From: bc@fccn01.fccn.pt (Luis Miguel Sequeira)
Newsgroups: rec.games.pbm
Subject: BattleTech PBeM Development Group
Date: 16 Nov 1992 05:09:42 -0600
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

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 B A T T L E T E C H   P B e M   D E V E L O P M E N T   G R O U P

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	Well, hope you've got all a nice weekend. For myself, I found
my mailbox bombarded with suggestions...

	First of all, thanks to all. It seems that the idea has its
supporters, and that a development group can be formed after all...

	Secondly, my apologies if I incorrectly forgot someone when
quoting what I read. I must admit that I have the nasty habit of
deleting half of the stuff I most want. Some things I remember by
heart, but I forget the authors. So, for instance, it was John Woolsey
(wool8657@mach1.wlu.ca) who suggested firstly the creation of a
BattleTech PBeM some days ago, but this was an answer to someone who
asked about it (and whose name I inevitably lost...).

	I thought of just layering out some aspects of the game
structure in itself, and trying to get some people discussing the
rules, others on the implementation, etc., but it seems unfair not to
make any comments about all the suggestions received.

	Before I go on, I must admit that, while having enjoyed the
fun of some battles with 'mechs, I'm by no means an expert, not even
someone who's familiar with the game. As you may have noticed, I've an
incredible bad memory, and while I may remember some of the essentials
of the rules, I forget most trivial stuff. Thus, if any of my
suggestions or comments on the rules are really stupid, please excuse
me. I promise I'll read the BattleTech Compendium again...

	On the other hand, I - as a few of you have pointed out - am
also not interested in doing *all* the hard work ("lazy" is the word).
My idea is to work the least possible on this, while enjoying the
final product! So, what's easier than to grab some of you BT freaks
out there, and get the work done? :-) Seriously, I really expect a
*LOT* of help - or I won't even start considering writing a line of
code (to be very honest, there ARE a few lines of code already
written, but they have nothing to do with the BattleTech rules).

	Ok, let's start with some thoughts for today:

LEGAL ASPECTS
*************

	Seems that this what quite a point for discussion! Some, I
believe, were more interested in discussing copyright issues than in
making suggestions to the game. Well, well... what about a PBeM called
"Bureaucracy - Law, Lawyers, Paperwork & Red Tape"?

	Let's begin with Matt (burgesmw@cnsvax.uwec.edu)

>   I don't think that it is illegal to make a game designed after the
>Battletech system if it is not for profit.  Most copyrights are there to keep
>people from making money off of a product they did not design.  There was a
>Battletech MUD game (that is supposed to be back soon) and it is said that it
>follows Battletech very closely.  As I said, there is also a computer game that
>was designed using the Battletech system, as a Shareware program (I believe). 
>As long as there is no money involved, I do not think FASA would mind.  Of
>course, we are not talking about a large volume of people and we are to
>insignifigant to matter.  8)

Obviously, Steve Chapin (sjc@cs.purdue.edu) disagrees:

>Not true.  You are siphoning off potential revenue.  I'd advise you
>not to even think about doing this without getting their permission
>first.
>
>Copyrights are not there to protect the rights of the author(s).

So, seems to me that a permission is needed. That looks reasonable.

But Matt goes further on:

>If not, then you should ask them.  
>
>I think you realize that what you're defending is patently illegal (ie,
>will certainly infringe on their copyright) but that they will not
>prosecute.  I would add that they may well not and that they would
>be more favorably inclined to you now then in court (if it ever came to
>that).

Ok, seems that his point of view is the following: it may be illegal,
but they won't bother to prosecute, as they aren't really losing much
(just a violation of their copyright, as I seem to gather from the
above).

Heh heh. Good that we're talking about FASA, and not IBM or Apple...

Still from Matt:

>I wonder if you could make a BattleTech "aid" that would fulfill much
>the same purpose but not actually include copyrighted material and not
>be useful without prchasing FASA goods.  In that case I don't think
>FASA would be likely to su or likely to win if they did.

Hmmmm... change FASA, replace with TSR, and the answer is NOT!!! Just
try to bring about something which mentions any of TRS's games without
their permission... just try!

But FASA, as I mentioned before, is a smaller company and not so
aggressive.


Well, then we have Greg (gl8f@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU):

>>I think you realize that what you're defending is patently illegal (ie,
>>will certainly infringe on their copyright) but that they will not
>>prosecute.
>
>It's amazing how many Usenet lawyers will pop out of the woodwork over
>questions like this.

Ten points, Greg. Agreed!
(what about a new newsgroup about copyright laws?)


