a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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it makes no sense that the eve spiral is smaller than the area ban. The only way this system would work is if most Eves died off so that all settlements were 2000 tiles apart, which is not the case, or if settlements within 2000 tiles typically connected into one village, which is also very unlikely.
I believe it is in fact the case that most Eves die off and that settlements are rather far apart - at least, successful settlements. Watch Chard's visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjEh-iOxUSQ - and note how the successful settlements are far apart relative to the closely-spaced transient blips of the Eve spawns racing around the circle.
Regardless of intent, a false statement of sole authorship was made. So maybe they are "unintentional liars."
Intent matters, Jason! You can't be an unintentional liar! The word "liar" implies intent!
THIS SHIT MATTERS, JASON.
Cool! Nice work.
I don't think anyone had actually started transplanting second lineages into a town to continue working so much as on server reset having multiple lineages due to everyone closely spawning together around a town. You turned the absolute best time to play the game into the absolute worst because the game devolves into constant Evedom due to being dumped further out because you cannot spawn anywhere near the original Eves or their camps.
I'm pretty sure that there's supposed to be a lot of Eves when the server restarts.
What is it that you think you're being deprived of at server restart that doesn't boil down to "I want to be reborn in or close to the town I just died in"?
You used to get a nice interaction between different families while now you're better off just killing anyone in your surrounding area.
The effect of the area ban is almost certainly small, and sterilizing the nearby towns will do very little to improve your town's fertility. If you are in town Foo and you're close to town Bar then your pool of children is "Everyone on the server who hasn't recently been born in Foo or Bar". That's not significantly smaller than "Everyone on the server who hasn't recently been born in Foo".
Also, repeating what I said in this thread:
The region ban only changes things for the case where an Eve spawns near an established town. But that's not common. Yes, it happens, but it's not common.
And when it does happen, the effect is small. The pool of children available to the Eve camp is nearly as large as it would have been without the area ban; it includes everyone on the server except those that were recently in the Eve camp or in the nearby established town. But that's only a small proportion of the players on the server. There are numerous towns on the server, and most players will not be under an area ban from the nearby town because their recent lives will have been in the other towns.
Jason wants towns to be far enough apart that being an Eve means you're on your own (i.e. you can't just walk into an established town), but close enough together that they can interact. At first Eve spawns were all clustered around one spot, but that ended up making them too close together. He tried a few different things and settled on the Eve Spiral, described here. At first the distance between subsequent Eve spawns was 1000 tiles, but it was reduced to 500 and then again to 250 which is where it is now.
I'm not sure why Jason reduced the Eve spiral spawn distance from 1000 to 500 to 250, other than he must have thought there wasn't enough interaction between towns. The changelog messages are "Eve placement adjusted to bring Eves twice as close together as before" and "Shrank next Eve jump to 250, down from 500. Smaller Eve spiral, more likely to be interaction between villages."
(And Jason, FYI, I checked: minRebirthDistance is currently 2000 and nextEveJump.ini is 250, so those values are current.)
Jason also wants you to not be able to live back-to-back lives in the same town. So he introduced the lineage ban. At the same time he also did something to prevent map-making; people had been using map-hacks to keep track of where they were and where the towns they'd been born into were, so that they could work in a town, die, get born somewhere in the wilderness, then travel back to their town. So he altered the client-server protocol to thwart learning your absolute location, making it impossible to travel back to some place you were in a previous life without using the bell. See here. In that post Jason makes his vision for the game very clear: he doesn't want you going back to work on "your" projects in "your" town because that's the exact opposite of what the game is about.
It's like Jason has written a symphony for an orchestra and people insist on playing it with a kazoo band.
Both of Jason's efforts in that post - frustrating map-makers and adding lineage bans - have been circumvented by Tarr and others. The lineage bans were worked around using multi-family towns, and the coordinate-blinding has been worked around by reading the relative coordinates of every player on the server in real-time and thus being able to identify the locations of towns (and specific people!) relative to your position.
This post by gondor2222 in the Bugs forum describes what's going on. Jason, you should probably be aware of this, and I'm betting you're not. As gondor mentions, you should probably filter out PLAYER_UPDATE messages server-side so that clients only receive updates for nearby players.
I think the concerns about the area ban are overblown and should be verified with data before shrinking the area ban distance. You should consider how far apart or close together you want towns to be, then check the lifelog data (for example, see this amazing visualization from Chard) to see whether the towns ARE in fact getting established as close or distant as you'd like. You can also check to see how often someone is prevented from getting a child due to the area ban, although you may have to add additional logging in the server code to capture that data. My bet is that it's nowhere near as often as people are griping about, and that the fertility issues people are reporting are just due to the same thing they've always been due to - server population falling during off hours.
If you shrink the area ban distance too much, people will just walk (or steal a horse and ride) back to "their" town. Is that the kind of interaction between towns that you want?
Your China hypothetical is muddled. Nothing about it matches the actual functioning of intellectual property law in China or anywhere else.
