> At this rate, how likely is it that Codeberg is just going to become a wasteland of abandoned ideological forks (with the exception of one or two major projects) by next year?
> But at least by going down that road, you end up with more games, better games, and people learning skills throughout the process. And who knows, maybe one is a mega success.
Yes, but in that scenario, some really good games would still die. So it would good to make it illegal to kill games in addition to making more games.
> Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them.
I mean, in the short term, yes, the Stop Killing Games movement is demanding that others do some work for them. But, in the long term, the Stop Killing Games movement is asking for others to do less work.
The only reason why games are being killed are because companies are putting in extra effort to include self-destruct mechanisms in games. If a company doesn’t want to bother disarming these self-destruct mechanisms, then there is a simple solution: don’t create the self-destruct mechanisms to begin with. It’s much easier to create games that don’t have self-destruct mechanisms.
I’m a strong supporter of demanding that companies stop doing bad things and that they put in effort to undo the bad things that they have already done.
> There are no self-destruct mechanisms put into games.
That’s not accurate. I used to play the Android version of EA Tetris [1]. I liked the game so much that I paid to remove ads from it. One day, I opened the game, and the game told me that I wasn’t allowed to play it unless I installed an update for it. I installed the update, and launched the game again. The game then told me that I would not be allowed to play it after a specific date. After that date passed, I tried opening the game again, and it refused to let me play the game.
For more examples of games that contain self-destruct mechanisms, see the Stop Killing Games wiki [2].
Mobile presents even larger problems as games and apps get orphaned by quickly moving APIs which don't have backwards compatability. It's not clear to me what the Stop Killing Games answer to that problem would be.
A form of copy-protection basically. I get the desire for the emotive framing though but I think the EOL implications were simply not considered. I also agree with the idea that at EOL that copy-protection should be removed. There are however a vanishingly small number of games that are built this way so I'm not sure regulation is the best way of approaching it.
But this is an additional and much less effective layer of copy protection compared to the actual copy protection. The game wouldn't be meaningfully easier to pirate without it.
IMO this means it isn't a form of copy protection.
License verification via a server is a pretty common and normal method of copy protection. For example the JetBrains IDE I'm using at work right now does this.
If it didn't work then players would have no issue with the server being taken offline! But that isn't the case so clearly it impacts people.
If you're doing license verification in a way that stops me from playing my legitimately purchased copy & you don't give me a way to continue playing my legitimately purchased copy, it's literally a self-destruct mechanism.
But the discussion wasn't just about license verification - there have been instances of account requirements that weren't tied to license verification, just to social features, yet the game still didn't work without logging in.
Eh, I don’t really think that this is an “or” situation. I think that this is an “and” situation. The last time that I set up Xash3D FWGS, I had to copy files from the version of Half-Life that I own on Steam into a different folder so that those files could be loaded by Xash 3D FWGS. I haven’t tried Xash 3D FWGS in a while, but it looks like you still have to do that [1]. Also, are you sure that the Steam version of Half-Life is Windows only?
For whatever reason, Valve doesn't want to open source the engine so some people have taken it upon themselves to build a reverse-engineered engine (which now runs on Android, in the browser etc).
Valve updates HL1 every few years so it runs on contemporary platforms. DOS was ancient history by the time HL came out, you might be getting it mixed up with Quake1
1. Applications or toolkits only supporting Wayland. An example of this is Waydroid, though thankfully that's the only example I'm currently aware of.
2. Desktop Environments only supporting Wayland. Examples now include GNOME and KDE.
3. Drivers only supporting Wayland. I think this may be the case of some "exotic" systems; I believe there are some postmarketos systems that don't have graphics with anything else. Thankfully, the existence of Wayback means this is probably a non-concern.
> Newgrounds taught me about the "fair use" defense when parodying wayyyyy back when their "Teletubby fun land" got them the ire of the BBC's lawyers.
> I can't find anything documenting that saga[…]
You can find Teletubby Fun Land here: <https://www.newgrounds.com/tubby>. If you want to read more about the BBC situation, then click on the middle finger that’s on that page.
> (And I hope one day they can resurrect the old school "Assassin" games)
>You can find Teletubby Fun Land here: <https://www.newgrounds.com/tubby>. If you want to read more about the BBC situation, then click on the middle finger that’s on that page.
Thanks for that, sadly it looks like as I said, Assassin is gone for good :(
>Unfortunately most of my early Assassin games were deleted when the 2012 site redesign launched and a bunch of old files were cleared out. My original games had never been part of the Portal system so they were easy to overlook.
> This is a very "american" definition of freedom, which is basically, just let me do what I want.
Eh. I see what you’re saying about gun control, but the idea that “some restrictions can lead to actually more freedom, while some permissions can actually decrease freedom” is actually very American.
The free software movement says that everyone deserves software freedom. The Declaration of Independence similarly says “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” While I haven’t found a source confirming it, I think that the founders believed that the freedom of speech was one of these unalienable rights.
The GPL puts restrictions in place to make sure that downstream projects give users software freedom. The Constitution put restrictions in place to ensure that the federal (and nowadays the entire) government doesn’t interfere with our unalienable rights.
Take a look at how the first amendment is worded:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The first amendment does not grant the freedom of speech because it doesn’t need to be granted. From the founders’ perspective, god already grants the freedom of speech to everyone forever. The key phrase here is “Congress shall make no law”. The first amendment is restricting Congress to ensure freedom.
The idea that “some permissions can actually decrease freedom” is also present in the Constitution. For example, take a look at Article I sections 8 and 9. The framers of the Constitution could have given Congress the power to pass any law. Instead, they chose to specifically enumerate what Congress can and cannot do.
Perhaps, though, most Americans don’t know much about our founding and think that freedom=just let me do what I want. I don’t know.
I don’t know. What makes you curious about that?