Still from Steve Chapin:

>}} In article <1e0v87INNj8v@bredbeddle.cs.purdue.edu> sjc@cs.purdue.edu (Steve Chapin) writes:
>}} 
>}} Copyrights are not there to protect the rights of the author(s).
>
>This is an obvious misstatement :-)
>
>I meant to say:
>
>Copyrights are not there to stop others from making money off an
>authors work, they are there to protect the rights of the authors.
>
>But on editing for brevity, I inadvertaently left in the "not."

Oops. Too much legalese for me. Well is it... or is it NOT?

And now to Matt Crawford (matt@severian.chi.il.us):

>>Alan Mead:
>>>I think you realize that what you're defending is patently illegal (ie,
>>>will certainly infringe on their copyright) but that they will not
>>>prosecute.
>
>Greg Lindahl:
>>It's amazing how many Usenet lawyers will pop out of the woodwork over
>>questions like this.
>
>
>I think my esteemed colleague has made a rare error.  It is not the
>least bit amazing.
>
>Saddening, perhaps, but not amazing.

Hmm. I'll think I'll watch some old Perry Mason films. This is going
too far, isn't it?

Well, let's put an end to this with John Woolsey's suggestion:

>If the game is free it is difficult to sue. This is because you usually end
>up sueing for profits, and there aren't any. Basically all they can do is
>shut you down. This is what I have heard anyways. I wouldn't ask FASA about
>the legal rights they are not impartial. Go talk to a lawer first.

Excellent! So if I do something for free, everyone has fun, and I
don't get sued.

>>	This could lead to the development to a PBeM on a "clone
>>world" without any mention to FASA's BattleTech, if no other options
>>were available.
>Why not. Most of the art in the orriginal BattleTech books were photo-copies
>out of RoboTech. All of the orriginal mechs also sucked because they
>attempted to emulate the mechs in RoboTech, which according the battleTech
>equations of constructability didn't work at all. For example a RifleMan is
>really a Radar X, and cannot fire all of its weapons at the same time
>without risking explosion. What a good mech design :-)

Yeah, sure. FASA has dirty hands, so they won't sue *us* for that...
or are they? I still remember Apple vs. Microsoft over GUI
"look-and-feel", when everyone knows that Steve Jobs got all the stuff
from the Xerox PARC. Only Xerox didn't bother with sueing anyone about
*computer stuff*; they only see fotocopies (sorry, I meant xerocopies)
in front of them...


>Sueing out of the country is very difficult if not impossible. Why do you
>think FASA got away with ripping off RoboTech.

Hah! This is what I wanted to hear: if I run the game here on my site,
and having the local representative of FASA as a personal friend (and
a good one, too), nobody bothers *me*, right? (My friend would even
actively support it!)

Ok, I've enough of it. I consider the following to be true:

1) If I use FASA's BattleTech trademarked name, and their copyrighted
ideas in any way, I am doing something obviously illegal;

2) However, this is going to be used without profit; so, they won't
sue me because they can't sue me for profit (but they could still jail
me, couldn't they?? :-)

3) On the other hand, if the computer running the PBeM is off the
States, they cannot sue me either, as this seems to be difficult. (But
could they jail the people who worked in the project?)

4) Finally, I'll change the name to WarTech, so they can't sue me if
they want. Unless, of course, they sue for the same "look-and-feel" of
my Battlehammer, Parauder and Night Hawk 'mechs (oops, I mean
"warbots").



BACK TO REALITY
***************

	Sure it was nice to discuss legal matters, but this wasn't
really what I wanted to hear. In any case, it seems to me that I'll
write to the FASA people anyway (or get my friend to talk personally
to them, as he's often in the States).

	I have noted all suggestions I received. Many were obvious
comments on my bad knowledge of the rules. Seems that many of my
"problems" (for instance, converting the BT rules into an abstract
game) were simply my ignorance of the vast amount of rules, which
cover almost anything... I'll do my homework better next time.

	So, from now on I'll abstain from making any more suggestions
on the rules themselves (letting that to *you*), and stick with
the global organization & coding parts.


STRUCTURE
*********

	I've hinted at this before, but I'll try to be more precise
this time. The PBeM development will have some distinct parts, each
with its own characteristics, and each of you may prefer "working" on
some of them. Many letters I got were from people who know the game,
and make fabulous suggestions on the rules, but don't feel comfortable
on the coding part; others, as myself, prefer the coding part, knowing
just enough of the rules to find the idea attractive; others still
offer their help in any way (but don't state how!!).

