Might I ask, what happens if your break the license?

Terrible terrible things will happen. Your post will be split from an ancient thread..... the thought police will come and chain you to a tree..... I won't like you any more.

Seriously, though, I think that the choices you make help determine who you are - your own character. I prefer to think of external accountability as a lesser state than internal accountability. Ambrosia could sue you. Other than that, there's very little, if anything, that would happen to you. You would just hurt yourself by taking something that is not yours to take. It gets easier the more you do it, and while people tend to go to great lengths to justify copyright infringement, that kind of justification seems to be pretty lame.

I'm somewhat curious here. What specifically are you referring to by "breaking the license?" Are you referring to actually hunting down a stolen serial code for the engine and utilising that, are you referring to selling games from the engine without permission from ASW, or are you referring to, say, continuing to use the engine without registering it after the thirty day trial period?

Although all three are violations of the license, they would probably be treated differently. For the first, you are breaking the law by stealing a copy of the engine, so I assume you would be open to litigation. For the second, it is much the same, as you are selling something that you don't have a legal right to sell - if I remember correctly (my CD is hiding somewhere), you are permitted to distribute freeware and shareware games without ASW's written authority, it is only commercial games that require permission and licensing - though do take that with a large grain of salt, until someone with a copy of the actual license text clarifies it, or just check the license yourself.

As to the third option, of continuing to use the engine unlicensed after the trial period - sadly, I think that if we took a survey, you'd find that the majority of users of this board nowadays fall into this category. It has been a long time since the engine has been available for sale, so anyone who has installed and extensively used the engine since that time has probably been in violation of this clause of the license text. Although this does make you techincally liable, it is hard to see whether Ambrosia would take any action upon anyone who used the engine unlicensed after the trial period when it is actually impossible for it to become licensed. I am, of course, not an Ambrosia official, but I can't see them doing anything if you keep Coldstone installed and keep playing with it unregistered. Provided, of course, that if and when it is once again available for registration, you were to purchase a valid code.

It's an interesting question.

-Andiyar

I was reffering to number 3, if ambrosia would sell cs I would buy it in an instant (even for 100$) or I would stop using the demo...

Since ASW has made it impossible to comply with the 30 day rule, and nothing changes with regard to the demo's functions at the 30 day mark, I would consider you far more angelic than most if you were to voluntarily cease using the demo.

Would it make you feel better to erase the demo from your machine (saving what work you have done) and download a new demo to use for the next 30 days?

Obviously, ASW has no intention of enforcing the license agreement in this situation because they have provided no way to meet it. If the 30 day limit was important in this unique situation, I would think that the demo version would have been removed from the downloadable list. Ask yourself, "Do they want to keep interest in Coldstone alive by making the demo available?" If you believe they do, then enjoy the demo until the registration is once more possible.

Well what happened was I bought pog, then found out about coldstone, thinking it would be the usual complicated programming device I decided to give it a try, after only one week I deleted the demo and went to the site to buy it, alas the bug had been discovered and I could not buy it, I contented myself with pog (whilst checking monthly for a bug update at ambrosiasw.com) after completly beating the game in every class with pretty much every interesting plugin I could find I wanted to make my own, I had for ages been trying to make my game (I had a pretty nice set of gfx I was working on and had bought poser) but couldn't find an effective somewhat cheap, and simple program (cept' for cs) anyways I re-downloaded the demo to make plugins, it says I have had it for *** number of days because of some cookie that wasn't deleted, technically I haven't had it installed for 30 days yet (I'm at about twenty-something)...although I plan on keeping it for more then 30 days if ambrosia doesn't fix the bug or at least sell it WITH the bug.