Piracy Piracy Piracy!

[stratman]

As in stealing gold from the underprivileged!

No, I really had something useful to say.

I come to Myth sites a lot before I sleep at night. Where else can I still see so much overuse of the photoshop cloud filter?

Anyway, I was going to try to come up with some clever subject about open source and Myth but I couldn't, so it turned into piracy, because open source really is worse than piracy. Instead of stealing someone's work, these horrid little open source kiddies steal the idea and make their own. How dare them.

Anyway, there's probably a million reasons why the Myth source code will never be public. And even if there wasn't, there's still the one that matters. I'm sure that there's 'someone who doesn't want that'. There's always 'someone who doesn't want that'. Eventually what they don't want happens, but hopefully they stopped caring by that time.

At the end of last year I posted saying I'd write a tool for PC people to do "Amber"like stuff. Then I left the country again for a while. No, that was like middle of last year? Or really the year before. I don't know. Anyway, I didn't do it. I've thought about doing it a couple times. Then I think, no one is going to use this. I go back to trying to figure out how to buy bulk toilet paper at the right time of the month. I tell you, I can pick winning mortgage pools before I can figure out any pattern to toilet paper prices. Before for me, that has some use. And besides, I don't play games anymore.

But you know I still have this game installed. It doesn't even run - something on my system has conflicts with it. Well, Windows barely runs anymore. I had a Mac for a bit, but I had to give it back, wasn't mind. I did install Myth on it though. I opened it up once and played a like 2 minutes of a game on an airplane a couple months ago.

Now I work like 16 hours a day. I still think about coding something for Myth, because unlike things that make or save money, it sounds fun. But you know, I don't really see the point in coding a tool. If someone really wants to put a sprite set together into some certain format, you can monkey jab it into place half by hand, half with perl, half with ten thousand things that exist today, or that I know how to use today, that I didn't know when I wanted to make Myth maps. Especially for me, there's no motivation, because I don't want to design units, and I don't want to make maps.

Here's the thing: I used to love playing grave and cussing. Especially if everyone agreed to kill everything but their three dwarves first, and go battle it out with just them on the hill. I liked playing grave normally too. But to be honest, even the full version of TFL was too complicated for me. Myth II, forget it. I never even played. I talked with the few leftover losers who hung around too long like me.

But this game was fun to play with. And when there weren't tools to make maps with, it was great fun to make something that looked like someone pooped on the Myth world with wight pieces and lightning filling up the screen making my pentium II scream.

So much did change over the years. Not only did computers get faster, connections get faster, graphics get better, and all that - I mean - people play like Unreal and stuff on their portable gameboy things from Sony now. Okay, again, not only did that stuff change, but now there's a lot more people my age when I started playing with Myth who could do twenty times the stuff I could have done because they know a lot more than I did - I learned how the game/games/machines work the backwards way because I was a bored kid. Well, not completely bored, but sometimes pretty bored. Myth doesn't get all the credit. But it gets some of it. For me at least. There's also development tools, kits, etc out there that would make it trivial to make a sloppy 'myth clone' with even one person with as much time as I had on my hands during high school and college. Alas, easier said that done. You know, I don't know what alas means.

But really, if there's still people tinkering their weedle on this thing, then there has to be people who would stick with something like this.

So, Doom's source code was released. Ok. Great. Myth's won't be. Does that mean we can't figure it out? Hell, there are more people that know the insides of this game than the insides of god cops mother just from fiddling with stuff. Compared to the crazy stuff out there today, Myth isn't too much. And I guess that's what I still like - even though I don't play or anything - its still pretty simple. I go to a gaming site today, and I don't even know what I'm reading or what I'm supposed to click.

So, there's this thread about the future of Myth. I only skimmed the first and eighteenth page. You know Doobie, or Crispy, or whoever posted about buffer overruns in Myth - the best way to 'look for' these types of things is to have more eyes. And yes, I know, lasers right? They can give you more eyes today. But that's dangerous. You might go blind. And its expensive. Some companies pay for it though. Mine does (I think). I don't want to get it though. I don't want to go blind. But if I went blind in one eye, convinced them I couldn't work, and still got paid, I bet in some years they could fix that eye, I'd be set for retirement, and I could just travel and stuff.

So get more eyes by putting the source out there - or convincing whoever has legal bondage over it to spread it around. Hahah, no, okay, fine. I know, I know, that can't happen - it WOULD NOT BE FUN IF IT DID. That ruins all of the interesting things that come from making Myth again. No, not like Myth 4. Make a TFL engine, or probably an SB engine because more people like it. The content of the game, and its source, all stay less promiscuous, and people can load up the content with this other thing that is open source and would probably be horrible for a long time, completely diverge from the original game, etc.

