CWE Patching System

[Paradox]

1. Distribute edited copies of Cyan's PRP files (bundled or not).

Technically you could get around that by only distributing the modified bytes. As in making an application that works out what bytes have changed and distributing the changed bytes in a patch which then takes the original PRP on the clients PC and builds a modified one using that and the changed bytes(Some old Patchers for games worked like that as the patches would be smaller in size... though they take far longer to apply). None of Cyans stuff would be distributed.

Interesting idea. What do you think, Branan?

That's exactly how patches worked in UU, using bsdiff. It looks like the code is still around, but never used in MOUL.

So you'd need to set something up (or write your own app) to download and apply to patches to the files.

[nathan2055]

This is a perfect idea! It might get around those copyrights (at least until Cyan eventually revokes the copyrights and goes GPL).

[Branan]

The GPL actually relies on copyright law to enforce its share-and-share-alike provisions. A work that's placed in the public domain can freely be integrated into anything, even a closed product.

This correction brought to you by the number 42 and the letters F, S, and F

[Stucuk]

One consideration for a patch setup is that if any files got modified or deleted from the patched install, the client would not be able to automatically redownload your files from the file server.

As far as i understand (I have never personally made any patcher that could do this, i have only made a normal patch system, so im going by what it looks like) they work out which version of a PRP you have and then apply the modifications one at a time until its upto the latest version. So the older the version of your PRP's the longer it would take to patch.

Files are unlikely to be deleted but if they were the user would just need to re-download them from Cyan and patch.

[nathan2055]

The GPL actually relies on copyright law to enforce its share-and-share-alike provisions. A work that's placed in the public domain can freely be integrated into anything, even a closed product.

This correction brought to you by the number 42 and the letters F, S, and F

Oh, man! Why did I forget all I had taught myself about copyleft! Oops.

One consideration for a patch setup is that if any files got modified or deleted from the patched install, the client would not be able to automatically redownload your files from the file server.

As far as i understand (I have never personally made any patcher that could do this, i have only made a normal patch system, so im going by what it looks like) they work out which version of a PRP you have and then apply the modifications one at a time until its upto the latest version. So the older the version of your PRP's the longer it would take to patch.

Files are unlikely to be deleted but if they were the user would just need to re-download them from Cyan and patch.

This is very interesting. What does everyone else think? Doable?

[diafero]

Is it legal to set up a dataserver that forwards requests to Cyan's, so you do not host the content yourself? That would of course still not allow modification, but the forwarder could be extended to act as an overlay and modify files on-the-fly.

[Chacal]

You guys are pretty much describing UruDistro!


The workaround suggested here is pretty much what we do with POTS (and the MOUL, Myst5 and other conversions done by Drizzle, and I think what Dustin does with his UAM shard): use the player's already existing prps. This means the player has acquired the game(s), presumably legally, so that there is no distribution of Cyan's content.

[nathan2055]

You guys are pretty much describing UruDistro!


The workaround suggested here is pretty much what we do with POTS (and the MOUL, Myst5 and other conversions done by Drizzle, and I think what Dustin does with his UAM shard): use the player's already existing prps. This means the player has acquired the game(s), presumably legally, so that there is no distribution of Cyan's content.

Do you guys think some kind of patcher like UruDistro could be added to the MOUL client itself? This would allow us to update shard user's clients without them having to install extra URU utilities.

[Chacal]

Yes. Everything that UruDistro does comes from the libHPlasma library anyway.

[diafero]

Actually, Dustin's UAM Shard hosts TPOTS (and Myst V and MOUL and ...). Completely. Anybody who gets the UruSetup.exe can easily download the full game.
DI does not host all the files - many of the core game files (those that are not modified) are verified by checksum, but not served by the server if they are wrong (starting Uru is rejected then).

But yes, it'd be similar to how Drizzle works. Just embedded in real-time into the server...