Bowls are only rare because they're undervalued, not because they're expensive to produce.
MAEK MOAR BOWLZ
Well, my eyes tend to glaze over when I look at pages and pages of legal text like on Zcash, so I'm more likely (personally) to move along and not consider re-using the work.
Well, I don't blame you! There's a lot there.
And I totally get that one of the reasons you put things in the public domain is because it's simple. You don't have to tack on a complicated license and other people don't have to try to read and understand it. "Public domain." There. Done.
I pointed to the GPL and the Zcash trademark policy not so much as examples to imitate, but as demonstrations that it's possible to get what you want, no matter what it is that you want. I bet you could find a way to a) state your requirements in a way that admits of little misunderstanding and b) preserves your rights should something go wrong and c) is brief and simple enough to dissuade neither you nor the others you want to use your work.
I think what you have right now misses both a) and b).
You can use the existing laws to craft all kinds of outcomes!
Look at what Gnu did, for example. That sort of outcome was unthinkable... until Stallman thought of it, and then (with a lot of help) made it real.
Look at what Zcash has done with their trademark policy: https://z.cash/trademark-policy/ - They want their trademark to be widely used, free of charge, without prior approval or agreement or contract, for "good" purposes... without giving up their ability to prevent "bad" purposes (with "good" and "bad" subjectively determined by them).
I feel certain there's a way to get what you want, and to communicate what you want to anyone who wants to use your work, but you have to understand what the law actually says about these kinds of issues, and what the (very wide) scope of possibilities entails.
To my eyes, the example license you posted at the end isn't substantially clearer, and I doubt it would have prevented the current dust-up with DD. I do think it clarifies your intent, which is important, but in practical terms it leaves too much to your variable and situational discretion and has too many elements which are open to a wide range of interpretation. Accordingly, it has the potential to lead to more of these types of disputes and disappointing outcomes.
Perhaps Ryan feels differently. He has skin in the game, I do not; I'm just sitting in the peanut gallery.
The general solution to these sorts of problems, Jason, is to use the existing laws as they are. They're there for a reason, and they have evolved over a long time through the efforts of many people in order to effectively deal with the very issues you are wrestling with now.
And unfortunately, it's really a "know it when you see it" kind of thing.
With those examples in mind, what kind of wording would you recommend?
You're putting Ryan in a very bad position, the exact same position you've put Dual Decade in.
"My work is released without restriction, except for one, which I can't explain in a way that everyone will understand, but I will know whether you've violated this restriction when I see it, which could happen at any point in the future, in ways that I will not attempt to predict or anticipate here, and if and when that happens I will make further demands upon you, demands which I will not attempt to predict or anticipate here."
This is terrible.
And now you're asking Ryan to not only read your mind, but tell you what he thinks the best explanation of your intention is?
Terrible squared.
Being clear about your licenses is your responsibility.
CrazyEddie wrote:although note that no one can "copyright it out from under you"
They most certainly can. In countries where registering a copyright is an optional-but-possible thing, and in countries where registering copyright is required (like China), someone else registering a copyright where you have not done so is a possibility.
As I understand it, that is exactly what has happened in China.
It's certainly possible that someone can register a copyright to your public-domain work, but that copyright registration would be invalid (they could do the same even if you had retained and registered a copyright, and their registration would likewise be invalid). This would be true in any country that participates in the various international copyright regimes, which includes China.
So no one can "copyright it out from under you", although they could attempt administrative shenanigans that would make life difficult for you or others trying to use the same public-domain work. I'll assume that's what you meant, then, and agree with you.
In countries where copyright registration is mandatory, you may in fact be out of luck, and be in a situation where you are forbidden from distributing your own work. If you had any chance, you would be stuck arguing not that you registered first, but that their registration was illegitimate. You'd be arguing from a very weak and unusual position, given that you placed the original work in the public domain to begin with, and specifically did not register it.
I don't think this is an accurate statement of how things work, at the very least not in China. China, like most countries, follows the Berne convention. Works are copyrighted at the moment of creation and registration is not required in order to establish a copyright.
If you (or anyone else) were ever in a position where you had to prove that your work was in the public domain and the registered copyright was invalid, you would only have to show that your creation of the work preceded the registration of the copyright.
Maybe you're right that even in that situation, where they were breaking the law, I would have no right to stop them from engaging in whatever lawful activities they were still engaging in, involving the work, in parallel to the unlawful ones. But that's splitting hairs, because the practical tools available for stopping them are blunt. If someone published a copy of the work with an unlawful copyright claim attached it, taking down the work is the most straight forward remedy. The only other option is a court order for specific corrective action (keeping the work on line while removing the unlawful copyright claim.)
Taking down a work because of a defective copyright claim when the work would otherwise be legal to publish is a remedy you would (I believe) be unlikely to obtain in a court. Your second option ("specific corrective action") is probably what you would get.
That's assuming you could make a case that you are suffering an injury from the publication of the false copyright claim. You probably could make such an argument, but it's also possible that the court would find that your case was not yet ripe, that you would first have to have been prevented from using your work because of the copyright claim, at which point you could then show that the claim was invalid.
