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Re: The End

#211
Flatfingers wrote:
Tue Dec 25, 2018 11:53 pm
Actually, I agree with these suggestions about the music.

I don't know what financial arrangement Josh made with Francois, but I'd guess that either the soundtrack was a work for hire and Josh now owns it, or Francois still owns it and licensed it to Josh. In either case, there could be some reasonable legal explanation for why Josh wouldn't feel that releasing the soundtrack would be appropriate.

If I'm mistaken, however, I'd sure like to be able to hear the work that Francois did.
It wouldn't qualify as a work for hire unless Francois was Josh's employee or the work fits within the exception categories (which it doesn't). I don't believe Francois was Josh's employee, so either there was a written assignment that granted ownership to Josh or it was licensed. I hope that Josh got the assignment otherwise he'd probably have to get Francois' permission to give it to people for free.
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Re: The End

#212
masseffect7 wrote:
Wed Dec 26, 2018 6:31 pm
Flatfingers wrote:
Tue Dec 25, 2018 11:53 pm
I'd guess that either the soundtrack was a work for hire and Josh now owns it, or Francois still owns it and licensed it to Josh. In either case, there could be some reasonable legal explanation for why Josh wouldn't feel that releasing the soundtrack would be appropriate.

It wouldn't qualify as a work for hire unless Francois was Josh's employee or the work fits within the exception categories (which it doesn't). I don't believe Francois was Josh's employee, so either there was a written assignment that granted ownership to Josh or it was licensed. I hope that Josh got the assignment otherwise he'd probably have to get Francois' permission to give it to people for free.

From https://definitions.uslegal.com/w/work-for-hire/ :

There are two main categories of copyrightable materials that can be considered works for hire. One category encompasses works that are prepared by employees within the scope of their employment. For example, if a software engineer employed by Microsoft writes a computer program, it is considered a work for hire and the company owns the program. The second category includes works created by independent contractors that are specially commissioned by a company. In order to be considered works for hire, such works must fall into a category specifically covered by the law, and the two parties must expressly agree in a contract that it is a work made for hire.

"If you show up to a job where somebody tells you what to do and when to do it, and for that you're rewarded with a paycheck, then your work product is classified as a work for hire and you don't own the copyright on it. Instead, it automatically becomes copyrighted in the name of the company," Michael Bertin explained in the Austin Chronicle. In the situation of independent contractors, he added, "There are two criteria for works for hire. It has to fit into one of nine specific categories, and there has to be a contract stipulating that it's a 'work for hire.' If one of those two elements is missing, then the work in question is not, repeat not, a work for hire."

The nine categories of materials eligible to be considered works for hire, as outlined in the Copyright Act, include works commissioned for use as:

  1. A contribution to a collective work
  2. A part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work or sound recording
  3. A translation
  4. A supplementary work
  5. A compilation
  6. An instructional text
  7. A test
  8. The answer material for a test
  9. An atlas
(emphases added)

I stand by the possibility, as I stated, that ownership of the music Francois wrote for the Limit Theory game (an "audiovisual work") may have been acquired by Josh as a work for hire.

Whether that is the case, or is probably the case, I have no idea and I make no such assumption. All I'm saying is that it's a valid possibility, in which case Josh is free to decide to make it available for us to hear (but it remains copyrighted by him) or not.
Post

Re: The End

#213
zircher wrote:
Mon Dec 24, 2018 2:35 pm
Basmannen wrote:
Fri Dec 14, 2018 5:22 pm
He said he was gonna clean up the code and make it presentable before open-sourcing it. That will probably take a couple of months, especially knowing that Josh is somewhat of a perfectionist.
I think it is the radio silence that drives some of us nuts. Even something minimal like "Clean-up at 17%" would be a relief.
lol, Josh spent years grinding away to satisfy peoples requests for meaningless updates on the status of the game, and now he's done with it there are still more requests for meaningless updates. Don't blame the guy if he never posts here again.
Post

Re: The End

#215
Hello Josh Parnell.

