What are /r/starcontrol's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

https://www.screencast.com/t/hQLRsMQ7GnY

No, both of them have brand new accounts. Only one of them is calling people shills. But that is a pattern I've seen here in which there are numerous new accounts (new as of the hiring of Singer PR) here but only the people who aren't in the PF camp get called "shills".

As one of the oldest contributors to this sub, the influx of new people with agendas (on both sides) is tragic.

I'd rather just see people talk about Star Control (new, old, whatever).

That poor Q+A has been changed so many times it breaks the server software when looking at the changelog.

That new bit also goes in the face of what Brad said before about not having the rights to the aliens or lore, only having a license for publishing (not developing derivative works) and later edited it out.

For years, Stardock said that they didn't have rights to the aliens and yet somehow in the last ~8-9 months they can say they do? Wouldn't someone well-versed in IP matters have known and accurately presented what rights they had from the start?

Something definitely changed in 2016, going from something like "we don't have the rights or have since refuted them" to progressively believing a narrative that allows them more than what they publicly claimed in 2013-2015.

It wasn't until 2017 were Paul and Fred notified of Stardock's newfound rights.

Lots of masterpieces get snubbed, but that doesn't invalidate them as masterpieces. SC2 is absolutely one of the top 100 video games of all time in terms of quality. And if you Google "best video games star control", you get results like this.

Hey Elestan, good to hear from you. Seems I couldn't stay away from this sort of thread after all.

I agree with you on almost all of your response and anything in the "reasonable middle ground".

As you know one area I have trouble with as a Modder is the idea of DMCA notices if somebody was to put together a ship design Mod that was very similar to an original ship design in SC2. Some of the best Mods around have frankly very blatant copyright breaches but they aren't commercial, one of many examples below. It would be a sad day indeed if a precedent started to be set that all of these Modders started receiving DMCA's. It's similar to the worries that Brad might interfere with UQM in the UQM community. That is, EXCEPT for the fact Brad has very clearly said he will not interfere, while P&F have made it very clear that they would.

Perhaps some people will buy the Origins base game as a result. And they want to stop that. If so in my view that's extremely petty. Now if somebody was to replicate SC2 as a whole or in large part, that's different, I would tend to agree with you then.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/star-trek-armada-3

Did I mention the Mod above is amazing? :)

The edit log wasn't tampered with. There was an edit made to it back in Summer 2016 long before there was any conflict. I don't remember why the edit as made but it didn't have any particular affect on the meaning one way or the other.

https://www.screencast.com/t/znojyB9C is a screenshot of the edit log we have and anyone with archive.org can look at the difference. And any such logs that PF require, private or not, are subject to discovery so they have access to anything we have (though archive.org is faster).

As for my opinions on the rights to the aliens and lore, my opinion continues to be that we do not have rights to their aliens (how they look, what their ships look like and behave) and lore.

But Stardock has every right to use Star Control aliens (names) as it sees fit.

However, now that PF are challenging our trademark rights and the legitimacy of the good will attached to it we are forced to vigorously defend our rights.

You are free to disagree with that answer but it doesn't make me "dishonest".

If they do have the right to put assets under that license, then yes; you'll also need to license any assets you make under the same license to conform with CC-NA-SA.

If they don't have the right to put assets under that license, then technically no, but realistically the worst outcome is that you get a nastygram from someone saying "stop distributing your software". But I think the chance of this is low.

A kid of the 80s, I learned to code in BASIC and made some simple games by the time SC2 rocked around.

It had the story telling, the music, the exploration, the characters. After playing SC2 I caught a fever to write my own epic game.

I would need music, so I researched on the early web and found out about the modscene, and started learning to write mods, which kickstarted an interest in music production that lingers to this day. I would need realtime graphics, so I ditched BASIC for Pascal and started learning how to create VGA graphics routines. I would need story telling and scripted events, so I began learning about abstraction and algorithms, and started writing branching stories.

I never finished a game, at least not until much later (check out Space Strafer on the android store if you're interested), but I can pinpoint SC2 as the game that spurred me to learn the skills which later would form the basis of my career in the web development industry.

Obviously F&P and their team were lightyears in advance of a deluded child but my thought at the time: if those guys could do it, why not me?

Without SC2, maybe it would have been something else, I'm not sure. But for me it was a spark that fuelled me to try harder.

"such as" does translate to "legal definition of the terms". It means, here are examples.

English Grammar Today

We can use such as to introduce an example or examples of something we mention. We normally use a comma before such as when we present a list of examples.

It'll be a while later, end of the year. I'll get Steam out the door and hopefully balanced based on feedback, then port. There's a free version on Android now in open Beta, but it's a much earlier build.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.softwaregeezers.ionAXXIA&hl=en_GB

Supports cloud saves but these are disabled while I finish things and update that to support the new features.

Something I've noticed with UQM is that it doesn't like some laptops and will "overscan" the top and bottom to fit with a resolution it thinks your laptop is.

I haven't had it happen to me personally which is why I've never been able to fix it in the MegaMod.

Here's something you can try though.

Add these commandline options to a shortcut: -f --res=640x480

Replace 640x480 with your native resolution.

So it would look something like this: C:\Games\UQM-MegaMod\UrQuanMasters.exe -f --res=640x480

Another option to try is to use Borderless Gaming: https://github.com/Codeusa/Borderless-Gaming

Where, again, you set the commandline options in the shortcut to your laptop's resolution but instead of -f you put -w. You then use the Borderless Gaming program to put UQM in fullscreen.

Don't know the easiest way to do that, but this might work. And here's a bridge image.

As someone who basically liked Star Control 3, I bet I'd still basically like Origins. There's some things I want enough that I'm never really disappointed.