... or so I wildly theorize. This is going way out beyond where I, as an "amateur lawyer" feel comfortable predicting what would happen.
You're claiming that it was not sufficient, or that the license is impossible to void. That "absolutely no restrictions" covers every possible contingency, including trademark squatting, copyrighting it out from under me, and all the other imaginable things one might do with my work.
That's a fair statement of what I'm claiming, and probably cuts to the heart of the matter. I do think that the license is impossible to void, and I do think it covers every possible contingency (although note that no one can "copyright it out from under you").
And I say that independently of whether I am strictly correct as a matter of law. I feel like a dedication of something into the public domain, using the language that you have used to do so, is in spirit a complete and total disclaiming of any further interest in that work, a statement to the effect of "I hereby now and forever renounce any attempt to control what anyone does with this, knowing full well that it could be used by people I despise to do things I despise, things that I would never ever want to have happen were I still to retain control."
I feel like the only ethically correct response to someone using your public-domain work in a way that you object to is to say "I am completely and utterly against what they are doing but will make no effort to prevent it, because they have every right to do it, even against my wishes."
Even if what they are doing is actively detrimental to your own goals, i.e. even if they are using your own work against you.
This is, I feel, part of the package that you chose.
Eddie, if you look at that Twitter PM chat with the journalist, did you see anything misleading there? Again, I open the conversation by explaining that the game is in the public domain.
Yes, I did. You say to him:
"I have decided that what they are doing is no longer permitted."
But you don't have the right to make that decision. You gave that right away when you put your work in the public domain.
The region ban has the exact same effect on outposts near towns that the lineage ban had, if you assume that everyone in the main town and the outpost are from the same lineage (which is the common case, or was, until people started twinning and migrating).
The region ban only changes things for the case where an Eve spawns near an established town. But that's not common. Yes, it happens, but it's not common.
And when it does happen, the effect is small. The pool of children available to the Eve camp is nearly as large as it would have been without the area ban; it includes everyone on the server except those that were recently in the Eve camp or in the nearby established town. But that's only a small proportion of the players on the server. There are numerous towns on the server, and most players will not be under an area ban from the nearby town because their recent lives will have been in the other towns.
Sterilizing the nearby town will do very little to increase the fertility rate in your Eve camp.
I thought the lineage ban was dumb but holy shit is the area ban even worse. I get that he doesn't want people to return to their old projects but it makes less sense that you would want to check the stdout and ride over to the closest town and stab all the girls to up your own chances of survival.
Perhaps you should stop thinking of the first town as "your town", and instead think of the larger conglomeration as "your region", if you insist on continually coming back to the same place anyway.
Jason, the mobile developers have not committed fraud. You should stop saying that.
Also, every time you tell someone that you don't approve of the mobile version, you should also remind whoever you are talking to that the mobile devs don't need your approval, and that you specifically placed your work in the public domain so that people could develop things using your work regardless of whether you approve of what they do with it or not.
The things you are telling people are just as misleading (by omission) as you claim the mobile developers are being.
Infertility comes from short-run declines in player population (i.e. people logging off for the night), not long-run declines (i.e. fewer people playing this week than last week). In the long run birth rates stay the same no matter how many or few players there are. What changes is the number of towns alive at any one time.
Maybe what you're seeing is because of the temperature changes. If you're not keeping as warm as other people, you'll see a big drop in your own birth rate.
Well my personal hate of IP laws is just how people can abuse the length of them. There's no sensible reason for copyright to last like 70 years or whatever the heck it is (edit: yeesh, the authors whole life plus 70 years), or trademark lasting literally forever if used forever. You can of course, give up the rights later after you've made your mark and people generally know who to credit the original work.
Even people who "hate IP laws" should be very happy about trademark. Trademark laws don't benefit the holders of them, they benefit the public. They exist so that the public knows who made which product and can have some confidence that when they buy Thing X they're getting the same thing as the last time they bought Thing X (because the brand is tied to the manufacturer and the manufacturer bears the reputational cost of ensuring the quality of their products).
It serves the function of trademark - and thus, serves the public interest - for trademark rights to persist as long as the trade in the trademarked product persists. That's why they never expire as long as they continue to be used. And again, that's a good thing for everyone.
btw how big is it that circle diameter or radius?
Depends on how big the spiral has grown. In the video he rescales everything dynamically so that the spirals and circles take up most of the entire screen. When there's a new burst of a filled-in circle the circle is small, and then as time goes by and it becomes just a chase around the circumference then the circle is large.
mric wrote:why is it a circle ?
Every time the server is spawning a new Eve it picks the next location along a spiral with a constant pitch (of around 2000 tiles I believe).
Each new spawn point on the Eve spawn spiral is 250 tiles away from the previous one.
What's the specifics behind the visualization? Is it just births, or does longevity come into play? How does a string of births in one general location over time affect what gets displayed?
holy smokes that's amazing