Possible way out for FO/armada 2

posted on October 7th, 2011, 10:48 am

I follow the Star Wars Galaxy emulator scene, to get to the point ASAP SWG emulators in a nut shell is various teams rewriting  the server side code to allow legally owned clients to play for free the famous version of the game that SOE destroyed. it was and still is illegal to distribute and modify the client. there was always a grey legal area covering this project but it was considered completely legal as long as everyone connecting to a private sever owned the original disks, however this is about to change with the closure of SOE SWG Servers and from the 16th dec it will become open season for anyone to do what they want from now on as the DMCA will be lifted. it is a specific clause that allows this (ii) the availability for use of works for non-profit archival, preservation, and educational purposes;

now my point is could this also apply to ARMADA 2 as it is no longer in production nor supported. now could it be possible if FO was to add stock into its game this would be considered archiving or preserving and considering how widely armada was modded this could also be consider educational.

someone with more brain power than myself should look into this, it could open up the door to distributing this game freely.

posted on October 7th, 2011, 1:03 pm

This is a good point you bring up. Actually, 99% of FO stuff is already seperate from A2 anyways, we could just add those to the next mod. It would allow people with no access to the original A2 disk to play FO without any problems.

There's probably some other legal stuff we'd have to get by, but it could work. I think the devs intended to make FO completely independant of A2 by the final release, but I'm not sure how long this would take.

posted on October 7th, 2011, 2:33 pm

This is a good point you bring up. Actually, 99% of FO stuff is already seperate from A2 anyways, we could just add those to the next mod. It would allow people with no access to the original A2 disk to play FO without any problems.

There's probably some other legal stuff we'd have to get by, but it could work. I think the devs intended to make FO completely independant of A2 by the final release, but I'm not sure how long this would take.

I"m not sure it is exactly 99% because it still runs on the a2 engine.

I think a simpler option would be to make a new version that ran off the legacy improved engine and could, in addition to A2, used the legacy CD to run FO.  ST:legacy runs only like $20.

posted on October 7th, 2011, 2:55 pm

I meant textures, graphics, etc. We could probably still use the A2 engine or get a better one. I don't think we should create an entirely new one, this takes signifigant time and resources

posted on October 7th, 2011, 3:50 pm

As far as I know, it is not legal in A2's case - Activision still "supports" A2 and DMCA still covers their rights 

posted on October 7th, 2011, 11:59 pm

activision still supports a2 , wheres the new patch these last 10 years and where can i buy a retail.

posted on October 8th, 2011, 12:33 am

"support"

They just didn't gave the game up nor is the game vapoware.

And parts of the engine where used in ST:Legacy and maybe there are used somewhere else atm.
Their best selling game is still using the good old id-tech 3 (Quake 3 Engine) .

posted on October 8th, 2011, 1:01 am

Yup, it's that kind of support  In any case, it's still under their legal juridiction, so a bit of a problem

Legacy is actually quite different than A2 - it's not so easy to really call one engine a knock off from the next. Even A2 and A1 have quite different approaches to certain areas as I understand it, which make backward development difficult 

posted on October 8th, 2011, 2:50 am

Legacy is actually quite different than A2 - it's not so easy to really call one engine a knock off from the next. Even A2 and A1 have quite different approaches to certain areas as I understand it, which make backward development difficult 

Still, I think that trying to use the legacy engine would be a better option than anything else suggested.  That all requires that the devs ever want to move of ov the a2 engine, for whatever reason.

posted on October 8th, 2011, 3:26 pm

I'm not up to speed on this, but what benefits would the legacy engine have over the current A2 engine.

posted on October 8th, 2011, 3:36 pm

It could certainly handle better graphics.    more dynamic map objects, and I think directx10 support.(maybe just 9)

Unfortunately, it is very different from a2 as Legacy is a RPG style space sim, and out of box had a bunch of bugs...  However, it is developed by mad doc, so it does have a lot of similarities, and it costs a lot less than A2.  About 10 times less.

posted on October 8th, 2011, 3:50 pm

I doubt the Legacy engine could be used easily. Despite coming from a similar code base, the Legacy engine probably lacks most of the coding necessary for A2 to work. Maybe if they were both RTS type games it would work, but as they are so different, I'd say it's not viable. Probably they only things "the same" are the asset loaders since both games use similar assets (odf, sod, spr, etc.).  And Legacy at most has DX9; it was far before DX10.

posted on October 8th, 2011, 3:57 pm

But at least if they used parts of the engine they could make it so you could install FO with the legacy CD.

posted on October 8th, 2011, 4:21 pm

I believe last time somebody asked if FO was going to switch over to Legacy we got...

wheee, legacy. not over my dead body!

posted on October 8th, 2011, 4:45 pm

Wasn't there talk about getting armada II on STEAM, so that people woulden't have to pay $500 for a CD or look for legal loopholes?