Modern Retro Project - Impossibru?

[Pyure]

Worth mentioning that we're actually talking about different types of properties here, but having said that: it does get blurrier than that. If I write a helper library, that's my code. My subsequent modding may call my library. Its easy enough to call my modding communal piracy, and I don't even strongly argue with it. But the mod may end up being 50% library-work, and that library might get used in tons of stuff that has nothing to do with the mod.

 

[Drbretto]

Worth mentioning that we're actually talking about different types of properties here, but having said that: it does get blurrier than that. If I write a helper library, that's my code. My subsequent modding may call my library. Its easy enough to call my modding communal piracy, and I don't even strongly argue with it. But the mod may end up being 50% library-work, and that library might get used in tons of stuff that has nothing to do with the mod.

Yes, I 100% agree here as well. There's gotta be honor amongst the pirate community (that may not be the best term, but imagine it without the negative aspects). Someone can't just take her code without her consent. What I am saying is wrong is her apparent insistence that she owned the idea and the refusal to pass the project down. I feel like that's a spit in the face of the community and comes off as misguided and selfish. She's free to do it, but it sounds to me like the backlash was also justified.

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

There was a huuge amount of work I put into my mod as well. But modding is a community piracy project, essentially. It's not your property to protect.

If you have an idea you want to use in your own IP, then you can protect it by not working on a public project like this. I'm sorry, and I'm sympathetic, but I feel she is in the wrong here. And I feel it's a very clear line, and not all that close to it.

Eh, I disagree, but I haven't the energy to get into it In the end, the solution was found by people doing similar things that weren't direct copies, and that was different enough to be acceptable. While she had no legal leg to stand on in some ways, I completely sympathise and understand the point of view of "stop nicking my f***ing stuff!!!" when the concepts, ideas and designs were things which she came up with outside of Minecraft, though implemented within Minecraft, to start with, may have been being taken wholesale. Now, I don't know if that's what happened, but if she wanted to make money on her own game at a later date, she HAD to take action to protect that IP.

Here's the thing - real talk: big or small, if you don't take steps WHEN the situation arises to protect a concept and idea you've come up with and put out there, however it's done, you CANNOT retroactively protect it after the fact. This happens with game devs pretty often, at all levels. If she wasn't doing her own game, I'd be with you as well (minus the community entitlement cos MAN that rubs me up the wrong way) but as it stands... no.

EDIT:

What I am saying is wrong is her apparent insistence that she owned the idea and the refusal to pass the project down. I feel like that's a spit in the face of the community and comes off as misguided and selfish. She's free to do it, but it sounds to me like the backlash was also justified.

Well, again, no - why should she? Why should she pass it down?

 

[Drbretto]

The thing is, I don't disagree with you that one needs to protect their IP. The disconnect is what that entails. If someone uses her mod and recreates what they can reverse engineer with their own code, there's nothing she can do about it, and nothing she should be able to do about it. It's already public domain. If she wanted to protect that idea, she shouldn't have put it out there in this form. That was her mistake, which she made long before she tried to jump ship. It's understandable, but she has no right to protect that aspect.

If people are stealing her actual code, that's totally different. But, all of that could have been avoided if she had simply handed the project off to someone else. She can still go on to do her own thing. She's not building minecraft, so whatever project she has in store for this would still be hers and hers alone. Notch can't go around telling people they can't make voxel-based mining and crafting games, either. I'm sorry, but unless people were straight up stealing her code, she doesn't come off good here at all.

I've had plenty of ideas that I'd like to use for my own projects. But as soon as I put them out there in a public forum, they're public. That's what you sacrifice by auditioning your ideas on an unofficial public forum. I am still free to build my own property off of that idea, and by virtue of not being part of a different app, it would be fundamentally different anyway.

Modding is flat-out public domain. It's already hacking someone else IP.


Edit: And to clarify, this wouldn't give anyone rights to stealing code or artwork or anything like that. Just the concept of the mod itself. If someone else wanted to recreate the spirit of the mod with their own code and their own artwork, she has nothing to complain about.

Edit 2: And just so I don't come off as entirely anti-modder here, while the adfly and patreon things are indeed murkey, i'm frankly happy for the modders for finding a loophole. As long as the mods are completely free to all.

I do have a problem with this one texture pack I saw that charges for their "full version". That's also murky, so I wouldn't start a campaign against them or anything, but I just don't like the precedent.

