Copyright

[ztony85]

First of all, let me say thank you for all your great work, and excuse for my language i'm italian.

 

I play bg2 since i was 16 now i'm 30, and i still consider it the best game in the world.

 

I understand that if we talk about to buy&download the original mod of bg2 and create new npcs, areas quests exetera... everything is allowed. But i would like to create an only multiplayer client-server mod, easy to connect and easy to host, as light as possibile, cutting all the things that i can(including the AI that is the biggest thing for the compiler), leaving only the areas, and characters, rules and weapons.I would like to organize clan wars. If i do so i'd had to share the client version to my friends and everyone who wants to fight, and this is a copyright infringement right? Because they are not starting with the original version but they download the cutted one by me.

i would like to know everything about the rules to use the bioware code, (do they really make any cash with bg2 yet?), if there are any sort of licenses for distributing part of their code.

There are already some kind of this project?,

any legal information is appreciated

sry for my english.

[lynx]

Uhh, how would you distribute "bioware code"? You don't have access to it.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Yeah, the difference between source code and the actual game code is significant in some respect.

The bigger thing with copyright is: Do you intent to somehow make any money out of it, or effect the copyright holder so that they might loose revenue, even if it's in unintended ways ? And it's unlikely that you would.

Besides the entry (Black Isle Studios/Bioware, Atari etc) that possessed at least a portion of the copyrights... well doesn't exist as the same entry anymore and eventually the Harbro is the rights holder* as of right now.

 

*As it holds the trademark for the D&D games, and thus can license the copyrights to it. And has done so to Beamdog. Yes, there's supposed to be a game coming out this year.

[Fiann of the Silver Hand]

Let's make sure we understand what you're saying.

 

You just want a mod to strip out everything but the bare-bones assets, yeah? I think I know what you're going for.

[ztony85]

I think that the copyright infringement goes beyond the money making and is inherent to the distribution itself. of the owner software

 

You just want a mod to strip out everything but the bare-bones assets, yeah? I think I know what you're going for.

 

i think that the multiplayer is the Achilles heel of the BG saga,perhaps because every client has to compile a large number of data, so the performance does not involve the RAM memory , or the connection speed. But the software.

It causes a large amount of packet losses, that is traduced in frame losses. You can see it with the difficulty to point a character for a spell or a attack,

 

and this without considering the errors while creating the connection, and the fact that is extremely booring to do that.

i was wondering if there was someone who's already working to a good client-server solution

or if not a "bare-bones assets" mod it is a good way to start, but would it be cracking the software?

[lynx]

I don't see how you could improve multiplayer easily at all. You could inject a dll like ToBEx does, but you'd first need to understand everything. Or you could try to implement it in GemRB, but that would be no easier.

 

The one time I tried it, it worked very well. But we did use hamachii (?).

[Magus]

An infrigement is an infrigement, money or not. (Of course, the companies are much more likely to pursue those that can affect the sales, rather than free ones)

 

But a long as you distribute only the actual mod, and not the client (i.e. all your friends own the original game, and apply your mod on top of it, and you hold copyright on all parts of the mod), it's legal. Even if you charge money for it.