BPzeBanshee wrote:I actually suspect that the people of 2ch that are working on it now are not the same ones as those who worked on it back in '04, but kept the original post info as the thread's OP for each time they have to start a new thread.
As far as I remember they lost the main programmer - presumably the guy that made the game engine - quite early in the project and afterwards another guy took it over, but everyone still involved has been with it since the beginning or at least fairly early. I thought they were around long enough to have access to the website but it may be that they didn't and never had any intention of going that out in the open, but were unable to get rid of the site.
Interesting. Sounds very counterintuitive to me though.
Why bother keeping any part of it in English if they didn't want foriegners playing the game? It seems quite odd to me. I wonder if it was the main programmer who had a more open mind about foriegners when this thing was first conceived, and if he left due to disagreements over this. I'm really just speculating at this point though - either way it seems there's not a lot that can be done to convince these guys that they're overworrying. I find it hard to believe that Cave would track any of these guys down considering it's an anonymous forum.
Udderdude wrote:It doesn't need to be a 100% rip of the other game's sprites in order to be considered stolen. For instance, you could consider the ship designs themselves to be copyrighted and not directly recreateable and cloneable.
If someone made a game with one of the XOP boss designs copied down to the last spiky thorn sticking out, I wouldn't know whether to be angry or flattered .. :p
It's actually legal to build something from the ground up using something else as a point of reference. It's worth bearing in mind though that you can be taken to court at any time over pretty much anything. Whether that legal action is successful or not is an entirely different kettle of fish.
Unless there's a trademark around a specific design, i.e Games Workshop with WH40k's Space Marines/Eldar (nerd alert!) - it becomes very hard to say for sure "That $vehicle is from $series and should not be used"
Most people tend to avoid the long winded battles and simply crumble under legal pressure so things dont go that far. It'd be interesting to see if one of us little guys would actually be prosecuted to the full extent of the jam, or whether we'd get a nod of approval from the bigger guys.
It could be that Cave actually cares about how those damn gaijin are treated and decided to put the foot down over this - though I think I have the chronology backwards for that to work.
Anyway, it's worth mentioning that even the threat of a lawsuit from the big boys is enough to sink most projects. There was Data East vs. Capcom, and I don't know the merits or decision in that actual case - but it seems that at the moment there is mostly a cease-fire in the gaming industry over the use and adaption of such ideas, which is good. But I don't see how these ideas are (besides being artistic rather than functional) especially different from the stuff that motivates a lot of litigation in the software industry - i.e. the Windows "look and feel" lawsuits (at the moment the software patents are of course wholly focused on functionality, like invention or design patents).
Overall, the game industry has been very lenient with people taking off from their works (cripes, just look at Touhou, or Machinima.