But, why not? Why not do something this pointless? Why not make it simple, fun, from the ground up? I'm not smart enough to do it if I had the time, will, or attention span. I'm sure someone here is. Or at least they think they are. And its the latter thats important. You need to be cocky to actually try doing something. I know that even if I had the brains to do something, I'm lazy unless I'm in fear. This game has never made me in fear of anything. Well, except for when I was living with my parents playing this game - I was in fear of being discovered sitting at the computer playing it anymore, as they thought it was mentally damaging me.

I kid you not, I'm a pretty normal person today. Not too normal, but I'm okay. Anyway, here's the paragraph that sums it up:

This was a good game, and even people who weren't Myth players, but had a chance to try this out, usually agree that it was. Most open source games out there suck and border on educational unless they're shooters, and there are just too many shooters. I'm too old for shooters now. You are too. I think a fun, simple, squad based RTS game that uses sprite graphics (THIS IS IMPORTANT), and pretty much emulates the Myth game series (and even loads their content!) would draw people into this game. Especially geeky open source people. And the fact that its free couldn't hurt to get more players.

Maybe this should be the next step, or some future step, assuming it doesn't get hit by a car during a step before this step, for Myth.

[iron]

We've discussed this long & often over the years we've had the Myth sourcecode. There's the legal problem - if the "open source" version had any code from myth itself then the project would be liable to sudden shutdown. I doubt Take 2 would ever notice any infringements, but there's people in the community (hopefully gone by now, but I still think they lurk around looking for malicious things to do) who'd be certain to bring it to Take 2's attention.

The problem with an open source game that could load Myth's tag files is that those file structures (and how they're loaded by the game) are labyrinthine. If you coded a solution to all that from scratch, next you'd be stuck with working out how to get it gameplay compatible so if could login to mnet & join in with the official Myth.

Personally I feel that an open source project would be way better off forgetting about loading Myth tags or any form of compatibility. Rather give it new graphics and sounds and its own means of managing/loading them, and have its gameplay be 100% original.

Its a lot of work. Probably why its never been done, and probably why it unfortunately won't ever happen.

[vinylrake]

Personally I feel that an open source project would be way better off forgetting about loading Myth tags or any form of compatibility. Rather give it new graphics and sounds and its own means of managing/loading them, and have its gameplay be 100% original.

Its a lot of work. Probably why its never been done, and probably why it unfortunately won't ever happen.

The way to go would be to create an original open source squad-based RTS with it's own tags/graphics/sounds and then seperately write a conversion app that would read a m2 set of tags and convert them to a format compatible with the new game. That way as long as no one is distributing the original Bungie/Take2 tags there would be no copyright infringement or any basis on which to make any misuse of intellectual property claims.

[haravikk]

The way to go would be to create an original open source squad-based RTS with it's own tags/graphics/sounds and then seperately write a conversion app that would read a m2 set of tags and convert them to a format compatible with the new game. That way as long as no one is distributing the original Bungie/Take2 tags there would be no copyright infringement or any basis on which to make any misuse of intellectual property claims.

Actually as per the legal blurb you're supposed to bundle with your plug-ins, they are actually the property of Bungie/Take 2. Converting them to run under another game is technically illegal unless you have permission. Not that that's ever stopped anyone, but some companies are really ratty about it when they find out.
For example; 3d Realms are incredible anal when it comes to people reproducing Duke Nukem 3D levels in other game-engines such as Unreal Tournament. Even though in that case it might be done entirely from scratch, it can still be proven to infringe their copyrights.

It's a very muddy area unfortunately.

[Eddaweaver]

The best path would be to fork an existing open source game like
http://glest.org/en/gallery-screenshots.html
into something myth-like. Glest for example has had most of the development needed for such a game done already.

[stratman]

I don't think there's a legal problem with writing an independent program that can read in the tags from Bungie's game. Especially if that code only reads the original content. It may be illegal for someone to use it to read the content, but surely it isn't illegal to write the tool to let them read the content.

I guess there is a point about the tag structs thoguh, the TFL tags aren't really a big deal, but I don't think anyone has really documented any guess as to what the SB tags do, and that's why you've never seen any independent editing tools. Given that there's tools for SB though - I don't think figuring out the structures would be the hardest part.

Using any of the existing code, yes, would be illegal, and it wouldn't be fun.

What kind of stuff did you guys sign/agree to in order to get the code anyway? Anyone who has had access to the code may not be a person to work on something like this for a given amount of time.

A smaller project that might be useful to people who still have interest in the game, and something I already started a couple of times for a couple of hours and didn't do, would be to map out all of the tags in some sanely readable format. SCS pointed out glest, and like any sane person would, they use XML to describe most of the content. Producing a set of XML files that describe all the structures in TFL/M2 would be a lot of work, but it would easily allow people to fill in the gaps where tools are needed on different OS's (hell, you could generate most of the tools from that - at least most of the boring parts of them).

[vinylrake]

Actually as per the legal blurb you're supposed to bundle with your plug-ins, they are actually the property of Bungie/Take 2. Converting them to run under another game is technically illegal unless you have permission. Not that that's ever stopped anyone, but some companies are really ratty about it when they find out.
For example; 3d Realms are incredible anal when it comes to people reproducing Duke Nukem 3D levels in other game-engines such as Unreal Tournament. Even though in that case it might be done entirely from scratch, it can still be proven to infringe their copyrights.

