You are a troll. Unless you're on a G3 with 64 MB of RAM and an ancient ultra slow drive copying to a tape drive, there's no way a 17 MB copy takes 2 minutes, just as the original 17 MB in 20 minutes thing was an urban legend spawned by some apple detractor.
One last remark - I think no one is really condoning the behavior of the medievia admins, but those who play there really like the game (muds and MMORPGs appeal to both the casual players and addictive personalities), and don't want to do anything that could disrupt that experience (I believe saying "diku" on the game is flagged for the notice of the admins, who regularly remove characters who try to talk about this issue). Which is understandable - I'm sure that a game that has been around this long has accumulated a large community (including people who have given the game $10K voluntarily, which is ok by me - which is why it was laughable and pathetic to see the admins stating that they needed $3k to replace a UPS, when they've accumulated a couple of orders of magnitude more over the years - remember, medievia is a "for profit" class S corporation). In fact, I'm certain most of the "gods" on the game are just good people who just want to make the game better, and don't really know the true story. But if you've been made aware of the sordid truth behind this game, you should really try to look into it for yourself. Ask the admins what the truth is, and ask them to respond to the allegations. Inform players about the issue, so that they can make their own decisions. Is it better to stick with a community built on a lie, rather than creating one yourself or joining one of the many others that acknowledge the people who made them possible?
Actually, while on the surface it would appear that medievia wasn't a stock Merc mud, the source analysis posted by various people indicates that most of the changes, besides the addition of new modules, like dragonlairs etc., have been source transformations like:
- straightforward conversions of C structs to C++ classes, and wrapping associated functions as methods
- renaming variables in the "hungarian" convention (heh - wonder if that's a form of obfuscation)
- removing comments which identified it as a Merc (things like comments from "Furey" a merc contributor who liberally sprinkled comments throughout the code).
- a global search and replace of the Merc and DIKU copyrights with medievia's
- various "special procedure" hacks to add out of the ordinary effects to weapons and zones, by changing things like the combat code (so you'd get things like "The fiery blade of death emits flames, striking your opponent", when you fight someone wielding a fiery blade of death).
- other combat code tweaks, but they all seem to be based on the lookup tables from Merc (to determine what chance you had to hit someone when you had some DEX or hitroll for instance)
I'm sure if you look at the architecture of the game, you'll notice that it's identical to that of Merc - it's hard to redesign a game incrementally, while cloaking it under the guise of C-C++ conversion.
There was at least one level 140 coder (mentioned on the slithytoves site, who left in disgust at this subterfuge, and confirmed all of this information, while adding a lot more. I'm sure if you're really curious you can contact him, of course the medievia admins with their "donation" funded war chest will try to intimidate you if you publish even excerpts of their code..not realizing that they're acknowledging that it *is* their modified code in the process:-)In fact, until a while ago (when the mud began to redo old zones), the game still had several stock mud zones, like the vaguely D&D based "Thalos" and "Mahn Tor". They still have a couple of zones based on AD&D modules.
Well, if it were a minor violation of some obscure clause of a license agreement, I wouldn't really mind either. But what you have here is someone who took an open source codebase (DIKU and merc), made some tweaks (remember, he started selling items in the mid 90s, when the game was pretty much a stock Merc mud, rather than with all the bells and whistles that have been tacked on now), and then claimed it was entirely his own code (which it demonstrably wasn't - as stated by former programmers, if you don't believe the excerpts that have made it out on the net). How would you feel if someone took a project that you worked on for the good of the community and released it as open source, only to have some guy take it and claim it was his own, and make money from it? In fact, Michael Seifert, a DIKU creator, stated that it was due to Vryce that he stopped working on DIKU and the many DIKU derivatives. As for your statement that "no real action has been taken against it", what would you do against if you were an impoverished Danish programmer, if some guy in the US stole your code and had the legal resources to fight you indefinitely, all based on the money he earned from *your* code? Would you bankrupt yourself? What would've happened to Linux if say some company like Lindows had come along in 1993 and started selling a product based on the kernel, violating the GPL and making it closed source, all the while stating that it was not linux (and not crediting it, like medievia) because they'd ported it to some other platform? Do you think Torvalds would've had the resources to stop them at the time?
I wonder if you're aware that medievia is based on stolen code, and that its owner has no right to sell items for money, which is a violation of the DIKU license. They used to mention the DIKU codebase upon which the mud is based in the game, but removed the credits when all of this came to light. I have no objection to someone asking for voluntary contributions sufficient to keep the game running (rather than selling powerful items under the guise of "donations"), but this guy makes a large profit from his business, and is a quite hypocritical about it too. Read this for more info.
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You are a troll. Unless you're on a G3 with 64 MB of RAM and an ancient ultra slow drive copying to a tape drive, there's no way a 17 MB copy takes 2 minutes, just as the original 17 MB in 20 minutes thing was an urban legend spawned by some apple detractor.
One last remark - I think no one is really condoning the behavior of the medievia admins, but those who play there really like the game (muds and MMORPGs appeal to both the casual players and addictive personalities), and don't want to do anything that could disrupt that experience (I believe saying "diku" on the game is flagged for the notice of the admins, who regularly remove characters who try to talk about this issue). Which is understandable - I'm sure that a game that has been around this long has accumulated a large community (including people who have given the game $10K voluntarily, which is ok by me - which is why it was laughable and pathetic to see the admins stating that they needed $3k to replace a UPS, when they've accumulated a couple of orders of magnitude more over the years - remember, medievia is a "for profit" class S corporation). In fact, I'm certain most of the "gods" on the game are just good people who just want to make the game better, and don't really know the true story. But if you've been made aware of the sordid truth behind this game, you should really try to look into it for yourself. Ask the admins what the truth is, and ask them to respond to the allegations. Inform players about the issue, so that they can make their own decisions. Is it better to stick with a community built on a lie, rather than creating one yourself or joining one of the many others that acknowledge the people who made them possible?
- straightforward conversions of C structs to C++ classes, and wrapping associated functions as methods
- renaming variables in the "hungarian" convention (heh - wonder if that's a form of obfuscation)
- removing comments which identified it as a Merc (things like comments from "Furey" a merc contributor who liberally sprinkled comments throughout the code).
- a global search and replace of the Merc and DIKU copyrights with medievia's
- various "special procedure" hacks to add out of the ordinary effects to weapons and zones, by changing things like the combat code (so you'd get things like "The fiery blade of death emits flames, striking your opponent", when you fight someone wielding a fiery blade of death).
- other combat code tweaks, but they all seem to be based on the lookup tables from Merc (to determine what chance you had to hit someone when you had some DEX or hitroll for instance)
I'm sure if you look at the architecture of the game, you'll notice that it's identical to that of Merc - it's hard to redesign a game incrementally, while cloaking it under the guise of C-C++ conversion.
There was at least one level 140 coder (mentioned on the slithytoves site, who left in disgust at this subterfuge, and confirmed all of this information, while adding a lot more. I'm sure if you're really curious you can contact him, of course the medievia admins with their "donation" funded war chest will try to intimidate you if you publish even excerpts of their code..not realizing that they're acknowledging that it *is* their modified code in the process :-)In fact, until a while ago (when the mud began to redo old zones), the game still had several stock mud zones, like the vaguely D&D based "Thalos" and "Mahn Tor". They still have a couple of zones based on AD&D modules.
Well, if it were a minor violation of some obscure clause of a license agreement, I wouldn't really mind either. But what you have here is someone who took an open source codebase (DIKU and merc), made some tweaks (remember, he started selling items in the mid 90s, when the game was pretty much a stock Merc mud, rather than with all the bells and whistles that have been tacked on now), and then claimed it was entirely his own code (which it demonstrably wasn't - as stated by former programmers, if you don't believe the excerpts that have made it out on the net). How would you feel if someone took a project that you worked on for the good of the community and released it as open source, only to have some guy take it and claim it was his own, and make money from it? In fact, Michael Seifert, a DIKU creator, stated that it was due to Vryce that he stopped working on DIKU and the many DIKU derivatives. As for your statement that "no real action has been taken against it", what would you do against if you were an impoverished Danish programmer, if some guy in the US stole your code and had the legal resources to fight you indefinitely, all based on the money he earned from *your* code? Would you bankrupt yourself? What would've happened to Linux if say some company like Lindows had come along in 1993 and started selling a product based on the kernel, violating the GPL and making it closed source, all the while stating that it was not linux (and not crediting it, like medievia) because they'd ported it to some other platform? Do you think Torvalds would've had the resources to stop them at the time?
I wonder if you're aware that medievia is based on stolen code, and that its owner has no right to sell items for money, which is a violation of the DIKU license. They used to mention the DIKU codebase upon which the mud is based in the game, but removed the credits when all of this came to light. I have no objection to someone asking for voluntary contributions sufficient to keep the game running (rather than selling powerful items under the guise of "donations"), but this guy makes a large profit from his business, and is a quite hypocritical about it too. Read this for more info.