OpenSkyscraper – an open-source clone (in progress) of SimTower
github.com
github.com
I remember the most infuriating weakness of the original game was that the speed of transportation was linked to real time, while the in-game speed would increase during the in-game night. The effect was that if there were large queues late at night, they would never empty before dawn because the elevators were moving unrealistically slowly.
I open sourced[1] the entire game shortly after securing funding for my current startup. Maybe I could donate the art to OpenSkyscraper. I really want this project to succeed :D
The issue I bring up is that the CC-BY-NC license is not open source. The issue stems from the non commercial clause which is a restriction on fields of endeavour. Now the reason why this matters is that Open Source is in fact a made up work. The group which invented it and popularized it did so with a specific definition: http://opensource.org/osd
One of the goals in inventing a new word was to have an unambiguous term to use for software which otherwise would have been called Free, as in freedom.
Now I am not saying this to force your hand. I understand you may not want to give up commercial rights, and that is fine. All I ask is that you consider releasing your hard work under one of the licenses which we as various communities have agreed are open source. You can take your pick from the OSI's list: http://opensource.org/licenses or the Free Software Foundation's list: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GPLCompatib... or even the Debian community's list: http://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/
If you pick one of those licenses your work has a chance to outlive your efforts. Your art may find its way into other games, and your game itself may find its way into linux distributions. Or it might get cloned a hundred times on the app store. =)
One more minor issue with CC licenses for code is that they are not designed for software: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#C... Thanks to edge cases you may be giving people more permissions than you intended. Or you might not be giving people a right you thought you were.
Is there some issue with asking someone to play SimTower in a VM and finding the items that way?
For example, here's a video of SimTower running on windows 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtMltxWLkaU
AFAIK this is rooted in a hardware limitation. Once you enter long mode, you lose vm86 mode. Rather than introduce software emulation to cover this case, Microsoft just said they wouldn't support it.
http://unity3d.com/company/legal/eula
In particular, pay attention to clause 2a (You are not permitted to combine content created using Unity Free with content created by Unity Pro)
2f: you may not copy or modify or use to create a competing product
3: You do not own Unity3d, only license its use
5: you consent to permit Unity to collect data on your users
and so on and so forth. Honestly I don't see the appeal of paying this company money to throw code away into a closed platform with no independent implementations.
(and yes, you do still have to pay them money if you wish to uh.. .distribute your game. to anyone. a right not included in the "free" version.)
But in any case, the app is being written in c++ which I think is a harder but better language to write games in, mainly for performance reasons. I am not familiar with libRocket, but I am curious how well it will deal with a large scene graph, whether or not it support level of detail or culling, or if you have to handle that yourself.
As for librocket, I was confused about that, so I had a look and I'm not sure that's what they are using for anything more than the UI. The framework they are using is SFML.
Isn't he opening himself up to copyright takedown by using the original game assets?
As a stop gap until they completely replace the art assets with OSS version, you can extract the originals and use them for development. That requires an original installation to coexist with the clone (read https://github.com/fabianschuiki/OpenSkyscraper#how-to-try-s... which mentions you need the SIMTOWER.EXE locally, mainly to acquire art assets).
So, you need a legit copy of SimTower to play the SimTower clone (at least until they rebuild all art assets).
OpenTTD has shipped with a complete set of base assets for quite some time, though it used to be like that.
As an aside, I don't see how needless typing is involved. s-tab will still go to the "source" folder.