I have been a lurker here on this forum since 2015.
I really liked the videos u made and thought "what a great game this could turn into" (i was really exited.)

But not worth your health.. please do not destroy yourself over this.

I do really hope to see something u had your hands in making in the future. (i am sure it will be great if it happened.)



PS. do not be a stranger on these forums, :)
Get better, go on a long vacation or something, cya around.

Marco.
Post

Re: The End

#216
Aeneas wrote:
Tue Jan 01, 2019 6:09 am
zircher wrote:
Mon Dec 24, 2018 2:35 pm
Basmannen wrote:
Fri Dec 14, 2018 5:22 pm
He said he was gonna clean up the code and make it presentable before open-sourcing it. That will probably take a couple of months, especially knowing that Josh is somewhat of a perfectionist.
I think it is the radio silence that drives some of us nuts. Even something minimal like "Clean-up at 17%" would be a relief.
lol, Josh spent years grinding away to satisfy peoples requests for meaningless updates on the status of the game, and now he's done with it there are still more requests for meaningless updates. Don't blame the guy if he never posts here again.
He took everyone's money ($187,865) and delivered absolutely nothing. Not sure why you are surprised people are less than patient at this point, and absolutely 100% blame him. (as there is no one else to blame, and this is squarely on Josh)

The only saving grace here is that Josh at least tried, though after year 1 (or at most 2) I would have thought it was obvious he should stop trying to make his own engine, and just go with a commercially available one. Josh is an incredibly talented and smart person, he could have easily made it work. (And to the people who say this game was far to complex to work on a commercial engine, stop being ridiculous)

Instead, 6 years later, the money is gone, and we have nothing to show for it. A colossal waste of Josh's time & talent, and a waste of our money.
Post

Re: The End

#217
I don't feel I got "nothing" out of this.

I had an absolute blast getting to know people here. Heck, I contributed to a podcast for over a year, which I certainly wouldn't have done without the encouragement of Skyfligher and DWMagus from this forum.

I had some wonderful conversations, learned some things (such as that the pseudorandom number generator code I'd been using sucks :lol: ), and got to contribute a few detailed gameplay suggestions. That was fun!

Would I have liked for Josh to deliver a game, even if it wasn't everything promised in the Kickstarter? Of course.

But "nothing?" I can't agree with that.
Post

Re: The End

#218
I would have to agree with flatfingers here, I don't feel like I got nothing.
I learned to know an awesome community and met people who I now think of as friends.
I had an absolute great time theorycrafting and just chatting with the people on here.
LT Wiki | IRC | REKT Wiki
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Idiots. Idiots everywhere. ~Dr. Cha0zz
Post

Re: The End

#219
johnnyr wrote:
Tue Jan 22, 2019 10:10 am
The only saving grace here is that Josh at least tried, though after year 1 (or at most 2) I would have thought it was obvious he should stop trying to make his own engine, and just go with a commercially available one. Josh is an incredibly talented and smart person, he could have easily made it work. (And to the people who say this game was far to complex to work on a commercial engine, stop being ridiculous)
I'll stop being ridiculous if you stop being an asshat. You go first.

People who know how to write games, and smart people who have actually looked at the specific issues around all existing commercial engines, came to the conclusion that the commercial engines would not support the technical features needed for LT.
You're welcome to have a differing opinion, but since it isn't based in reality, you should keep it to yourself and stop calling competent people 'ridiculous'.
--
Mind The Gap
Post

Re: The End

#221
Ringu wrote:
Wed Jan 23, 2019 8:55 am
johnnyr wrote:
Tue Jan 22, 2019 10:10 am
The only saving grace here is that Josh at least tried, though after year 1 (or at most 2) I would have thought it was obvious he should stop trying to make his own engine, and just go with a commercially available one. Josh is an incredibly talented and smart person, he could have easily made it work. (And to the people who say this game was far to complex to work on a commercial engine, stop being ridiculous)
I'll stop being ridiculous if you stop being an asshat. You go first.

