In all fairness, it doesn't look like they're complaining about how the game follows the plot of Doom, or uses the setting, locations, creatures, and weaponry from Doom. They're complaining that it uses the trademarked name Doom.
That doesn't seem like a completely unreasonable complaint here.
Also glad to see the source for DoomRL released, despite the reason.
The thing loads of people forget is that if you don't try to protect your trademark, you lose it. One of my previous employers went through exactly this scenario, where AT&T tried to argue that they hadn't tried to protect the use of this company's trademark, and therefore had lost it. It was certainly eye-opening to hear that story. Anyway, it may be that they even like what the DoomRL dev is doing... But if they don't send a C&D letter, they risk losing their trademark on the name "Doom".
Can Bethesda issue a revocable license to DoomRL for the use of "Doom" and still have their trademark protected? Since it doesn't seem like Bethesda cares whether or not DoomRL exists, and since it would provide good will and good PR towards Doom, this seems like a better move than sending a C&D, which just causes hostility.
Sure, but then you're on the hook for what they officially do with the name, since you've sanctioned them.
Then you come to the cost of doing this while protecting yourself. Getting lawyers to draft up something appropriately restrictive is probably expensive, and still unlikely to cover all the problems you might run into, and getting the project to sign it might be hard since it's in their best interest to have a lawyer review it to make sure it doesn't give away IP, and that costs money...
The author endorses racist/sexist views, comes out for child labor, and incorporates those themes into their work, or somehow publicizes that fact in relation to your property. The details don't matter to 99% of the people out there, if an official Doom product endorsed racism, Bethesda would definitely be dealing with the fallout.
I'm not sure how likely it is factors all that much. When you have a hundred million to billion dollar business, why risk allowing anything even remotely like that which might harm your brand? It's much easier to just say no.
You might be correct they don't care too much that monsters look alike. Many, many years ago on the Mac we had this Bomberman clone called BOOM and it was a mix of Bomberman gameplay with graphics that mimic some Doom monsters [0].
It's a shame that it took a threat of a lawsuit for it to be released as open source. This wasn't a game that was ever charged for, so I see no reason it shouldn't have been released like this 15 years ago. There's actually a weird culture in roguelikes (and similar ASCII games) of not releasing the source, and using opaque, non-open development processes. NetHack was open source but only recently switched to an open development process recently, and may other popular entrants in the genre such as ADOM and Dwarf Fortress are closed source entirely.
Yeah, I think that might be a matter of wanting to keep things secret from players.
Of course, it doesn't keep things secret from players with a copy of IDA and too much time on their hands, but it probably adds to the mystery for some people.
Stuff are often covered in great detail in changelogs, development blogs, forums, etc.
And players figure stuff out.
All the info will be on wikis. It is not effective.
If people want to spoil it, they check out the said wikis. If they don't want to spoil it, they don't check the wiki or the source, if it is available.
Actually, several developers have stated as much, most notably Thomas Biskup, who develops Ancient Domains of Mystery.
That's not to say you're wrong on any of your other points, but I think the reasoning for it isn't so much to prevent players from figuring stuff out and publishing guides, but more to encourage players to experiment and figure stuff out for themselves rather than relying on a guide to tell them the 'right' way to do things.
If they don't accept PRs then they will still be the sole driver. But if I were in his situation I'd at least take PRs for simple bug fixes. That gives you more freedom to work on creative stuff.
Given the ecosystem around it and the reportedly parlous state of the DF codebase, I would guess, somewhat along the lines of Minecraft, what would happen upon open-sourcing is that people would start big cleanups and APIfying, and he would have little choice but to either accept PRs en masse or quickly be left in the dust with an obsolete codebase while everyone begins using a version forked from whenever he balked at a re-architecting patch.
I'm inclined to agree that in practice you just can't ignore open source contributions if you want to remain the official version. The moment the community is patching faster than you your changes start to become ported to the 'official version' and not the other way around.
He could add trusted contributors to handle that load for him. No one says he has to handle merging all the PRs himself. Dwarf Fortress has a huge community of very technically-minded people. The end result would be better with more contributors, especially if it freed up the attentions of the main developer to focus solely on the creative stuff while bugfixes and maintenance tasks were handled by the community.
I don't mean he's going to go 'woe is me I have too many PRs to look over'. I mean that inevitably, his goals and coding aesthetic preferences are going to conflict with the community: 'I don't want to add that feature' or 'I think this is too complex and just caters to API users' or 'I dislike this architecture'. Right now, his version is king because he is the only one who can make meaningful changes to it and it is very difficult for anyone to patch his binaries, dooming any fork; allow access to the source code, and suddenly he's merely an ordinary coder who happens to be very experienced with the codebase. Think eGCC and GCC.
Open source may mean additional administrative overhead. For a game, which is essentially a sort of artistic expression, there may also be little value to the author in external contributions or derivative work. Forks or exact specifications of the mechanics could very well compromise his artistic goals.
It does note that the original plan was to open-source it once the Kickstarter completed, so I suspect a decent amount of it was "From an older era of Roguelike development"
To keep it from turning into a generic trademark[1], I would guess. Aspirin is the classic case of this that I know of. It's the same reason Coca Cola sends representatives to restaurants and when they ask for a coke they make sure you actually bring a coke, or ask if Pepsi is okay if that's what they have. If Coke becomes generic for Cola, then they can lose their right to enforce their trademark. As an example of this happening, apparently in some areas of the US Coke is generic for soda/pop, not just Cola, and it's not not unheard of for someone to ask for a Coke, and when prompted for what type, respond with Sprite.
