In a recent thread, Martin Turner of 'Frozen Heart' fame mentioned some of the great EV plugins: Angels of Vengeance, Eye of Orion, Clavius and Beyond, Battle Velocity, Pale, EVGE. On the EVO side, Beyond the Crescent immediately comes to mind as well.

Personally, I never played many plugins, but my curiosity is piqued enough that I'm considering it (though, I vaguely remember Pale. Didn't it feature banking ship graphics?). I still have both EV and EVO installed on my home computer, but the idea of porting them for use with Nova is appealing.

Enter the ethical question: I see no problem with someone porting a plugin for their own use, but what if, after porting it, they wanted to make it available for the wider public? Some of these plugin developers may or may not still be around; they may be unreachable, so getting permission may not be possible.

So, what is the verdict? Provide the port, once finished and tested, to the public, or sit on it and use it for one's own entertainment? A related question would be: where would one put such a port? EVN addons? EV/EVO addons? If EVN, has a standard way of designating a plugin as being a port for use with EV/EVO for Nova bee worked out?

-STH

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Quote

Originally posted by seant:
**In a recent thread, Martin Turner of 'Frozen Heart' fame mentioned some of the great EV plugins: Angels of Vengeance, Eye of Orion, Clavius and Beyond, Battle Velocity, Pale, EVGE. On the EVO side, Beyond the Crescent immediately comes to mind as well.

Personally, I never played many plugins, but my curiosity is piqued enough that I'm considering it (though, I vaguely remember Pale. Didn't it feature banking ship graphics?). I still have both EV and EVO installed on my home computer, but the idea of porting them for use with Nova is appealing.

Enter the ethical question: I see no problem with someone porting a plugin for their own use, but what if, after porting it, they wanted to make it available for the wider public? Some of these plugin developers may or may not still be around; they may be unreachable, so getting permission may not be possible.

So, what is the verdict? Provide the port, once finished and tested, to the public, or sit on it and use it for one's own entertainment? A related question would be: where would one put such a port? EVN addons? EV/EVO addons? If EVN, has a standard way of designating a plugin as being a port for use with EV/EVO for Nova bee worked out?

-STH

**

The important thing is that if you do port a plug to Nova, that you don't take credit for anything other than the port, and that all of the creative credit goes to the original creator.

Matrix

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I think it would be important to at least try to contact the author before porting. I know many of the creators of those plugs have drifted out of the community, so it might be hard, but should any of them come back and see their masterpiece ported to the newest engine...well, a couple things might happen. Personally and hypothetically, if I were in such a situation, I would appreciate the respect and dedication others have with my work, enough to feel a personal obligation to ensure it gets a wider audience again. Especially if I noticed that this new "Nova" thing is also out for Windows. The word "flattery" comes to mind, and I think my day would be more than made.

Supposing I then discover that the port is poorly done, buggy, or some names, storylines, or other things were changed by the porter. As you can imagine, it'd spoil my initial glee. I don't think you're planning on taking it that route, but it's certainly possible.

So, as long as you treat the works with the utmost respect and attention to detail (in combination with what what_is_the_matrix said), I don't see much of an ethics problem. You may find that, even with a careful and loving port, the author finds out and wants to quash distribution. Again, I am confident you appreciate it is completely their call to do that, unless you want to be a jerk and try and claim it as public domain or something. You don't make friends arguing underhanded legality tactics.

Pale, as I recall, was one of the first plugs with all 3/4-view sprites, which later became the standard. There were no banking ships.

Many of these are based off the EV story, so you'd have to be using a ported EV default scenario with your port on top. Granted, that isn't particularly complicated, but people who are chekcing it out for the first time and not out of nostalgia are less likely to install something to install something else to install something else. Just something to think about.

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Also, bear in mind that many people don't want other people porting their work... Martin Turner, for instance, has repeatedly said he doesn't want anyone touching "Frozen Heart" or "Femme Fatale," and I doubt anyone would ever get approval from Kris Hauser regarding his Star Wars plugs.

I think it's really in your best interest to always attempt contacting the original creator first, and, failing that, get a feel from the overall community on each potential port individually.

