01 Oct, 2010, Mudder wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
So where is the line drawn in this area?

I'm thinking about this because I am toying with the idea of using tinymudserver as a base for my own MUD. Though the only mud coding exposure I have, at all, is the DIKU - ROM family and I rather like the general set up for many of it's things.

If all the code is 100% different but the game experience is the exact same, so a player could not tell which codebase he was actually playing. Is that too far?

What about the flow logic of the code? Can that not be used without issue?

These questions are just to get an idea of the lines to draw, not because I want to copy ROM exactly. It's only natural, I think, that I will revert back to what I know when working on a new codebase so I want to be sure what I need to avoid.
01 Oct, 2010, Runter wrote in the 2nd comment:
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Are you asking if its morally acceptable or legal? The two don't intersect for everyone.
01 Oct, 2010, Kline wrote in the 3rd comment:
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Static Chaos / Chaosium (pick a name, it used both) was a ROM (maybe merc? I think ROM) written to mostly resemble a God Wars MUD without actually being one. It did just fine :). What should under the hood matter to players? Many times I've written fun things (for me) or improvements (mem/cpu/speed/etc) under the hood that players never notice…Which is usually for the better.
01 Oct, 2010, chrisd wrote in the 4th comment:
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I don't think altering one Merc-derivative to seem like another Merc-derivative is really the same thing as what the OP is considering…
01 Oct, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 5th comment:
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Mudder said:
So where is the line drawn in this area?

There isn't a line, just a gradual fade from black to white.

Mudder said:
I'm thinking about this because I am toying with the idea of using tinymudserver as a base for my own MUD.

Getting lighter…

Mudder said:
Though the only mud coding exposure I have, at all, is the DIKU - ROM family and I rather like the general set up for many of it's things.

Getting a little bit darker…

Mudder said:
If all the code is 100% different

Getting lighter again…

Mudder said:
but the game experience is the exact same, so a player could not tell which codebase he was actually playing. Is that too far?

Getting darker again…
01 Oct, 2010, Mudder wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
I'm asking about the legality but I am far more concerned with the feelings and attitudes of the community – since it is likely the community will be the only critic.

Thank you KaVir. So in your example, that's 2 movements to light and 2 to dark. Does it then cancel out, or are all the movements recorded and too many movements to the dark side (hehe) no matter the light just "too much to handle." ?
01 Oct, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
Well my point is that there's no a clear-cut answer, it would depend on many factors.

I remember on one occasion when I was working on some of the low-level code for GW2, I asked someone else to compare my solution with Diku to make sure I hadn't subconsciously copied it from memory.

However if you created something that was so much like ROM that the players couldn't even tell the difference, then that would certainly look rather suspicious. Too many people have come out with the old "I rewrote it from scratch" line over the years, and there are many little nuisances that would be unlikely to exist if the mud were truly written from scratch.
01 Oct, 2010, Mudder wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
Well if I do go through with this, I would be putting the code up for anyone to freely download and use. Until I started putting in game specific things that would give players an obvious advantage by knowing the code.

So if anyone thought it suspicious they could see for themselves and if they find something let me know. Because like you said, it can be hard not to mimic the only thing you know.
01 Oct, 2010, Davion wrote in the 9th comment:
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If the project has public source, we can openly watch your transition to the lightside, or dark.

Yoda said:
Fear is the path to the darkside. Fear leads to anger. Angers leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you.


Don't think about it too much :). If you're constantly thinking "Is this how Diku did it?!" you'll end up going crazy ;). If you start from something vastly different than ROM, chances are, you aren't going to be pushing those boundaries. However, if you're writing your code with a copy of ROM open next to you plucking line after line (or even trying to simply rename/reorganize things as a way to avoid Doing It Diku) you'll end up looking more and more like it.
01 Oct, 2010, Rudha wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
Well my point is that there's no a clear-cut answer, it would depend on many factors.

I remember on one occasion when I was working on some of the low-level code for GW2, I asked someone else to compare my solution with Diku to make sure I hadn't subconsciously copied it from memory.

However if you created something that was so much like ROM that the players couldn't even tell the difference, then that would certainly look rather suspicious. Too many people have come out with the old "I rewrote it from scratch" line over the years, and there are many little nuisances that would be unlikely to exist if the mud were truly written from scratch.


Ah NiMUD, probably more famous for certain people's licensing fiascos than any of its other non-merits.

I have to agree with KaVir, to a point. If your code is freely available and people can see that this code is not anything like Diku's then they'll be a lot more understanding generally speaking, but if the MUDs closed source, and it talks like Diku and walks like Diku, people are going to assume its Diku.

Maya/Rudha
01 Oct, 2010, Tyche wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
If you find yourself cut and pasting from somewhere, then you're definitely not on the right track.
If you're writing code while looking at some other person's code, then you're probably not on the right track.
If you're copying control flow, then you're probably not on the right track either.

I'm somewhat confused by the thread title. Copyright infringement (if that's what you're getting at) isn't about protecting ideas,
it's about protecting a particular expression of those ideas.
It's perfectly fine to borrow or steal other people's ideas. I do. KaVir does. Everybody does.
Sure every so often you'll see a post by someone along the lines of "Bubba stole my ideas".
The response of people who know better is usually "so what?", unless of course they really mean "They stole my code or areas".

There do exist many DikuMud clones. CoffeeMud, Mud++ and ScryMud are very much Dikuish clones borrowing many ideas from it.

[1] Literary works are of course protected, so copying some muds areas, helps or output messages is also a problem.
[2] Patents can protect ideas and systems, but AFAIK nothing in DikuMud or any of the derivatives that I've seen have been patented.

HTH
06 Oct, 2010, Tavish wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
Out of curiosity, where do people feel SocketMud falls in relation to Merc? I realize that SocketMud doesn't have any real game functionality built in and the later versions with the built in event queue did start to move it in a different direction. But the core setup is basically stripped down Merc with different structure names.
06 Oct, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
Tavish said:
Out of curiosity, where do people feel SocketMud falls in relation to Merc?

Some stylistic and high-level design similarities, it's clear Jobo is from a Merc background, but the code appears to be very different - not stripped down or renamed, but literally written in a different way, doing some things better and other things worse.

I also tested some of his early socket code when he was still developing it, before SocketMUD was released, and it had a number of bugs that I've never seen in Merc.
06 Oct, 2010, Tyche wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
Tavish said:
Out of curiosity, where do people feel SocketMud falls in relation to Merc? I realize that SocketMud doesn't have any real game functionality built in and the later versions with the built in event queue did start to move it in a different direction. But the core setup is basically stripped down Merc with different structure names.


I don't follow. How so?
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