It's a very muddy area unfortunately.

But but but. I didn't say anything about _distributing_ bungie tags. I just said IF there were a program that converted the tags from one format to that of another game that would be the simplest path - assuming the other game exists of course.

I could (in theory) write a program that would read in the Myth II large-install tag file and convert it to music. If I distributed that program I wouldn't be infringing on Bungie's/Take2's copyrights unless I distributed the tag file along with it. Similarly, there's no legal reason I couldn't write a program that would load the tags from Bungie into a new program AS LONG AS I didn't try to distribute the game WITH THE MODIFIED TAGS IN THE GAME (that's the copyrighted stuff), and as long as I didn't distribute the tags WITH the game. What if I use Microsoft Word to open the Bungie Tag file, am I running afoul of the law? What about all the 3rd party mapmaking applications that read Bungie tags? The concept is the same - a standalone program used to open/read/import a Bungie tag file.

This is the exact same situation the console game emulator developers face. They wrote programs that emulate other game machines and the input to the emulators are ROM image files copied from physical ROMS from the original console machine. Since the ROM contains copyrighted material they can't distribute the ROM image file for a game WITH the emulator, BUT they can distribute the emulator on it it's own perfectly legally. The reason they can do that is because if you own the original ROM chip (or in the bungie case, if you own a copy of Myth II) you can do whatever you want to/with it in the privacy of your own computer.



ps. Welcome back Stratman. Did you know your TFL demo map archive is still online (thanks to archive.org)?

http://web.archive.org/web/200407021823 ... /demomaps/

[Eddaweaver]

If anybody is to produce a new myth-like game, it would need to be independent of any content from Myth. So this talk of converting tags is kind of like counting chickens before they've been laid.

[Frumius]

o this talk of converting tags is kind of like counting chicks before they've been laid.

Is this the right forum for talk a bout laying some chicks?

[Death's Avatar]

Also, Glest makes me cry. But that's really neither here nor there.

-DA

[t o x y n]

see sig

Also, T2 needs to make Myth freeware.

[vinylrake]

Also, Glest makes me cry. But that's really neither here nor there.

-DA

Not sure if you mean in a good or a bad way, but Glest appears to be a Civilization style resource/society-building-THEN-fight strategy game. Not very mythish at all if that's the case. Doesn't seem like it would be very similar to Myth under the hood.

IF I wanted a resource/strategy game (and I don't) I'd probably prefer something that looks more like this:
http://wildfiregames.com/0ad/movies/0adpreview1.avi

(the video locks and freezes on my machine - but it shows enough to get a good idea of what the game looks like)

[Death's Avatar]

Not only is Glest not myth-like. It sucks.

Also, Myth 4 is a plugin.

[carlinho]

wildfire is doing a great game with that
http://wildfiregames.com/0ad/

and it's going to be freeware and the people producing it are really cool, in fact I'm registered at their forum and everytime I post they are pretty cool responding, etc

but then, it's a game like age of empires kinda,
where you need to gather resources, etc....and not a full fighting game like myth

but yeah...it definitely looks amazing

[stratman]

I unfortunately have like 16 hour work days recently so I don't get much time to check/post.

I think the point is more this: all these other games, open source or not, try to copy off Warcraft, AOE, etc. These are very popular games, so that makes sense. Myth is an amazingly simple game in comparison. And I think that's why there's still a handful of people addicted to it.

What has sort of happened since the guys here at Project Magma have been working on the code is that they've been relied on to make improvements to the game, maintain the tools, etc.

The problem is, while they know the most about the internals of the game, they're under legal restrictions from sharing it.

The starting point wouldn't be creating a game or even writing something to read in the tags. It would be getting enough knowledge out there about how the game works that if people would put in the work, there is a resource to do it. For TFL, there's actually a lot documenting the structs of the Myth content. For SB, no one really took the time, because there were already tools. Of course, the existing tools are limited to a point - moreso on PC in the third party area.

What we really can't know is the ass backwards things Bungie surely did in the code to make it Myth. There has to be someone who hard coded the age of their mom in dog years somewhere when getting a random number. But, as map makers know, most of the stuff seems to be in the tags. If we start an open project to map all of these out, not only would it make it trivial for people to write some code to go and manipulate the data themselves without using Bungie's tools, but it should be easier to see what would be missing.

I mean, to be honest, Myth people have never really done much in this line. Look at what people did for Doom. They wrote books about what they found out with their hex editors and not with the source code. I know. No one will buy them from me on half.com. I think someone tried to write a book about TFL or something too? Who knows. I remember something like that.

Anyway, just my thoughts. I think producing an alternate engine with a separate code base (like has been done for Doom, Quake, etc many times) would be a nice addition to keeping random people interested in this game.