bundle them together with GPL exe.
You own all Copy Rights to it but none to your code. Image selling Piratez as standalone game as it still need OXCE.

I mean case as MS long time ago pulled off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
They use it to expand they monopoly by consuming smaller markets.

You can bundle GPL'ed data with any other licensed data. For example, Apple OSX includes BSD, GPL and proprietary code. Although they have replaced the GCC with a BSD license clang compiler. Dunno what was the reason for that, but it broke some of the more tricky code.

Regarding Piratez, it runs on the OXC engine, which is, AFAIK, a result of reverse engineering the proprietary code, in addition it requires assets from the original game. You can probably replace assets with something from OpenGameArt, but the engine code is still very murky legally, because it has the same abstract structure as the original Gollop's code, even if variable names are different.

[Yankes]

Regarding Piratez, it runs on the OXC engine, which is, AFAIK, a result of reverse engineering the proprietary code, in addition it requires assets from the original game. You can probably replace assets with something from OpenGameArt, but the engine code is still very murky legally, because it has the same abstract structure as the original Gollop's code, even if variable names are different.

Only some parts are reverse engineered. Most code was created using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
And OXCE is even more different when I alter some behaviors to be more generic.

But this was not my point, get same situation but OXC is pure and independent GPL program not connected to original game.
You profit from selling data not exes.

[Nikita_Sadkov]

Only some parts are reverse engineered. Most code was created using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
And OXCE is even more different when I alter some behaviors to be more generic.

But this was not my point, get same situation but OXC is pure and independent GPL program not connected to original game.
You profit from selling data not exes.

Given that it replicates original very closely, that itself can be problematic. Many Tetris clones were taken down, due to them having exactly the same game design, down to the playfield size: https://forum.unity.com/threads/how-likely-is-a-tetris-like-game-to-be-taken-down-on-the-play-store.398902/

So I guess game mechanics itself could be a subject to copyright, not patents. But classic XCOM is not as popular as Tetris, in fact it is very niche, so I doubt anyone would go after it, after all there are several very similar clones being sold at Steam.

Anyway, I think making 1-to-1 clone is boring and not worth the effort, that is why I re-redesigned everything, like using no-RNG combat. And Gollop himself with his latest games moved a bit into different direction, instead of repeating his previous games.

[tkzv]

What is LOR? Linux.Org.Ru?

Were you "anonimous" (note the "i", not "y")? Did you register in 1999 or get the account later? (People are making bets...) Were you "logicoop1"? (If yes, punched tape was invented in 1725, 2 centuries before Zuse.)

Dude, you are insane in the best way possible.

Probably more true than you think. As far as I know, he's been working on this project since mid-2000s to test his unorthodox ideas about programming and language design. He's kinda Terrence Andrew Davis of game design, but atheist and self-taught.

[Nikita_Sadkov]

Now I'm trying to decide on a story. There are three stereotypical variations:
Background Story 1:
The Great King [KingName] the [First, Second, Third] of [Dynasty Name] has hired you and several other warlords to protect the kingdom from increasing monster attacks and investigate their cause.

Background Story 2:
The ruthless tyran rules this land, taxing poor people to no end. Can you put an end to his rule? Beware of king's still loyal generals.

Background Story 3:
The king of this land has died, leaving no heirs. Now it is up to local warlords to fight for the throne. You're one of these warlords.

Well, as Carmack said story is very secondary to the game, and all three variations are very similar, but story could have various cosmetic nuances affecting gameplay and driving it forward (i.e. what competing forces player will have and how he/she will compete with them). Obviously the best solution would be picking one randomly at the start of the game, or letting player to pick the setting. Yet that will require some time to polish and playtest, so the best idea for now is to implement some single story. Then adding some other possibilities.

Were you "anonimous" (note the "i", not "y")? Did you register in 1999 or get the account later? (People are making bets...) Were you "logicoop1"? (If yes, punched tape was invented in 1725, 2 centuries before Zuse.)
 Probably more true than you think. As far as I know, he's been working on this project since mid-2000s to test his unorthodox ideas about programming and language design. He's kinda Terrence Andrew Davis of game design, but atheist and self-taught.

That is untrue.

[Nikita_Sadkov]

Added some barebone supply/demand economics for shop items. Guess in future I could also add crafting and/or trading by allowing city shops to have different prices. That way player could raise some funds without any battles or dungeon exploration, by just traveling between cities. Although that somewhat duplicates the delivery quests. And it is not obvious how bandits would hunt player inside such system. Maybe competing merchants will hire assassins?. Still I'm not really creating anything truly new, because long ago there was that Merchant Prince game by Holistic Design, who also did another great game - Emperor of the Fading Sons.

Countless other additions, among them are multithreading, SSE optimized RLE blitting and dynamically animated lightnings for main menu, which required implementing software 3d rendering, because you can't deform polygons without taking Z-dimension into account for texture space, otherwise without Z it will result into what is known as affine texture mapping. So even such simple lightning effects require full blown polygonal renderer.