People who know how to write games, and smart people who have actually looked at the specific issues around all existing commercial engines, came to the conclusion that the commercial engines would not support the technical features needed for LT.
You're welcome to have a differing opinion, but since it isn't based in reality, you should keep it to yourself and stop calling competent people 'ridiculous'.
Even if disagreeing on the tone, I could not agree with you more on your forceful rebuttal of that user's overly harsh words against Josh. There's no need for people to be as aggressive as he has been - nothing will come out of that beside degrading the rare quality of this space - and this space is all that is really left for us. I, for one, refuse to even acknowledge or address his posts while he does not chill down enough.

On another note, let me take the opportunity you brought up to disagree with you (and others) on the Game Engine issue - which is something that I have seem a few people bring up in the last months. I am a professional programmer. I know Unreal quite a bit and Unity fairly well. The conclusion about Josh not choosing to use proven game engines depends very much on the choice of words. If someone says that LT could not be built with a proven game engine, that someone is simply plain wrong. There's no debate to that. Now, if someone questions whether or not Josh should have went that route, this is, whether or not the trade-offs would be worth the choice, then we have a debate.

Let me explain. The idea that proven commercial engines could not support the technical features needed for LT simply can't exist in the minds of anyone who has ever worked with the sources of those engines - Unreal, Amazon's Lumberjack or even CryEngine. Just google the games made or being made with them. No other than Star Citizen started using CryEngine and later moved to Amazon Lumberjack. If people really think that LT, even in its more idealistic incarnation, would be more resource-demanding in terms of graphics, AI, gameplay or multi-systems than all of the games being made with those engines, people simply do not know what they are talking about. "Oh, but procedural generation..." please stop. Procedural generation can be done with any engine whatsoever. Generating content with code can be done as far as code can be done - more or less painfully, of course. Don't get me wrong, there is no doubt about the flaws of those and other engines in what regards things that LT needed. Unreal, for instance, has very bad built-in out of the box support for mesh procedural generation because of how little (and in how bad) ways it exposes huge parts of its APIs to the end user. Also, indeed setting an environment to use custom geometry and compute shaders in Unreal is quite a pain. Unity, on the other hand, while much more amenable for procedural generation and shader based general programming out of the box, has all sorts of inefficiency issues when it comes to building open worlds or systems with too many moving parts.

Yet, one golden thing that both engines share - and which they also share with all others - is that they exist. They are not a goal. They are not a dream. They are not an intellectual challenge. They do not take 6 years to perhaps-be-finished. Would Josh have to spend a relevant amount of time learning the intricacies of a chosen engine to modify it enough so that LT could live there? Absolutely. Open source ones like Unreal and Amazon' Lumberjack allow that to extreme extents. It is ludicrous to claim that LT - or any other game - could not be done with those open game engines - whose source code, well, can be adapted to one heart's content. And now we come to the other side of the coin, which is where reasonable debate can exist: tinkering and adapting said source codes would be worth the effort? In other words, what are the trade-offs? Would the cost of changing source code to make room the needed flexibility pay-off the effort?

One will never know, since we can't go back in time to test and see. My own take has always been that yes, that would have paid off. I saw once someone here saying that Josh would have had to spend such a big amount of time learning all the needed details of those Engines that it would not be worth. What on Earth? How can someone think that modifying a game engine would ever be as hard as - much less harder - than building one from scratch? Imagine the time saved from not having to implement strings, a UI system or a physics system all from the ground up. I know, I know, what about the FPLT? Well, saving coders from having to handle the insane size of a game engine + game codebase is precisely one of the reasons why even multimillionaire companies resort to pre-made game engines. People usually say "oh, LT was too big/complex for commercial game engines". Sorry to say this, but as time proved, it is the other way around. LT was too big and complex for a custom one-dev made game engine. That is why most of the time you see tiny teams or solo devs building games with their own engines they are much simpler games than LT either in scope and/or in graphics. It's not a coincidence that Josh said in his last post that "Perhaps those who are interested in game engines will glean a thing or two from the engine, as it is a fairly solid piece of engineering, much more solid than the Lua game code". That's what he has been building for 6 years, a great space game engine and that was nearly perfectly finished.

