Given that Blizzard is using the trademarks "StarCraft" and "WarCraft" in this very specific market (realtime computer strategy games), their claim that "FreeCraft" infringes on their copyright is reasonable and very likely winnable in court.
So, no problem, just rename FreeCraft to a unique name that clearly isn't derivative of Blizzard's product. And don't be mad that they asked you to do this, because they have the right and obligation to protect their copyrights.
On the other hand, unless you've physically ripped code or content out of StarCraft or WarCraft and put it in your game, any claim that your game is "too similar" to theirs seems absurd and almost certainly has no basis in copyright or trademark law. If you ignore them on that issue, then they are almost certain to go away.
And if they don't go away nicely, the resulting outrage over their persecution of the open source community would almost certainly force them to go away ashamedly.
But if you just cave in, and you fail to stand up for your rights when presented with this sort of threat, then you are certain to lose your rights.
If a person asks you to get out of his seat, you move. If a bully asks you to give up YOUR seat, you fight.
The transition to 24-volt batteries will be complete by 2020? Aw, come on, I thought we were all supposed to have hovercars by then. Why can't Moore's law apply to automobiles?
Regarding documentation, check out the Unreal Developer Network for a huge amount of documentation.
Also, the 3D Buzz team has created many excellent training videos covering many aspects of the Unreal tech, from programming to content creation.
>> Ultimately, the developer of such a mod should be fairly compensated based on the popularity and ultimately, the sales, of their mod, not a one-time payout.
The mod developer keeps complete ownership of his work. The contest doesn't take that away.
For example, if you enter an early version of your mod in the contest, you could later create a retail game based on it and pursue a publishing deal. The Tactical Ops mod for the original Unreal Tournament went this route and was published in retail by Atari.
Regarding tax issues, one should definitely consult a tax attourney upon making the finals for the grand prize. My understanding (IANAL) is that, if we gave you a $350K cash prize, that would be revenue for your mod team's corporation or small business. If you then spent that $350K on an Unreal engine license with the intent of using it commercially (which is the only reason one would want such a license), you would then incur a $350K expense, leaving a net tax liability of zero. So a direct award of an engine license is not necessarily a taxable event.
If you're running a 3D-accelerated PC game or modelling application, the majority of your computer's FLOPS are already consumed by a non Von Neumann computing device.
For better or worse, most of the PlayStation2's computing power is locked up in a non Von Neumann architecture.
So the evolution of computing to non Von Neuman architectures isn't so much news as a gradual shift that began about 5 years ago with 3dfx, and is really starting to happen large-scale right now.
The justification for FPGA's in consumer computing devices could be seen as a generalization of the rationale behind 3D accelerators: they bring you the ability to get a 10X-100X speedup in certain key pieces of code that are inherently very parallel and have very predictable memory access patterns.
I think the timeframe for mainstream FPGA style devices is quite far off, though. They need to evolve a lot before they'll be able to beat the combination of a Von Neumann CPU augumented with several usage-specific non Von Neumann coprocessors (the GPU, hardware TCP/IP acceleration, hardware sound...)
Here are the major issues:
- You'll need a lot more local memory than these devices have now -- there is a very limited set of useful stuff you can compute given a 32K buffer (a la PS2) and significant setup overhead.
- The big lesson from CPU's (and I expect from GPU's in the next few years) is that things REALLY flourish once you have virtualization of all resources, with a cache hierarchy extending from registers to L1 to L2 to DRAM to hard disk. For virtualization to make sense with FPGA's, Star Bridge's quoted reprogram times (40 msec) would need to improve by about 10,000X. Without this, you can really only run one task at a time, and that task can only have a fixed number of modules that use the FPGA.
Even then, it's not clear whether the FPGA's will be able to compete with massively parallel CPU's. In 3 more process generations, you should be able to put 8 Pentium 4 class CPU's on a chip, each running at over 10 GHz, at the same cost as current.13 micron CPU. Such a system would be VERY easy to program, a couple orders of magnitude more so than an FPGA. So even though it wouldn't have as much theoretical computing power as an FPGA, massively parallel CPU's are likely to win out because they have the best cost/performance when you factor in development cost.
Intel's claims are wholly out of touch with reality.
On a daily basis we're running into the Windows 2GB barrier with our next-generation content development and preprocessing tools.
If cost-effective, backwards-compatible 64-bit CPU's were available today, we'd buy them today. We need them today. It looks like we'll get them in April.
Any claim that "4GB is enough" or that address windowing extensions are a viable solution are just plain nuts. Do people really think programmers will re-adopt early 1990's bank-swapping technology?
Many of these upcoming Opteron motherboards have 16 DIMM slots; you can fill them with 8GB of RAM for $800 at today's pricewatch.com prices. This platform is going to be a godsend for anybody running serious workstation apps. It will beat other 64-bit workstation platforms (SPARC/PA-RISC/Itanium) in price/performance by a factor of 4X or more. The days of $4000 workstation and server CPU's are over, and those of $1000 CPU's are numbered.
Regarding this "far off" application compatibility, we've been running the 64-bit SuSE Linux distribution on Hammer for over 3 months. We're going to ship the 64-bit version of UT2003 at or before the consumer Athlon64 launch. And our next-generation engine won't just support 64-bit, but will basically REQUIRE it on the content-authoring side.
We tell Intel this all the time, begging and pleading for a cost-effective 64-bit desktop solution. Intel should be listening to customers and taking the leadership role on the 64-bit desktop transition, not making these ridiculous "end of the decade" statements to the press.
