Given the closed minded majority of this community, its better you cut the ties to TLR

I wish you good luck. (open source ftw)

I don't wish, what has it been, 2-3 years? Where is a preview? Has that grand game engine been built yet?
All I remember of the project was some start-up screen that didn't even run right, that's really all I've heard of it. The rest was ifs and buts.
OL left TLR for dead? Man I sure didn't care enough to pay attention to that announcement, I am sure you hurt the community deep with it too.


Edited by - Question Asker2044 on 9/10/2007 6:39:17 PM

indeed we havent seen much of this project, no screenshots, no preview
but i know that such projects need time
it is a shame that projects are more often killed/damaged by the members of this community than they are supported by it

honestly i didnt like the idea of a new lancer game developed as open source because of the way it started and the way it was planned to be
the fact that those ppl changed the concept might change my mind (but atm i dont really have the time or the nerves to put that much attention into this project)
after all those guys working on it have my respect for that they do

Openlancer (imho) began on the wrong foot to start with. That in itself already put the project in jeapordy of legal scrutiny and actions by MS.
It began as a sequal to Freelancer.

So, if you plan on truely developing this project, I think you're going to have to head in a totally different direction now. That means away from anything Freelancer (or *lancer) which unfortunately abolishes anything having to do with the original content.
iow: you're screwed.

The FL copyright is a non issue. We spent the past 13 or so months creating everything from scratch. The only possible copyright issue is the *lancer name but Starlancer and Freelancer were not marketed under "Lancer". The terms Starlancer, Freelancer, or Lancer are not trademarked, and I think only a trademark would carry sufficient legal protections to challenge us on *lancer as a derivative name (e.g. that mikerowsoft crap was trademark law, not copyright, and even if it were, OL isn't easily confused with SL or FL). If MS did challenge us on the name as an empty scare tactic we could either scramble to trademark Openlancer (overrides copyright) or just change names (major annoyance but we're not "screwed" ) . Beyond that, we're not making any claims on SL or FL - OL is not a FL sequel. Both the game engine replacement mod for FL and native support for FL game data in OL were also dropped. That covers the legal grounds.

The only way someone could confuse OL in its current state with how it got started back in Nov-05 is if they haven't looked at it in over a year. We completely restarted from scratch in May-06 and started on the new canon in Aug-06.

Again, our lack of progress is a lack of developers. This is supposed to be a hundred-plus man project, the couple dozen guys working on it now won't produce a final release within a decade unless we get a massive amount of help. In terms of being screwed, we critically need competent C++ programmers - starting with building a simple demo with Ogre3D and cleaning up the mess Blackhole left behind (he quit in June).

EDIT: I should note that copyright argument from last year is not legally sound, I should have said something last Nov (or so) but I didn't think someone would dig up this thread. The fair-use doctrine has never been applied to fan fiction so its all legal theory, someone could just as easily argue the fair-use doctrine doesn't even exist and the cases fair-use advocates typically cite are narrow enough not to set a precedent.


-Burn

Edited by - megaburn on 9/19/2007 2:08:42 AM