Guild of Writers

So thats what this is all about, Copyright? Cyan seems to turn a blind eye to all the copyright issues for what ever reason at least as far as I have seen, and in the past their was no way for any one to run a shard legally or pay for use of copyright material and this has not changed as far as I know.

We have an opportunity now, the shards are still illegal But we can pay a reasonable fee for use of copyright material threw donations.it wont make the Shards any less illegal but it might help maintain the blind eye and alleviate some of the problems involved. And who knows it might actually get us something new on the MOULa and produce enough income for Cyan to put more of their work force on open source. I assume the Shard Admins are gonna be the same ones who are gonna be the Open source Server admins.

I thought this was a community, we can pull together and make this happen. Cyan has given us some of the financial responsibility as far as Uru live is concerned.

I donated enough to Cyan to get me a Gold account on GameTap and Im not even a shard admin. I just enjoy the game and the community in all its forms

Im not saying that illegal use of copyright material is OK But now no one is stopping you from paying for it. After all nothing in this world is free. One way or anther their is gonna be a price somewhere down the line

Shards are not illegal.

However, /this/ is piracy.

Running a shard is not illegal. Alcugs is an open-source, Uru-compatible game server.

Even running with the UU plServers binaries is not illegal, since Cyan never actually told shard admins to stop running their shards. They simply disabled the global authentication server. (It may however be a grey area to modify the plServers to work around the missing auth stuff)

Alcugs is legal, so the server part of a Shard is fine. The critical part is the dataserver, that ships updates to the client so that everyone has the latest version and all clients are consistent. Obviously, this means that some Cyan-files need to be made available for download. However, the Shard admin can attempt to reduce the number of files made available to a minimum, for example by shipping only files that actually changed compared to default TPOTS, and/or those that are globally loaded and thus more essential to be in sync for everyone. Of course, this will not help for the ages converted from Myst V etc., but there are ways to ensure consistency without providing the files for download. It is more complicated, and it is what I did for the Deep Island.

Dustin took the easy route of just putting all the files up, so that you don't need to buy anything. I can not say whether actually *all* files are on there, but so far all the ones I checked I found. This is especially surprising seeing how he used to try to reduce the amount of copyrighted material that is distributed with the Offline KI.
The only reason why you can not link to these ages before conversion is that Offline KI checks for the agename.age file before linking - or whatever linking mechanism he uses. But one can still download the files manually, or try to fool the linking mechanism by putting an age file in there.

A person cannot get the Myst5/Crowthistle/Hexisle/Magiquest Ages files or link to them without converting the games, as described. The server does have the files to ensure integrity. If Diafero has found a way to trick the client into getting them, then that is neither here nor there. I have not told anyone of such tricks, and have always encouraged people to buy the game.

You know perfectly well that you don't need to upload the files to ensure consistency. There are other, more complicated, less problematic ways of doing that.

I did not trick any client for I don't have a client for this Shard. But as a matter of fact you have these files on your webserver open for download for anyone who wants them. You just did not (publicly) post a link there.

That's purposefully misleading. All Alcugs dataservers have their files available for download via http, *if* you know the obscure filename to use. He's trying to make it sounds like someone can download an archive with the files to use. This is all part of his renewed efforts to attack the Uam Shard :S

Of course you can download the files from all dataservers. I never claimed anything else. But you can only download what is on there. Nor did I ever speak about an archive of files. But in the end, it is the same thing. Providing the ages for download in public, without a link there. You may think about that whatever you want. It is NOT however technically required.

This is all part of his renewed efforts to attack the Uam Shard :S

*sigh*

Dhel did something similar, if I remember correctly.

No, Dhel provided links to the files, so that people would not have to buy the games. Having Cyan files is not the problem. (E.g. the Offline-KI contains files from Myst5 and Magiquest, for technical reasons, and this is fine.) The problem with Dhel was that he was encouraging people to not buy the games. I encourage people to buy the games and convert them(that is the path for players to have them on the shard), and have even gone to large efforts to make Hexisle purchasable. (It was previously fairly rare.)

I should add that to Dhel's credit, he later changed that.