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A case in point. I have ported Empire:War Without End to EVO (as well as Angels of Vengance for that matter) for my own use. I contacted Tim Isles about Empire and he seemed quite happy for me to put it out (subtly questioned why I would want to do it but that is another discussion :)). I have a few final things to do and will run it past him for a final OK and then put it up on the EVO boards. The process was quite painless.

The only point to make would be that the important thing is porting the underlying scenario - you have to understand the underlying scenario and how it is ported so you can make identical changes in the plug-in. For example, between EV and EVO there was a change in the way seeker missiles were handled. When I ported the EV scenario to EVO I made an arbitrary choice that missiles would be affected by Type II jamming and thus, that the missile jammer would jam Type II. I then had to make sure that all the guided missiles in Empire were affected by Type II jamming. Similar issues would apply to any port of EV or EVO plug-ins to EVN.

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Quote

Originally posted by UncleTwitchy:
Also, bear in mind that many people don't want other people porting their work... Martin Turner, for instance, has repeatedly said he doesn't want anyone touching "Frozen Heart" or "Femme Fatale,"

I wonder why? I mean, I, for example, don't give a flying rat's how people muck with Nova.

Dave @ ATMOS

Quote

Originally posted by pipeline:
**

Quote

Originally posted by UncleTwitchy:
Also, bear in mind that many people don't want other people porting their work... Martin Turner, for instance, has repeatedly said he doesn't want anyone touching "Frozen Heart" or "Femme Fatale,"

I wonder why? I mean, I, for example, don't give a flying rat's how people muck with Nova.

Dave @ ATMOS**

Nova and Frozen Heart are quite different kinds of things.
FH was free, but I've protected the copyright including the integrity of the work quite vigorously.
Nova is commercial, and one of the benefits of registering is that you can make plugins which, by definition, change the Nova universe.
Also, and please don't allow me to put words into your mouth, if I remember some of your original posts about Nova, you had a very definite intention of making a landmark plugin which would put Atmos on the map.
Frozen Heart was never intended to be a landmark of any kind - I just had a story I wanted to tell, as much in the EV universe as I could and only changing enough to make my story work. When EVO came out, suddenly I had to include all the EV stuff if I wanted it to work, because my universe was very different from the EVO universe. Of course, I didn't have copyright permission to do this, so I made my own landing pics, spob pics, ship and outfit pics using free software which I'd picked up on the covers of magazines. I didn't really tell anyone I was making it, apart from a handful of beta-testers. The first piece of feedback I got was 'you shouldn't introduce the tachyonic ship, because it's too powerful'. However, it was the essential part of the story I wanted to tell, so I put gameplay second and story first. Of course, I then had to work hard to include some almost impossible pilot challenges, and that added ultimately to the cult status of the plugin.
Frozen Heart was released without a great deal of fanfare, and immediately incited long strings on the web-boards of people who said they hated it (although it turned out that most of them hadn't actually downloaded it yet, but were just afraid that it would stop people playing the plugin they were writing). I also got hundreds of emails from people telling me either i) they'd found a bug and were going to release a fix to stop two planets appearing in the same place or ii) they'd done new graphics and were going to release them or iii) they were writing their own plugin and were going to use my graphics or iv) they would like to develop a new plugin with me.
Because FH had not 'official' status, I had to decide very quickly what to do with this, before the detractors and the erronneous bug-fixers and the graphic-borrowers had watered down my vision so much that there was nothing of my story left.
My decision then - which made me very unpopular at the time, but which I think ultimately enabled FH to be successful enough to release Femme Fatale - was to fix all genuine bugs identified and issue releases immediately, vigorously defend my artistic decisions, especially from people who said 'I haven't played it but I think the idea of xyz is lame', respond to the erronneous bug-fixers and graphic-borrowers to defend my copyright, and to work with a select number of people who wanted to make FH plugins that matched my vision.

