Anyone know what the legal issues are in doing a freeware game that is very like Civ?
(Ive noticed there are quite a few out there that are very like civ II).
It occured to me that the amount of work involved in rewriting civ 1 using Java would be low enough to make it a reasonable proposition for someone to have a go at. (Not me though. 9pm and Im still at the office...)
When civ was written much of the effort went into 2 things - the gameplay (as developed by countless hours of playtesting) and the user interface and basic support code. Using Java (or other modern development environments) of course, one could bang something functional together in a fraction of the time. Back then Sid and his crew would have had to write a lot of basic 'infrastructure' code - ie: gui menu system, basic data structures etc... all the sort of stuff thats built into modern development environments. Nowdays all one would need to concentrate on would be the logic and computer ai...
But if someone were to do this how different would their game have to be from civ to avoid breaching copyright - would anyone actually make a fuss if it was a public domain program?
Would it be ok to write ones own version if it required the original civ files to be present also (thus ensuring that the user had bought a copy of civ)? (In which case you might even think of it as an expansion)
(Ive noticed there are quite a few out there that are very like civ II).
It occured to me that the amount of work involved in rewriting civ 1 using Java would be low enough to make it a reasonable proposition for someone to have a go at. (Not me though. 9pm and Im still at the office...)
When civ was written much of the effort went into 2 things - the gameplay (as developed by countless hours of playtesting) and the user interface and basic support code. Using Java (or other modern development environments) of course, one could bang something functional together in a fraction of the time. Back then Sid and his crew would have had to write a lot of basic 'infrastructure' code - ie: gui menu system, basic data structures etc... all the sort of stuff thats built into modern development environments. Nowdays all one would need to concentrate on would be the logic and computer ai...
But if someone were to do this how different would their game have to be from civ to avoid breaching copyright - would anyone actually make a fuss if it was a public domain program?
Would it be ok to write ones own version if it required the original civ files to be present also (thus ensuring that the user had bought a copy of civ)? (In which case you might even think of it as an expansion)