If the aim of this PR strategy is to protect the non-existant market for $4000 Itaniums from the soon-to-be massive market for cost-effective desktop 64-bit, it will fail very quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that Blizzard is using the trademarks "StarCraft" and "WarCraft" in this very specific market (realtime computer strategy games), their claim that "FreeCraft" infringes on their copyright is reasonable and very likely winnable in court.
So, no problem, just rename FreeCraft to a unique name that clearly isn't derivative of Blizzard's product. And don't be mad that they asked you to do this, because they have the right and obligation to protect their copyrights.
On the other hand, unless you've physically ripped code or content out of StarCraft or WarCraft and put it in your game, any claim that your game is "too similar" to theirs seems absurd and almost certainly has no basis in copyright or trademark law. If you ignore them on that issue, then they are almost certain to go away.
And if they don't go away nicely, the resulting outrage over their persecution of the open source community would almost certainly force them to go away ashamedly.
But if you just cave in, and you fail to stand up for your rights when presented with this sort of threat, then you are certain to lose your rights.
If a person asks you to get out of his seat, you move. If a bully asks you to give up YOUR seat, you fight.
The transition to 24-volt batteries will be complete by 2020? Aw, come on, I thought we were all supposed to have hovercars by then. Why can't Moore's law apply to automobiles?
Regarding documentation, check out the Unreal Developer Network for a huge amount of documentation.
Also, the 3D Buzz team has created many excellent training videos covering many aspects of the Unreal tech, from programming to content creation.
>> Ultimately, the developer of such a mod should be fairly compensated based on the popularity and ultimately, the sales, of their mod, not a one-time payout.
The mod developer keeps complete ownership of his work. The contest doesn't take that away.
For example, if you enter an early version of your mod in the contest, you could later create a retail game based on it and pursue a publishing deal. The Tactical Ops mod for the original Unreal Tournament went this route and was published in retail by Atari.
Regarding tax issues, one should definitely consult a tax attourney upon making the finals for the grand prize. My understanding (IANAL) is that, if we gave you a $350K cash prize, that would be revenue for your mod team's corporation or small business. If you then spent that $350K on an Unreal engine license with the intent of using it commercially (which is the only reason one would want such a license), you would then incur a $350K expense, leaving a net tax liability of zero. So a direct award of an engine license is not necessarily a taxable event.
If you're running a 3D-accelerated PC game or modelling application, the majority of your computer's FLOPS are already consumed by a non Von Neumann computing device.
.13 micron CPU. Such a system would be VERY easy to program, a couple orders of magnitude more so than an FPGA. So even though it wouldn't have as much theoretical computing power as an FPGA, massively parallel CPU's are likely to win out because they have the best cost/performance when you factor in development cost.
For better or worse, most of the PlayStation2's computing power is locked up in a non Von Neumann architecture.
So the evolution of computing to non Von Neuman architectures isn't so much news as a gradual shift that began about 5 years ago with 3dfx, and is really starting to happen large-scale right now.
The justification for FPGA's in consumer computing devices could be seen as a generalization of the rationale behind 3D accelerators: they bring you the ability to get a 10X-100X speedup in certain key pieces of code that are inherently very parallel and have very predictable memory access patterns.
I think the timeframe for mainstream FPGA style devices is quite far off, though. They need to evolve a lot before they'll be able to beat the combination of a Von Neumann CPU augumented with several usage-specific non Von Neumann coprocessors (the GPU, hardware TCP/IP acceleration, hardware sound...)
Here are the major issues:
- You'll need a lot more local memory than these devices have now -- there is a very limited set of useful stuff you can compute given a 32K buffer (a la PS2) and significant setup overhead.
- The big lesson from CPU's (and I expect from GPU's in the next few years) is that things REALLY flourish once you have virtualization of all resources, with a cache hierarchy extending from registers to L1 to L2 to DRAM to hard disk. For virtualization to make sense with FPGA's, Star Bridge's quoted reprogram times (40 msec) would need to improve by about 10,000X. Without this, you can really only run one task at a time, and that task can only have a fixed number of modules that use the FPGA.
Even then, it's not clear whether the FPGA's will be able to compete with massively parallel CPU's. In 3 more process generations, you should be able to put 8 Pentium 4 class CPU's on a chip, each running at over 10 GHz, at the same cost as current
Intel's claims are wholly out of touch with reality.
On a daily basis we're running into the Windows 2GB barrier with our next-generation content development and preprocessing tools.
If cost-effective, backwards-compatible 64-bit CPU's were available today, we'd buy them today. We need them today. It looks like we'll get them in April.
Any claim that "4GB is enough" or that address windowing extensions are a viable solution are just plain nuts. Do people really think programmers will re-adopt early 1990's bank-swapping technology?
Many of these upcoming Opteron motherboards have 16 DIMM slots; you can fill them with 8GB of RAM for $800 at today's pricewatch.com prices. This platform is going to be a godsend for anybody running serious workstation apps. It will beat other 64-bit workstation platforms (SPARC/PA-RISC/Itanium) in price/performance by a factor of 4X or more. The days of $4000 workstation and server CPU's are over, and those of $1000 CPU's are numbered.
Regarding this "far off" application compatibility, we've been running the 64-bit SuSE Linux distribution on Hammer for over 3 months. We're going to ship the 64-bit version of UT2003 at or before the consumer Athlon64 launch. And our next-generation engine won't just support 64-bit, but will basically REQUIRE it on the content-authoring side.
We tell Intel this all the time, begging and pleading for a cost-effective 64-bit desktop solution. Intel should be listening to customers and taking the leadership role on the 64-bit desktop transition, not making these ridiculous "end of the decade" statements to the press.
If the aim of this PR strategy is to protect the non-existant market for $4000 Itaniums from the soon-to-be massive market for cost-effective desktop 64-bit, it will fail very quickly.
-Tim Sweeney, Epic Games