A few questions about recreating commercial games.

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Blitz_9100
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A few questions about recreating commercial games.

Post by Blitz_9100 »

I was wondering if someone could anwser a few questions about recreating a existing commercial game. I am creating a opensource recreation of GTA2 and was wondering if it is safe to use the resources from GTA2 by loading them from a existing installation of the game.
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Re: A few questions about recreating commercial games.

Post by Sektor »

You only really risk legal trouble if you were to sell your engine with the GTA2 data files bundled or you use a trademarked name. If you only bundle files that you own, you should be safe. If you make it free then you'll be even safer. That being said, a forum isn't the best place for legal advice, I'm not a lawyer. I've never heard of anyone receiving a cease and desist letter from Rockstar Games/Take2 over GTA. There's an unlicensed iPhone game called GTA Ride that uses GTA1 sprites and that has been around for years, so Rockstar Games seems fairly generously.

So are you starting your engine from scratch? Give us details.
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Re: A few questions about recreating commercial games.

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The project came to mind when a friend and I wanted to teach my brother how to program. He keeps refusing and just ignores any time we ask him. We finally got him into possibly remaking GTA2 because we used to play it when we were younger.

The project will be written in Java because its easier to learn. The project will be open source and available on a repository. Its going to be written from scratch and use Apache Ant for building the project. The idea is that its going to load the resources from the GTA2 installation directory.
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Re: A few questions about recreating commercial games.

Post by T.M. »

Are you going to make it read the script files too?
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Re: A few questions about recreating commercial games.

Post by BenMillard »

I'm not holding my breath for it to do anything...although there are a couple of GTA-like clones which got somewhere, such as Payback.
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Re: A few questions about recreating commercial games.

Post by Sektor »

If I was making a GTA1/GTA2 clone, I wouldn't even start with reading the file formats, there are already engines/apps that do that. I'd just use some dummy sprites and start straight into writing multiplayer code.
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Re: A few questions about recreating commercial games.

Post by T.M. »

Sektor wrote:If I was making a GTA1/GTA2 clone, I wouldn't even start with reading the file formats, there are already engines/apps that do that. I'd just use some dummy sprites and start straight into writing multiplayer code.
For what i know, i would still use the file formats, it gets much easier afterwards. It's a pain in the ass to make your own sprite arrays; eventually it just gets harder than using the original files. It's not that complicated to read the sty-files; and its fun to learn to read file formats too. Isn't that what they are up to; to learn programming? ;-)

If i just wanted to make a multiplayer game, i would start with tic-tac-toe. I think their motivation isnt on (online) multiplayer, since that is a bit more complicated matter for "learning to program" kind of project.
Blitz_9100 wrote:The project came to mind when a friend and I wanted to teach my brother how to program. He keeps refusing and just ignores any time we ask him. We finally got him into possibly remaking GTA2 because we used to play it when we were younger.
If your brother kept refusing and ignoring, i dont think he will last long. So just forget him, i know how that goes... You cant force anyone to be interested in anything.
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Re: A few questions about recreating commercial games.

Post by Blitz_9100 »

T.M. wrote:Are you going to make it read the script files too?
This may be a long term goal, we originally were focusing on using Mozilla's Rihno script engine and have a enclosed scope of only required classes.
BenMillard wrote:I'm not holding my breath for it to do anything...although there are a couple of GTA-like clones which got somewhere, such as Payback.
We are going to do our best to make this happen, I understand what you mean though.
Sektor wrote:If I was making a GTA1/GTA2 clone, I wouldn't even start with reading the file formats, there are already engines/apps that do that. I'd just use some dummy sprites and start straight into writing multiplayer code.
This does sound like a idea to work with, but I really want to learn the formats of the files as well.
T.M. wrote:
Sektor wrote:If I was making a GTA1/GTA2 clone, I wouldn't even start with reading the file formats, there are already engines/apps that do that. I'd just use some dummy sprites and start straight into writing multiplayer code.
For what i know, i would still use the file formats, it gets much easier afterwards. It's a pain in the ass to make your own sprite arrays; eventually it just gets harder than using the original files. It's not that complicated to read the sty-files; and its fun to learn to read file formats too. Isn't that what they are up to; to learn programming? ;-)

If i just wanted to make a multiplayer game, i would start with tic-tac-toe. I think their motivation isnt on (online) multiplayer, since that is a bit more complicated matter for "learning to program" kind of project.
Blitz_9100 wrote:The project came to mind when a friend and I wanted to teach my brother how to program. He keeps refusing and just ignores any time we ask him. We finally got him into possibly remaking GTA2 because we used to play it when we were younger.
If your brother kept refusing and ignoring, i dont think he will last long. So just forget him, i know how that goes... You cant force anyone to be interested in anything.
I am pretty good at programming with java and my brother has done some scripting in other things before. He has talked about learning programming before, We just want to nudge him a bit to see its something he really wants.

This is probably going to be a project that is worked on during our free time. Thanks for the feedback, it will definitely be something we take note on when we work on this.
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Re: A few questions about recreating commercial games.

Post by T.M. »

Blitz_9100 wrote:
Sektor wrote:If I was making a GTA1/GTA2 clone, I wouldn't even start with reading the file formats, there are already engines/apps that do that. I'd just use some dummy sprites and start straight into writing multiplayer code.
This does sound like a idea to work with, but I really want to learn the formats of the files as well.
I think i could help you on that, the original documents are quite cryptic. I've had in my mind to recreate those documents for long time. If you need any clarification on them, just PM me, maybe it'll make me want to finish the docs. For scripts, i have kind-of documented the .scr file format: http://gtamp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=560 But as you said, you dont need that now.

Hmm, feeling like finishing the SCR doc now :-) , although nobody needs it, but its just too simple to not do.
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