![]() Hopefully SVG will prove more portable than Mono. I thought Scalable Vector Graphics (a part of HTML5) well suited to a game with simple 2D graphics. And how about more statistics, report "waldopath" as well as cycles and symbols used by a solution? And finally, how about a bit of AI, some ability for the computer to generate solutions? A freely available open source version makes such things possible. Could add ability to enforce all kinds of barriers. Could make reactors bigger of course, though I'm not keen on that. Maybe allow the input areas to be combined into one, same as can be done with the output areas. Allow more than one fuser, splitter, and sensor per reactor, things like that. Also, I wonder if a little expansion might be interesting. SpaceChem can only import and export puzzles. At the least, add in Spaghetti's tool to export and import solutions. Then, could the user interface be better? I think it can. Eliminate exploits such as particle smashing, for instance. I want to do more than merely clone SpaceChem, I want to improve it. All you have to do is view the source of the web page. Just about everyone agrees the current term of 75 or 95 years after the death of the author, who could easily live another 50 years, is far too long. Some have argued that copyright should last 5 years. Of course I don't have the exact sales numbers for SpaceChem, but we do have much more than "no idea", based on general knowledge of how successful copyrighted works perform on the market, and I see no reason why SpaceChem should be an exception. You might as well argue that we should all travel by horse so that horse breeders can have more business. So why don't we do it? Because it somehow might be unfair to a few artists, as if we can't work out another system to compensate everyone fairly. A typical ebook is perhaps 1M, so a 2T hard drive, which is approximately the same physical size as one paperback book, can hold 2 million ebooks. Libraries could have much, much larger collections while simultaneously needing far less space, would never run out of copies, there'd be no more lost and damaged books, no more returns and penalty fees for being late, no more need to travel to the library for a few books, and everything would be searchable. It's a huge and unfair burden to us all that our libraries don't go fully digital. We ought to have fully digital public libraries by now, but we can't, it's mostly illegal, thanks to copyright. It is that sort of attitude that makes copyright reform so hard. Well, I'm sorry you see matters this way. I've heard upwards of 99% of all the earnings a copyrighted product will make are within the first 5 years after publication. There always the chance that such efforts by fans can revive flagging interest. ![]() Copyright is actually very bad at the stated purpose "to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts", sometimes having the exact opposite effect as intended.Īnyway, I would guess krispykrem loves the idea of someone cloning SpaceChem on a different medium. The special interests like to talk as if those points are already settled, as if copyright is somehow the one and only true system under which art can flourish, and that's just not true. It is hardly the only way to compensate artists, nor is it the best or fairest way to all parties. What copyright really is, is a means of compensating producers of art and science. Special interests (Hollywood, the RIAA, Microsoft, Big Pharma, and others) have been waging a long propaganda campaign to convince the public that copying is stealing, causes artists to starve, discourages the creation of art, and is un-American and Communist. If you still doubt the ethics, please read up on the controversies of "intellectual property". Fans can make their own Star Wars movies. For instance, there is FreeCiv, a clone of Sid Meier's Civilization II. AMD and others can make x86 CPUs, Gnu/Linux can and did create clones and improvements of all the Unix utilities, and many games have been cloned. ![]() ![]() If you are really in doubt about the ethics of making clones, be reassured it is both perfectly ethical and legal. ![]()
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