Then again, your talking about doing it for real.
At the moment, most hacked N1 and ICR2 'Daytonas' are Talladega
hacks which:-
1) Have a similar shape
2) Have similar scenery (possibly including Daytona logos/images)
3) Have the 'Daytona' name or something similar.
Therefore Daytona/ISC are going to jump on you as they believe that
your trying to use their name/intelectural property/likeness/whatever
without permission and regardless if your making money or not, they'll
only let you release it if you pay them for the license.
As as Sega have that you're not going to get it and Daytona/ISC are
obliged to help protect Sega's investment by trying to stop any
unauthorised use of Daytona or it's likeness.
Even if Sega didn't have the license and you did make a Daytona I
doubt Daytona/ISC would let it lie.
Two things that can happen is that the 'Daytona Brand' (for want of a
better phrase) may lose some of it's marketability and therefore it's
ability to make money for ISC or the France family.
It may sound unfeasable but it does happen, it's sometimes a little
hard to grasp if you don't have a marketing background. For examples
just look at some of the things that can force share prices up and
down on the stock exchange.
Secondly, it may affect their future ability to license 'Daytona' for
things like games, merchandise, etc.
Companies (like Sega or Papyrus for example) who are interested
in purchasing an 'exclusive license' for Daytona are going to be put
off if they think that Daytona/ISC don't make efforts to keep
the license 'exclusive'.
That means that the license buyers are going to want their product to
be the only one with the 'Daytona' name on it and therefore are going
to want Daytona/ISC to stop any unauthorised use - and that includes
your crumby little track.
As a side issue to this, say Papyrus did have the license to use
Daytona and include in one of their sims. If you have made a perfect
Daytona track then this will affect sales of Papyrus software.
Say Papyrus released 'Daytona Track Pack for Nascar 1' for $15.00
and your was free to download of the net. The chances are most
people would rather have your free 99.9% accurate track then
fork our the $15.00 for Papyrus's version.
Therefore as well as Daytona/ISC after you for un-licensed use, you'd
have Papyrus wanting you to stop as it's going to***their sales.
So, sadly it all revolves around this global desire to make money.
Now, at present nobody has yet got the correct tools or all of the
information needed to create a perfect Daytona apart from Papyrus
so an official Daytona from Papyrus is going to be more attractive to
users than a hacked Talladega (no matter how close it is).
Try and understand that in this case Papyrus are not the bad guys in
this sorry story. They have been fighting for ages for the license for
Daytona but as money talks, they haven't had the cash to make
a better bid than Sega. They want to see Daytona in their sims as
much as we do.
However, every Daytona from us lot that appears on the net chips
a little bit off their chances of getting it from Daytona/ISC.
When The Pits was about to lauch our Daytona, we got a call from
Daytona/ISC and NOT Papyrus. The Licensing Manager of ISC called
Jan Kohl and ordered us to halt the release or face action. Read it
again - ISC stopped us, not Papyrus. That's how serious ISC are about
the Daytona name.
O.K, thats the Daytona aspect of the tracks finished with but what
about the other tracks that have been made like Texas or Las Vegas?
In this instance the action would come from Papyrus unless the coder
was very careful.
When Papyrus writes a sim, all the code, including the individual
files in the DAT's are copyrighted to them.
Now, most of the people who have been pulled up by Papyrus have
been distributing ZIP's with the entire new track in it including LP
files and the DAT.
The problem comes in that using another track as the base for your
new track is that the shape will be the same (at the moment) and
therefore you need the original LP files to make the AI work properly.
Secondly, a large percentage of the files inside the track DAT are
going to be original from the track you based yours on.
Modifying one byte in a file does not constitute it being a different
file and likewise with textures.
As an example, you can open MS GOLF in Borlands Resource Workshop
and change all sorts of things. However, it's still recognisable as MS
GOLF and Bill Gates ain't going to be happy if you try and pass it off
as your own and distribute it.
Now, say you have made a new track from another, the way you can
distribute it is to write a program that modifies the original code on
the users machine.
That way, you don't distribute any original code only a list of
modifications and any *completely* new files you have made for it.
As far as I can remember, when a person buys a piece of software, the
end-user agreement usually in one wording or another lets them use the
software and it's code for personal use and modification as long
as they don't attempt to distribute it in any form or try and pass it
off as their own.
Therefore, if they've got the original track on THEIR hard drive you
program acts as a tool to let let THEM modify the data themselves.
This is where the patches at The Pits get their basis from. We don't
ship any original Papyrus code with our patches and they only modify
the exisiting data on the users hard disk.
This is also why it takes me so damn long to write patches, writing
code to do this isn't easy and you need to understand all the Papyrus
file formats of which I know about 80%.
I think this is why Alex and the others get pulled up by Papyrus -
there shipping original code with their tracks.
I'm sorry about the length of my posts recently, but I don't see the
point of giving brief answers if I can answer something as fully as
possible.
As I've said before, I've nothing against track editing, I'm all for
it but I'm trying to stop people getting themselves into trouble
causing undue tension in the sim racing comunity between the
user/coders and the software publisher/writers.
And if anyone who has a track editing page wants to post this message
as a guide to those wanting to edit tracks, feel free.
Cheers
Jed
The Pits - http://www.racesimcentral.net/