[Nikita_Sadkov]

The problem with adding more features is that each feature usually relates to other feature, creating combinatorial explosion. For example, if you add rain, then it would look stupid if fire would continue burning under the rain, so you must add the feature of water extinguishing flame. Same way, when you add barebones gas dynamics, like oxygen, the same flame must also burn oxygen down and stop if there is no oxygen. Now that somewhat restricts level design, like you can't have a closed castle dungeon with torches, because you can't have flames in vacuum, and must provide some ventilation, which I've solved for now by allowing doors and windows to pass air.

Another feature is world/travel map, which obviously should allow player to pre-equip his units before combat. Original XCOM had no world map equip feature, forcing player to reequip his units during each battle, while say Realms of Arkania, required doing everything on the world map. In my case, I use scripting to apply item effects on the unit, and site-level script isn't available on the world map. Solution: add camping mode, which would present player with makeshift map with a campfire, so the player could pre-equip his units or say cast healing spells.

[Nikita_Sadkov]

While XCOM/Spelunky style maps generated from premade parts work fine in many cases (especially for modern city streets), they are a bit repetitive, with obvious seams, severely limited in geometry and require creating many parts. Now I want local maps to closely correspond to the world map, which requires more fine grained resolution, that can be used as an input for fractal generator.

[Nikita_Sadkov]

Ok. Initial fractal heightmap is working. As usual, it is the easiest part, much harder would be planting trees, objects and caves. Although say roads and rivers are fractals too, but they need special handling. In serious applications they are generated from statistical data, but I'm using ad-hoc constraints, parts of which should be passed from world map.

[Nikita_Sadkov]

For now rivers are implemented as the good old stencil layer applied to the fractal. It is not ideal, because I want some nice waterfalls and inflows going from out of hills. But that can be done by an opportunistic algorithm, sampling search space randomly for potential nice features.

IIRC, people reverse engineered different sim cities. I should look how they did that. But I already guess they used some hacks that worked for them, but will unlikely work for me.

[ohartenstein23]

What about a gradient-descent model combined with a small amount of umbrella sampling? If the map has a large elevation feature like a mountain, have a weighted decision to source water there. Otherwise, build a very rough estimate of which edge of the map and where on that edge is the most elevated, then use a coarsely-sampled version of your map to determine where the flow goes, allowing for some "erosion" to occur so it doesn't just get stuck at a local minimum. Maybe let it run this a small number of times and pick an averaged or most likely route for the water from that.

[Nikita_Sadkov]

Here is actual OpenSimCity project: https://github.com/nicholas-ochoa/OpenSC2K

It doesn't have any map generator (loads pre-made maps) and doesn't appear to be a serious reverse engineering project, as it is in JS and rewrites everything from scratch. So it can't be used as a source on anything and I'm too lazy to reverse the generator myself guess for now it will remain a mystery, how SimCity did it. Still SimCity generators don't appear to be using a simple perlin noise or voronoi, because rivers actually look like rivers, plus a few ponds, because real cities are built along rivers and have bridges, so a river is a must. And it also has island maps (obviously a special case)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUaCyUkC_jM

What about a gradient-descent model combined with a small amount of umbrella sampling? If the map has a large elevation feature like a mountain, have a weighted decision to source water there. Otherwise, build a very rough estimate of which edge of the map and where on that edge is the most elevated, then use a coarsely-sampled version of your map to determine where the flow goes, allowing for some "erosion" to occur so it doesn't just get stuck at a local minimum. Maybe let it run this a small number of times and pick an averaged or most likely route for the water from that.

That is what I already do for world map. In a non-toy 3d apps it is also used for erosion (they pick random points and then descend from them, subtracting from heightmap), but it takes a few seconds even on modern GPUs. But in my case, I build from the data passed from world map. I.e. if player explores a site with a river at corner, there should be a river there. If it is near ocean, there should be an ocean. I also pass world map seed to the local site generator. Otherwise players will complain that they entered camping site exploration on the edge of forest, but there is no forest to be seen, so world map serves no purpose.

I'm planning to introduce some poaching into game, so there will be some incentive to explore even non-quest sites, therefore I need the generation be tangible and well integrate with world map. There is also a system, which favors using a few leader units, but still allows having grander battles. Similar to Lords of Magic followers vs mercenaries system.

Anyway, one problem, is that fractal generation requires power of 2 map dimension (i.e. 32,64,128,256), because it subdivides the fractal by 2 each step, so in the end it produces say 64x64 map, while I need 50x50, because such chunks are more user friendly. Say I have 1000x500 pixels world map, which are subdivided into 10x10 chunks, which then provide enough features for the site 50x50 generator. I could either downscale the map, getting some nasty results or cut out the require 50x50 chunk out of 64x64 map, risking to miss some features from the world map, which can be avoided by passing 13x13 world map samples to generator, instead of 10x10.