In fact there were four or five people who I agreed could make FH plugins - but at least fifty who I turned down. For example, anyone who said they wanted to make a plugin about aliens for FH I turned down, because the whole mystery of aliens in FH is that they vanished from our part of space fifty-thousand years ago. I wanted to retain the mystery which I personally enjoyed so much when I was an archaeology student. Likewise, I turned down people who wanted to write Magellan and Rigellian side-strings. I suppose if I got an email from someone who lives in a totalitarian state, or has done, and wanted to write strings, I would be interested. Again, people who wanted to continue the Lars-Alana-Mordillo personal stories I turned down, because I have a very distinct idea of how those relationships ultimately develop. Finally, I turned down requests from people who I thought wouldn't sustain the quality of writing, which is the basis of Frozen Heart.

I suppose I might as well reveal at this time that I am 90% complete on Frozen Heart 2 for Nova (but don't hold your breath because the last 10% takes far more time than the first 50%). Assuming that I do release it (no promises), most of the ship graphics will have changed in style, and the overall quality of graphics will be much higher (remember that FH was done on StrataVision 4, and, in any case, everything had to be 8-bit). To me, the writing came first - especially the characters and the relationships. I was much more interested in the relationship between the player and Katherine than I was in how good the Orion class ship looked. I was also interested in the emotional response of the player - to refugees, victims of sex-traffickers, victims of war - all the things that I respond emotionally to when I meet them and work with them. Beyond that, my next concern was to make the game challenging to play - with puzzles, missions that were only 'just' possible, tricks, traps and unexpected encounters.

The good news is that the things I cared most about really don't change under the new engine. The bad news is that bringing everything else into the world of 16-bit 2003-era graphics is a big undertaking.

I have to say I am in two minds about whether I'll release it. Currently it's knocking on 48 megabytes. Is there seriously anyone out there who wants to download a 48 megabyte plugin?

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Quote

Originally posted by Martin Turner:
**I have to say I am in two minds about whether I'll release it. Currently it's knocking on 48 megabytes. Is there seriously anyone out there who wants to download a 48 megabyte plugin?

**

Hey, not wanting to sound lame or cliched or anything but I'd dowlnoad anything by the plugin-making god himself!

-Starbridge42

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Same here.

On the topic, I think if you can not find the maker of plug-in you intend to port, then you should not port it.

But hey, morals are up to you. In the end it's just a mater of if you can live with your self, or not.

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Quote

Originally posted by Martin Turner:
I have to say I am in two minds about whether I'll release it. Currently it's knocking on 48 megabytes. Is there seriously anyone out there who wants to download a 48 megabyte plugin?

Considering that, stuffed, the second alpha build of Starfleet Adventures is 89MB -- and I still have graphics and storyline missions to make -- and I have people offering me money to beta test it (okay, that's a slight exaggeration, but not too far from the truth), and given the growing increase of DSL, cable modem, and T1 line access that's out there, I'd say that, yes, the odds are a large number of people are more than happy to download a large plug.

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Quote

Originally posted by Martin Turner:
**...
I have to say I am in two minds about whether I'll release it. Currently it's knocking on 48 megabytes. Is there seriously anyone out there who wants to download a 48 megabyte plugin?
**

Martin, in the old era the game itself was 5-6 MB to download, and so was Frozen Heart - I for one had no problem in downloading FH.

In the present era, EV Nova is a 75 MB download. I think only a few will be detered by a plugin that size.

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I hope that a future EV Nova will hold the gövt-switch set expression, working like Wxxxyyy: hereby treat and let behave what belongs to gövt xxx as if it belonged to gövt yyy. This is the small tool we lack to build a believable scenario without unrelaistic amounts of resources and work.

Broadband has also gotten more prevalent over the past few years, so I would think that would make less people balk at a file that size. I'm a sucker for good graphics, so (usually) I love the larger plugs where a lot of attention has been made there (New Horizons, Pale).

As stated above, feel free to port anything you want for your own personal use. But, distribute them only if you can get in contact with the plug's creators.

Quote

Originally posted by Engla:
**
in the old era

**

Ow. Does that make me feel old, or what?

Seriously, on topic. As an inactive plugmaker (released a tiny thing called CompWars a billion and two years ago that nobody remembers :)) I have nothing to contribute.

As a gamer/consumer, though, I have to agree that 75MB (or 89MB, or 48MB) isn't the wild and unconscionable download it once was. Computers are faster, connections are more stable, and a given 56k modem can handle (because of this) more data than before. Add in programs like iGetter or browsers that support interruptable downloading, and large plug sizes are no longer the issue they once were.