 

[Hambeau]

Well, no that's... that's not true at all. Yes, mods modify Minecraft's code, but there's a HUGE amount of work done in terms of coding mechanics, blocks, items, not to mention the creative property of block models, skins, effects etc. That's a very slippery slope, and one that's been discussed in great detail on these forums. Don't get me wrong, if it comes to monetisation, that's very shaky ground because it IS based on Mojang's IP ultimately, but I'd be very careful about dismissing out of hand the ownership of the creator, and especially so about implying ownership by the community. That sense of entitlement can put modders off VERY fast.

And one could argue that RedPower has always been Eloraam's IP - she created a mod based on a game that she had come up with, it just happens that said game isn't finished yet. But I do believe it is THAT way round.

There's also a section in the Mojang EULA stating that mods written for Minecraft technically become Mojang's property... This is standard in most "boilerplate" EULA legalese and in fact in US Copyright/Patent law anything based on other Copyrights/Patents have to meet several criteria in order to meet the requirements as "new" works.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Which is why it is the Mod-which-shall-not-be-named.

 

[Drbretto]

Which is why it is the Mod-which-shall-not-be-named.

Yep. Fair point! lol I will not bring it up again.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

UPDATE!

IC2C has released for 1.10.2 so I'm going to try to put this thing together using the following:

Spoiler

IC2C for IC2. It also comes with Advanced Machines and Compact Solars built-in, however it isn't compatible with regular IC2 addons.

Agricraft. To replicate the crop system of old IC2 more effectively.

CoFH Suite. Now that Thermal Dynamics and MFR have released, this will give me roughly everything Buildcraft and Forestry used to do.

Immersive Engineering. Railcraft is a buggy hot mess, this gives me the coking ovens, blast furnaces, and an actually interesting tech tree

Project Red. To duplicate the circuitry from RP2, since the tubes are already done by TD.

Iron Chests - Because apparently Enhanced Inventories is now abandonware

JEI with NEI addon

Storage Drawers - used instead of JABBA or Factorization's barrels

Journeymap - because REI's hasn't been updated in some time.

Then add onto that the following:

Spoiler

Applecore/Appleskin

Cooking For Blockheads

Pam's Harvestcraft

Dynamic Surroundings

Fast Leaf Decay

Iron Backpacks

Quark

Realistic Terrain Generator + Ruins

Tomb Many Graves

Inventory Sorter

WAILA

And... that's it. Something like 50 mods including coremods and library dependencies.

 

[KingTriaxx]

That's microscopic, and I adore the plan. Frankly, if I do play it, I'll just add Railcraft on my own.

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

Love it that's a really nice set of mods! I think you've really captured that retro feel from the sounds of it. I don't know whether YABBA would have been a more faithful replacement, but I love storage drawers so you won't get any complaints from me!

 

[WTFFFS]

For the true 'Modern retro' experience you need Project E to replace Equivalent Exchange because it was one of the major mods in that era, whether you liked that style of play or you didn't

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

For the true 'Modern retro' experience you need Project E to replace Equivalent Exchange because it was one of the major mods in that era, whether you liked that style of play or you didn't

Granted, but I only played with it a couple of times then tossed it because I didn't really like the post-resource scarcity point being so very rapidly. And since this is a private pack not intended for distribution, and I'm really the only one playing it, I get to tell Project E to sod off just like I did the original EE2.

 

[WTFFFS]

Granted, but I only played with it a couple of times then tossed it because I didn't really like the post-resource scarcity point being so very rapidly. And since this is a private pack not intended for distribution, and I'm really the only one playing it, I get to tell Project E to sod off just like I did the original EE2.

Heh pretty much the answer I was expecting to see, only place I've seen EE2 or Project E make perfect sense is on challenge maps. There it is a very valuable tool.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Works startlingly well in Future's Edge, which is a totally rebalanced pack. Needs a dragon Egg, and some Open Computer's Stuff that's a lot harder than it seems.

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

Works startlingly well in Future's Edge, which is a totally rebalanced pack. Needs a dragon Egg, and some Open Computer's Stuff that's a lot harder than it seems.

I think most OpenComputers stuff is harder than it seems! then again, I know zero Lua, so that's not a surprise. But yes - the crafting of OC stuff is simple; the programming? Not so much!