> If Coke becomes generic for Cola, then they can lose their right to enforce their copyright.
That should say 'trademark' rather than 'copyright'. Copyright and patents don't become less enforceable if they are selectively enforced. The same is not true for trademarks.
Corrected, thanks! They occupy a similar place in my mind, and while I purposefully and deliberately made an effort to use the correct one initially, I accidentally regressed later...
I grew up in one of those regions and was flabbergasted when, at the age of 8 or so, I moved to Seattle and asked for a coke and they gave me a Coke without asking what kind of coke I wanted (Dr. Pepper of course). I then proceeded to protest to a very confused clerk that I wanted a Dr. Pepper coke, not a Coke coke.
Good point.. Wondering though if it is really necessary. I'd argue such 'homage' supports the brand identity. It's not like some random shooter uses the name Doom in which I would understand the argument.
You know, I decided to look this up, and I'm not having luck from Google getting info on Coca Cola sending people to check on restaurants. I believe I heard it as an anecdote from a fairly reliable (not not directly related) source, so I believed it, but I admit I have little to back it up at this point. So, I'm note sure if it really happens, much less what they would hope to accomplish specifically if they do do that.
Well, I heard part of it is more a company issue with John Carmack (who supported the game's spiritual successor on Twitter) than a business one. After all, the same ZeniMax also supported Brutal Doom (a Doom mod) for the Game Awards and was fine with numerous other Doom fan projects. And this game itself has been going fine for about 10 years.
They'll say it's an IP ownership thing, but a lot of people are more convinced it's a personal grudge thing.
I wasn't sure that this was still going on - sadly I guess it is.
I find zenimax's claims that Palmer didn't invent anything to be spurious at best; I was following what Palmer was doing on the MTBS3D forums for a couple of years before the Kickstarter was launched.
He's been hacking on this tech for a long time. He was taking old-school HMDs from the 1990s and upgrading them, experimenting with optics and displays - ultimately perfecting them into what would become the prototype of the Rift.
I've played around with DIY VR since the early 1990s - and I've collected many of the same HMDs Palmer was experimenting with. I've got a few hacked power gloves (sadly, I don't have a Menelli box - but the parallel port hack works great; there's even a linux driver, now), some old VFX-1 HMDs, a Cybermaxx, etc. I even have a complete set of the PCVR magazine before it folded. I played with REND386 and AVRIL back in the day. I even got some crap working on my Amiga 1200 (using AMOS 3D).
In short - I knew when I saw what Palmer was up to, that he was the "real deal", and that of anyone, he had the best chance of bringing VR into a "second revival" - which is why I backed the Kickstarter. I may not agree with what has happened post FB money (I'm really disappointed that official linux driver support has been relegated to the bin of history), but I still believe the company to be legit when it comes to the claim of invention.
For zenimax to say that Palmer couldn't have invented this stuff in his "garage" is pure rubbish - many people in the 1990s were hacking VR in their garages, on their kitchen tables, and at the PCs in their bedrooms. You had to, if you wanted inexpensive VR. Furthermore, it doesn't take much to plop a couple of cheap fresnel lenses in front of a couple of old Casio portable pocket TVs to get up-and-running. PCVR and Presence magazine both had articles on how to configure optics and build homebrew HMDs; the tech isn't exactly rocket science.
Where Palmer got lucky (no pun intended) was being at the right place, at the right time, and being one of the few people in the world at the time still experimenting around with low-cost homebrew VR (compared to the 1990s, there were only a handful in the world doing it post-2010). The tech finally came around (because of smartphones) for low-cost, high-resolution, small, lightweight LCDs - the kind of display we could only dream about back in the 1990s. He was positioned perfectly to take advantage of this - and he did.
If you don't enforce your copyright or trademark, you lose it. That's likely what this is: Some lawyer saw that DoomRL was using Zenimax property and got all excited about it.
> this is a very common misconception for some reason
The use of the umbrella term "intellectual property" is a deliberate tactic to seed that type of misinformation in public discourse, so that people will assume these different concepts are equivalent and that protections applying to one of them apply to all of them. You're seeing cases where this tactic has succeeded.
Richard Stallman rejects the term 'intellectual property' for exactly this reason. It's another case where Stallman can seem extreme, but is actually quite insightful.
If I've understood correctly, the action in Jupiter Hell happens only after user controls are used, so it's still turn-based in that sense. Looks like a promising game to me, hope they make their Kickstarter target.
The animation system uses tweening and will respond to queued actions, so you can give sequential commands faster than it renders and get more interesting animations. It's still a RL and you can take as long as you want per command.
As somebody who had to code in Pascal (in this millennia) I just... I'm not sure I can get passed that to enjoy the game. I think this is the moment where I realize that I'm a coding language bigot.
There were quite a few commercial games written in Pascal/Delphi back in late 90s and early 2000s. Original War was quite successful RTS game that comes to my mind.
The most interesting part is that they've also made a very nice cross-platform clone of 1) Turbo Vision (yes, text mode and all), and 2) VCL.
Then, using that TV clone, they wrote a cross-platform clone of the original DOS Borland Pascal IDE - that even comes in the base FPC distribution. Works great in Linux console:
