[Hendricks266]

If M210 remains in Russia then he would be basically immune from any USA legal reprisal. Usually, it takes some effort to lure the worst-of-the-worst criminals to "vacation" at a place with an extradition treaty so we can nab them. However, that's something you would see for botnet operators and smuggling operations, not a little bit of copyright infringement.

Any site based in the US or a location with US-friendly treaties that redistributes BloodGDX is at risk though.

[icecoldduke]

Hendricks266, on 20 July 2017 - 03:39 PM, said:

If M210 remains in Russia then he would be basically immune from any USA legal reprisal. Usually, it takes some effort to lure the worst-of-the-worst criminals to "vacation" at a place with an extradition treaty so we can nab them. However, that's something you would see for botnet operators and smuggling operations, not a little bit of copyright infringement.

Any site based in the US or a location with US-friendly treaties that redistributes BloodGDX is at risk though.

This is 100% correct.

[Hendricks266]

Devon, on 20 July 2017 - 03:15 PM, said:

Damn can we stop this legal shit storm flood already?

My port will sidestep the legal issue entirely, while achieving 100% accuracy from the start--of any version of Blood you choose.

[icecoldduke]

Hendricks266, on 20 July 2017 - 03:44 PM, said:

My port will sidestep the legal issue entirely, while achieving 100% accuracy from the start--of any version of Blood you choose.

I assume your creating a dosbox wrapper of some kind that hooks build function calls and routes that shit over to eduke32?

[Hendricks266]

I've already talked as much as I'm going to about the technical details in Psycho87's BloodBox thread.

Any use of DOSBox is a legal impossibility.

[icecoldduke]

Hendricks266, on 20 July 2017 - 03:46 PM, said:

I've already talked as much as I'm going to about the technical details in Psycho87's BloodBox thread.

Any use of DOSBox is a legal impossibility.

Look forward to seeing what you come up with .

[Jim]

icecoldduke, on 20 July 2017 - 03:45 PM, said:

I assume your creating a dosbox wrapper of some kind that hooks build function calls and routes that shit over to eduke32?

Can you really do much with that methods tho? Like even fix the diffculty bug?

[Hendricks266]

Making modifications will be harder but still doable.

[Jim]

J432, on 20 July 2017 - 11:46 AM, said:

Well, that "someone" is almost always you with some little support from Hendricks266. Problem is that you are repeating the same things so this discussion runs in circles.

Icecoldduke's criticisms are purely technical, I don't see him making personal attacks or insults. There is no problem with healthy technical discussions.

[Zaxx]

Hendricks266, on 20 July 2017 - 10:30 AM, said:

You are incredibly wrong. Take a moment to sit your ass down and quit talking about things you know nothing about.

Oh yeah, sure. Guess it's useless to argue with random people on the internet when all you get in return is insults and stuff that you did not even say gets put in your mouth.

For example if I mean the act of reverse engineering being legal in most cases you instantly think about the distribution of reverse engineered code being legal which I never, ever said to be the case. What is the aim of reverse engineering? Usually to research and to gain knowledge. Now if hypothetically speaking we look at BloodGDX as a Java-based source port of Blood achieved through reverse engineering (which according to other comments is not the case but it will serve nicely as an example) a certain amount of questions come to mind if we're talking about copyright infringement.

Developing software from the knowledge gained from reverse engineering and making said software available does NOT equal "distributing" reverse engineered code (and well, BloodGDX is not open source so there is no source code to distribute), it's just new software and "how much new" that software is will decide if it's infringing the original software's copyright. Can it be considered transformative work for example? If it can then you're not infringing copyright because of the fair use doctrine.

The point is that a situation like this is not as simple as you make it out to be. I provided my "incredibly wrong" arguments to gather information so I could make up my own mind on just how much trouble a project like BloodGDX may face, mainly because I'm interested in the topic. But hey, call me an idiot three more times, I'm sure that will evolve the conversation further.

[Jimmy]

icecoldduke, on 20 July 2017 - 03:38 PM, said:

If he was state side, he would be playing with fire.

I bet he wouldn't be. He'd get a C&D at most. And even then, its probably a bluff.

[kimec]

Let me recap the facts.

* Regarding the development of BloodGDX

M210 used a) reverse engineering of the blood binary, b ) realtime java debugging, c) blood alpha source code (as a reference?) and d) EDuke source code to write BloodGDX.

As for a) to c), my understanding is that M210 himself sort of confirmed these points on this forum and/or this thread.

As for d), Hendrics266 recently wrote on this thread that he and TerminX "checked" BloodGDX for symbol names originating from EDuke. I guess they either decompiled BloodGDX class files or searched for symbol names in class files (since they are stored in UTF-8) without decompilation.

If M210 indeed used GPL licensed code from EDuke, it means the whole of BloodGDX may need to be released under GPL since it could be treated as a derivative work. That being said, I would say that even EDuke licensing is kinda murky, because one could argue that BUILDLIC is incompatible with GNU GPL in the first place. If you throw in portions of illegal blood alpha source either verbatim or with minor modifications, the situation gets even more complicated. I think we are sailing through some shit storm, captain.

Honestly, I think Blood does deserve properly licensed (copyleft?) open source clean room (re)implementation of the game hosted on GitHub, so that it will never be lost again. However, obfuscation of the compiled java byte code does not really solve any of the problems outlined above. It just makes the proving part of the technicalities a bit harder, but since all is already mentioned on this publicly readable forum in plain English language, I fail to see why would you even need to do the proving part.

* Regarding the implementation of BloodGDX

I get the anti-Java sentiment, but its unsubstantiated. There is a 3D game written in Java which is by an order of magnitude more popular and thus more battle tested than EDuke32 will ever be simply because of the sheer size of the community playing it and (((suprise))) it's called Minecraft.
No matter how many times you'll slap BUILD engine with shaders or HRPs, it will never look as good as DooM 5. There is no parallel reality in which there is a "down the road plan" for EDuke to reach DooM 5 visuals, so for the purpose of reviving Blood, Java is as good as any other language. From the technical point of view, yes, you have (almost) no stack allocated structures or heap allocated continuous segments of structures, but in the context of Blood (teh game), the impact of this is zero to nil (as proved by Quake2 port to Java). You can pretty much factor out the whole "anti Java sentiment" and forget about it. In the end, the Java portion of the game will be JITed, loops unrolled and methods aggressively inlined. I guess the biggest bottleneck is calling OpenGL through JNI and availability of the platform dependent Java OpenGL bindings.

[Hendricks266]

Zaxx, on 20 July 2017 - 04:01 PM, said:

Developing software from the knowledge gained from reverse engineering and making said software available does NOT equal "distributing" reverse engineered code (and well, BloodGDX is not open source so there is no source code to distribute), it's just new software and "how much new" that software is will decide if it's infringing the original software's copyright. Can it be considered transformative work for example? If it can then you're not infringing copyright because of the fair use doctrine.

This statement is so misinformed I have a hard time believing that you're legitimately trying to argue against me. Your claim about "using knowledge" is a fairy tale at best. Let me tell you how this works:

1. M210 loads blood.exe into IDA Pro.
2. IDA Pro outputs assembly code, or the Hex-Rays plugin outputs C.
3. M210 fixes it up to compile as Java.

This is unequivocally copyright infringement.

kimec, on 20 July 2017 - 04:20 PM, said:

If M210 indeed used GPL licensed code from EDuke, it means the whole of BloodGDX may need to be released under GPL since it could be treated as a derivative work.

There is no need for a Blood port to use the GPL code from Duke 3D. But, M210 is still bound by BUILDLIC.

kimec, on 20 July 2017 - 04:20 PM, said:

There is a 3D game written in Java which is by an order of magnitude more popular and thus more battle tested than EDuke32 will ever be simply because of the sheer size of the community playing it and (((suprise))) it's called Minecraft.

After Microsoft acquired Minecraft, they rewrote it in C++. Your argument is invalid.

[Hawke]

Hendricks266, on 20 July 2017 - 03:44 PM, said:

My port will sidestep the legal issue entirely, while achieving 100% accuracy from the start--of any version of Blood you choose.

This is something I very much look forward to.

[Zaxx]

Hendricks266, on 20 July 2017 - 04:31 PM, said:

This statement is so misinformed I have a hard time believing that you're legitimately trying to argue against me.

Oookay, stopped reading there. Guess I'll just stop arguing and patiently wait for your revolutionary port that you've been talking about for one and a half year now without anything to show for it. I'm sure it will be great to play your port along with BloodXL and BloodEX.

[Hendricks266]

Zaxx, on 20 July 2017 - 04:40 PM, said:

Oookay, stopped reading there. Guess I'll just stop arguing and patiently wait for your revolutionary port that you've been talking about for one and a half year now without anything to show for it. I'm sure it will be great to play your port along with BloodXL and BloodEX.

Feel free to pull your head out of your ass at any time.

[Zaxx]

Hendricks266, on 20 July 2017 - 04:44 PM, said:

Feel free to pull your head out of your ass at any time.

You can make me do it any day by releasing Hendricks's Blood Revolution Ultra Turbo.

[kimec]

Hendricks266, on 20 July 2017 - 04:31 PM, said:

There is no need for a Blood port to use the GPL code from Duke 3D. But, M210 is still bound by BUILDLIC.

The question is not about the need but whether you found or not that BloodGDX is using GPL licensed code.

Hendricks266, on 20 July 2017 - 04:31 PM, said:

After Microsoft acquired Minecraft, they rewrote it in C++. Your argument is invalid.

Year and month of when that happened? My google search reveals Minecraft is still written in Java. Are we living in a parallel universe, perhaps? Anyhow I fail to see how Minecraft acquisition by Microsoft makes my argument invalid.

[Hendricks266]

kimec, on 20 July 2017 - 04:47 PM, said:

The question is not about the need but whether you found or not that BloodGDX is using GPL licensed code.

Apologies for being unclear. I'm trying to say that we did not find any GPL code, which is to be expected given that Blood does not use Duke code.

kimec, on 20 July 2017 - 04:47 PM, said:

Year and month of when that happened? My google search reveals Minecraft is still written in Java. Are we living in a parallel universe, perhaps? Anyhow I fail to see how Minecraft acquisition by Microsoft makes my argument invalid.

https://www.reddit.c..._minecraft_for/

I was being cheesy about it making your argument invalid. It only makes the particular example invalid.

[kimec]

Hendricks266, on 20 July 2017 - 04:49 PM, said:

https://www.reddit.c..._minecraft_for/
I was being cheesy about it making your argument invalid. It only makes the particular example invalid.

You mean like when somebody ports BUILD to Java and it has exactly zero impact on the gameplay and user perceived speed of the game?

I think what you really want to complaint about is "forking", maybe not literal in the case of Blood but perhaps resource wise.

[Mblackwell]

Polymost in its current state would probably run most scenes at 2k-4k fps, and you're telling me this Java port has no perceived speed difference?
I mean, people can use whatever languages they like but let's not pretend there isn't a cost.

[SPILL]

M210 is fucking rebel. The legality is not my concern. Or any of yours. And you've basically demonstrated that he's near immune of any repercussions. So are we done or are we finished with this topic? Because it seems like we've reached a conclusion.

Any claims of other individual Blood projects is worth less than nothing if you don't have any results to demonstrate. It's irrelevant to this topic.

As far as the new update, here is my feedback:

[Jimmy]

edgy reply m8

[XThX2]

I've just finished reading up all the posts and I have to say what I've read is not very surprising. It gives you a good view on who's ignorant and who isn't... And as we all know many people are ignorant.

I also have to say I don't get why you guys are whiteknighting M210. You have nothing to lose, you still get to keep your port and play Blood until the end of time You really are going to be upset because of a few missing features? Please... That's just being ungrateful after 20 years.

I also don't believe in anything Jace Hall ever teases with. It's pretty much click-bait at this point and he's lost all relevance to me until he really proves he got something... which is probably never.

[Emmanuelexe]

XThX2, on 20 July 2017 - 05:52 PM, said:

I've just finished reading up all the posts and I have to say what I've read is not very surprising. It gives you a good view on who's ignorant and who isn't... And as we all know many people are ignorant.

I also have to say I don't get why you guys are whiteknighting M210. You have nothing to lose, you still get to keep your port and play Blood until the end of time You really are going to be upset because of a few missing features? Please... That's just being ungrateful after 20 years.

I also don't believe in anything Jace Hall ever teases with. It's pretty much click-bait at this point and he's lost all relevance to me until he really proves he got something... which is probably never.

Indeed, better to enjoy the port because i have the bad feeling the classic fps/retro fps are gonna die before 2010, i see so much less expansions for blood, heretic and others.....doom is surviving but idk, i feel like those times are difficult, we still didnt get a nextgen classic fps, it doesnt help and when we can get some good mods, port or others, people make fun with bashing everything when it's not what they want, envious, jealous or caprice, i don't know, it doesn't help.

I thought People could be more GENTLE than that in retro fps community but apparently, there is a ton of drama in some communities (zandronum, brutal doom, bloodgdx in this forum) ect.... It makes me sad.

If you want help BloodGDX, tell some advices to M210, if he doesnt want change anything to your ideas, forgive him (or maybe your own port), but don't bash him. We can still make our own forum and remove this one of Duke4 if the eduke managers hate bloodgdx, that's simple.

I'm out, i havent checked this topic for a while but this madness make no sens, if people want to be enthousiastic of BLOODGDX, they are allowed and it's a good thing because classic fps are dying (not only retro, but the concept of "classic") so well...some gentle mood could help at least.

[icecoldduke]

Manhs, on 20 July 2017 - 06:34 PM, said:

If you want help BloodGDX, tell some advices to M210, if he doesnt want change anything to your ideas, forgive him (or maybe your own port), but don't bash him.

I think you guys are confusing technical discussion with bashing and hate.

[High Treason]

kimec, on 20 July 2017 - 04:20 PM, said:

(((suprise)))

Could someone please explain to me what the deal is with putting three brackets around random words as of late? I don't get it... There are a lot of things I don't get these days, but we'll start small for now, I can always ask about the obsession with vaporware and Ayla Mao, in a more appropriate thread, at a later time.

For the record, BloodGDX... Yeah, seems good, maybe now I can play the game without ruining hard drives for whatever reason, or other strange goings on which I will compile someday. That is, if I can find my CD or a copy of my game data, don't have time right now.

[icecoldduke]

To sum up what I'm trying to get at. Technical discussions are required for any project. Technical discussions get heated. I've seen people scream at each other, quit, throw things threw windows, fall through windows, etc. At the end of the day technical discussions are had because people care about a project. Let's stop taking things personally, let the technical discussions be had, break some windows, and go for a beer after the fact.

[Mblackwell]

When working development, a lot of beer is required.

[Striker]

These kind of technical discussions are necessary if there's to be any synergy between projects, and it helps to discuss things to point out work out issues that may have consequences in the future, both foreseen and unforeseen. It can get intense, but It's best not to take it personally, and not to make it personal.

It's only the people perceiving it as bashing that are the real problem here and stirring up a fuss.