(Just adding a deeper insight into that old era/new era thing).

Anyway, that said, if I had to choose between story and graphics, I'd choose storyline over graphics anytime. Not that I have anything against graphics - it's just that graphics alone should not be what supports a plug. (Hey, I know Phantom Menace wasn't a plug, but it's a good example of storyline vs. graphics going badly wrong.)

So, yeah. Gimme a yell when FH2, SFA, and all them other wonderful plugs get done...I'll play 'em. Maybe not 20 hours a day (can't get away with that anymore :)), but I'll play 'em.

Even more on topic: regarding the ethics? Find the creator. IF you can't find him, then it's a judgement call. See if the Readme has an "All rights reserved" caveat in it. If it does, it's a stickier situation if the creator ever decides to go for your throat.

Cheers,
Guapo

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(This message has been edited by ElGuapo7 (edited 09-19-2003).)

Quote

Originally posted by Martin Turner:
**
I have to say I am in two minds about whether I'll release it. Currently it's knocking on 48 megabytes. Is there seriously anyone out there who wants to download a 48 megabyte plugin?

**

I'm on a 56k, and I'll definately download it. I downloaded both Nova and Polycon. Sure it will take a while, but it'll be worth the wait. Considering quite alot of people are on broadband now, I think you will get many, many people willing to download your plug.

To UncleTwitchy: 89 MB's! Wow, I'll need some strong coffee and a free night to get all that downloaded.

Edit: Oh yeah, the topic. I don't think that anyone should port any other persons plug-in without there permission. Chances are they'll be OK with it, but you really should get their permission anyway, just in case.

(This message has been edited by TheRedeemer (edited 09-19-2003).)

Or I could just bring it round to your house on a CD.

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(quote)Originally posted by ElGuapo7:
**Ow. Does that make me feel old, or what?:) If it's good, and it will be, then people will find ways to download it.
On the subject of ethics-contact first, then port.

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**

Quote

Originally posted by macmaxbh:
**
I remember that plug-- I played it for a little bit and I found it strange.

**

Well, that was the idea, so I suppose it was a success, eh?

Guapo

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Quote

Originally posted by Martin Turner:
-snip-
(/B)

One thing you have to understand Martin is that some people are incapable of understanding how higer thinking and experiences, especially those real one's reflected in you work, can be more enjoyable than any gaming challenge available. I think that FH and FF were two of, if not the two best plugs that have ever been made for the EV series. Mainly this was due to the unique, plot driven gameplay. It wasn't about getting the cash and the skill to work your way up to big combat missions, it was about exploring the mind, experiences and the life of a future archaeologist. Frankly it was the most compelling EV experience ever, I spent a good part of a night finishing it with a friend.

And frankly it'd be nice to try it again with nova. You should consider porting it, with the explicit details of your copyright and FAQ's about "can I make a plug for it" and everything to try to cut down some of that useless mail you were talking about. Explain in the readme that it isn't about the story of races, governments or planets... Explain the real meaning, and that a rigellian storyline wouldn't work. And all that stuff, but damn it'd be a harsh thing if you deprived all the new EV fans that have come along with EVN of your plug... It's great, it obviously took a lot of effort, share it around, make the effort worthwhile. Glad to hear about the sequel coming up too... I don't care about the download, it'll be worth it (even on 56K)...

Just had a great idea for a plug in. Similar idea to FH's storyline and exploration of a character concept, but utilising the multiple personality choosing ability... I suppose it would be like getting different perspectives in a single universe. Maybe a poor guy who's family was opressed by the government, and the son of a government minister or something... just a couple of interesting stories to follow. I suppose it'd be like getting a choice between Jasta Hela and Lars Sorenson...

Keep up the good work martin, your stuff is the best, despite what anyone says. Any intelligent person can see you have a gift.

~A~

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"How can I make it go faster?" -Me-

Quote

Originally posted by Martin Turner:
**Or I could just bring it round to your house on a CD.

**

True, but I was using it as an example to make the point about how even 56k users would still want to download it.

Fair point.

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