 

[KingTriaxx]

Landstryder (pack dev) went sort of full tilt into expert mode. Anything with a hard mode has been turned on, anything without has been adjusted to do so. 2 EIO conduits per craft (normal recipe), capacitors use full ingots, and steel instead of iron to actually craft the Machine Chassis, and some of the other recipes also require steel that wouldn't normally.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Landstryder (pack dev) went sort of full tilt into expert mode. Anything with a hard mode has been turned on, anything without has been adjusted to do so. 2 EIO conduits per craft (normal recipe), capacitors use full ingots, and steel instead of iron to actually craft the Machine Chassis, and some of the other recipes also require steel that wouldn't normally.

You see... this is my problem. That's not 'expert mode', that's 'resource dump' mode. It doesn't require any additional level of expertise, as it would imply. It just requires more resources and higher tier resources to make. Which is simply nothing more than grinding, and little more than a Skinner Box.

 

[Pyure]

You see... this is my problem. That's not 'expert mode', that's 'resource dump' mode. It doesn't require any additional level of expertise, as it would imply. It just requires more resources and higher tier resources to make. Which is simply nothing more than grinding, and little more than a Skinner Box.

I don't know enough about the pack in question to have an opinion, but I know that some packs, like Infitech2, could be considered resource-dump mode at a glance. But in actuality, the "expert" part comes from learning and leveraging the many various ways to de-dump the pack.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Fair enough. I'm partial to old School GT/Tech Reborn, where yes, it's lots of work and effort, but you're getting huge amounts of resources out of the effort. I mean, comparing the Industrial Grinder to say the SAG mill, and it's more expensive, and more effort to put together, but you're getting far more out. Eight diamonds in, and from one piece of iron, you get 2 iron, two small nickel and (with Tech Reborn), two small zinc. Compare the SAG mill, which requires no diamonds, but for the same iron gets 2 iron, a chance of nickel dust and a chance for a cobblestone, which I've almost never seen anyone need more of. And the iGrinder is hilariously faster. It'll chew through two iron in the time it takes even an octadic SAG Mill to do one.

@Pyure: Yeah, most packs I've found are like that. The early game is an annoying resource dump, but eventually you reach the point where you're tipping over into not having to do things manually all the time. Age of Engineering is another good example.

 

[lenscas]

Landstryder (pack dev) went sort of full tilt into expert mode. Anything with a hard mode has been turned on, anything without has been adjusted to do so. 2 EIO conduits per craft (normal recipe), capacitors use full ingots, and steel instead of iron to actually craft the Machine Chassis, and some of the other recipes also require steel that wouldn't normally.

I must say that I agree with @ShneekeyTheLost here. Yes, there is sometimes a need to increase recipe cost if automation needs to be forced (which is what the "expert" stuff probably refers to). However, these recipes need to become intresting to actually automate and automate at the point that you want to make them. Thus not crafting recipe into crafting recipe into crafting recipe but rather machine mod a into machine mod b into machine mod c. Of course these machines should be at least somewhat more interesting to automate then your standard furnace else it is the same as a basic crafting recipe.

Because of this I would say that having things cost steel instead of iron is only a resource dump rather then a step into expert mode as in most mods turning iron in steel is basically just smelting iron again. Granted some mods also require pulverized coal which help a bit into making it fun to automate but then you are still basically automating a vanilla furnace, except now one of its side is taken up by a power line and we also didn't expand our list of mods that we where using to create our item in the first place.

An example of something that may work better is to make it that fighting blazes is either really hard or even impossible. This needs to be done in such a way that farming them is still trivial, else that defeats the point.
If that is done getting blaze rods is suddenly a lot trickier but there are still ways to get the rods. One way that I know off is that you can turn 1 glowstone dust and some molten redstone into 1 blazepowder (thermal expansion) and 5 blaze powder can be turned into 1 blaze rod (Industrial craft2). This leaves us with a need of glowstone and redstone, luckily we can make a witch farm (vaniila minecraft/some mod that allow you to spawn them). There is also a way to make 2 glowstone out of 1 blaze rod, thus allowing us to be a lot less limited with glowstone needs and also adding one more mod into the mix.

Now, this all is without touching on the various ways that one could have made blazes so hard to farm that players go the above route nor the various ways that players can get around this and if a player manages to do that his game will at least when it comes to blazes be pretty normal again.