You know, it's much nicer to indirectly think that LT was doomed all along because of its own qualities - being ambitious, big, complex. But in the end, as special and brilliant as Josh is, LT did not fail because it was too good to be true. It was plagued by the most trivial set of bad choices that plague so many game devs: feature creep, severe premature optimization, excessive time spent on making coding itself "more efficient" and above all, the legendary "building an engine not a game".
Post

Re: The End

#222
Kimny, that's an excellent piece and you're 99.999999% right - and as another professional programmer, I doff my cap to your very sensible arguments that I haven't seen many people make.

The tiny little bit that I think you didn't include is that I remember Josh looking at the engines and disregarding them because of the 'infinite universe' setup. I can't now recall the details of what about that feature broke the game engines, but it did so in a way that meant fixing it would be so substantial that the remaining parts of the game engine that would be usable would become more hindrance due to the need to be adapted, than to use the bits he already had.

You're totally right that it was all about these trade-offs, and I disagreed with many of the choices Josh made here; my vitriol to the last post was mostly because of the overly-dismissive parts "he could have EASILY made it work" (emphasis mine), and the "stop being ridiculous" - that's the tone of a 13-year-old in his bedroom who has no idea how to even start analysing a proposition.

Josh tried hard to make LT work in his original vision, not compromising on the way.

His failure was, IMO, due to the lack of a worked-through plan, and the inexperience to know what to do when things failed. Not using a game engine was a technical choice that was made after he examined the possibilities, and even if he made the wrong decision, the sheer contempt shown by someone who clearly doesn't know anything about the details, just got my goat. THE goat, I believe.
--
Mind The Gap
Post

Re: The End

#223
Ringu wrote:
Wed Jan 23, 2019 8:55 am
johnnyr wrote:
Tue Jan 22, 2019 10:10 am
The only saving grace here is that Josh at least tried, though after year 1 (or at most 2) I would have thought it was obvious he should stop trying to make his own engine, and just go with a commercially available one. Josh is an incredibly talented and smart person, he could have easily made it work. (And to the people who say this game was far to complex to work on a commercial engine, stop being ridiculous)
I'll stop being ridiculous if you stop being an asshat. You go first.

People who know how to write games, and smart people who have actually looked at the specific issues around all existing commercial engines, came to the conclusion that the commercial engines would not support the technical features needed for LT.
You're welcome to have a differing opinion, but since it isn't based in reality, you should keep it to yourself and stop calling competent people 'ridiculous'.
Lol, harboring some anger? Insults won't win you many arguments, nor friends.

Additionally, I have to chuckle at your assertion that I know nothing about game development, despite having absolutely no evidence to the contrary, other than I don't agree with your "opinion" (which by the way, is in the minority of pretty much any indie developer).

As another (and obviously much more experienced than you) developer already pointed out, the engine is mostly meaningless. He could have made it work. LT wasn't some unique snowflake - at least not in technical terms. Certainly game-play wise it could have been something special, but as a hobbyist programmer myself, I find the choice of spending 6 years on the engine alone (and not actually finishing it) it be a pretty good indicator that it was the wrong choice.

As I mentioned above, a single indie developer creating their own engine (aka reinventing the wheel) is just kind of silly. It's basically the first rule of programming - don't reinvent the wheel, especially when it's something as well-trodden as a space sim. (pretty good read here: https://blog.codinghorror.com/dont-rein ... ut-wheels/)

If you're still holding on to the belief that Josh's choice to make his own engine and stick with it, even after it became obvious it was not feasible, was the correct one - given our current situation: no Josh, no game, no development whatsoever....well, then I think we are in agreement that your reality is certainty a different one from mine.
Post

Re: The End

#225
Talvieno wrote:
Thu Jan 24, 2019 7:55 pm
(Not directed at any one person)
Guys, let's chill here, okay? There's no reason to sling insults. I think we're all in agreement about the majority of the points being made over the past week. We're on the same side. Let's stay friendly, all right?
B..but... Insults are !!FUN!!
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