	Ok, to keep all of you happy, let's get this organized:


	A) Rules

	This will need a large group of people just to discuss the
rules, the settings, and so on. Please don't concern yourselves (yet)
with low-level implementation details. I've seen that some people
don't want the OmniMechs thrown in, just because they give a lot of
trouble to program. While I agree :-), this doesn't mean that sometime
in the future someone wants to "code the Clans", and add that to the
rules...

	What I mean is: think about the general idea (i. e., a global
game with economics/politics, but also with a strong emphasis on the
local battlefields, but not like the arena games), add some nice
features, think about things you'd like to see on a PBeM, and leave
the dirty work to the brute-force coders... (hah!)

	I'll sum up some of the new ideas on my next post.

	B) Implementation

	Ok, there's here much to be done, and some things can even
start now without rules.

	1) Mail Reception

	There are zillions of ways to do this, and John Woolsey
already suggested one:

>I offer flagship as a site, but I will not do much coding other then linking
>things together. Flagship is a PC Based site that uses UUCP to connect to
>the world. This may be an advantage since it will allow the PC based
>programmers out there to work on the game. SFACS works like this:
>parser module reads in moves, and responds back to users.
>
>Fighter module does general maintenence, lists fighters, finds fighters, and
>adds a whole bunch of nice subroutines that generally help the world. It is
>responsible for loading the database into memory. Since I am using windows
>there is no logical ram limit, and thus my database will work all in memory
>regardless. It also calls a procedure fightscn with the appropriate
>warriors.
>
>FightScn is simply the FightScene procedure which does the complete combat.
>There is also a common code module.
>
>FightRec. This common code includes the data record, and all of the weapon
>types defined in a constant. It will include all of the armour types as well
>when they become properly implemented.

	Seems like a very good starting point, but there are
alternatives. Let's hear about 'em!

	2) Order parsing

	Once I wrote a small PBeM, and what it did was to parse orders
with yacc and add them to a database. Later on, the database was
sorted in a meaningful way (the rules stated that all moves were
simultaneous - yep, but what does that mean??), and loaded by the main
program.

	But I think we'll really need something better than that...

	3) Database processing

	Well, here comes trouble spot #1. I suggest something ISAM
based, with source code readily available averywhere, but I know each
one will have some better suggestion! (SQL servers of the world, join
yourselves)

	One group will be specifically assigned to mantaining the
database. This doesn't only mean "yeah, here's my own isam/B-Tree
database, just added a few primitives to call it from your main
program, and hey presto! - instant database". There must be also a few
useful tools available to extract meaninful data from it, just for
debugging tests. Also remember that the people who write the rules
aren't interested in how many bytes you'll save for the 'mechs name...

	Even if you aren't a BT fan, any helpful advices on mantaining
a successful database are really wanted. Show examples of what you've
got or found on other PBMs, or how this problems were solved
ingeniously by other people.

	4) Rules coding

	There are many ways to do it, of course, and here we'll get to
the old "war" on the language of coding!

	I'm even considering to get beyond this by simply suggesting
to develop a new language! After all, why not? I've seen languages for
MUDs & text adventures, why not for PBMs? Perhaps there is already
something done on this subject, or we could get some of this languages
and adapt them for our means?

	This language, if ever developed, would be quite a nice touch
for many who don't want to learn C (or Pascal, or whatever) just to
help with the game, but who know the rules. If the rules could be
described in some meaningful, organized way, then we could just
compile it...

	(or interpret it. No full-scale compilers, please. No
portability, you know? Unless it generates code in C...)

	5) Reports generation

	There are at least 2 ideas I've got on this:

	5.1) Witty comments

	Really, getting lines like

	Mech #64876 45% damage 34% fuel 76% so-and-so

	aren't fun!

	So what about a report generator with lots of different
messages? Just to write them all and present them would be work
enough. Specially if you put them in a sort of database (also), and
even permit messages on other languages, too (am I going too far??)...

	5.2) PostScript printouts

	Yep, why not? Anyone knows PostScript?

	6) Mailing reports back

	This seems that the people who did B.1) will be doing B.6) as
well.

	7) Technical support :-)

	Those are the guys who keep the game running, who write
newsletters about it, who discuss rules with the players, who create
tables with best 'mehs, etc, and WHO WRITE THE RULES (this is more
trouble than you think. Most games I've ever received the rules of are
just a descriptions of what the orders do! That's like explaining your
characteristics in a RPG, but forgetting to tell the players HOW they
should play).

	

	Well, my time is running out...

	Until the next megaton of suggestions,


			Luis Sequeira
			& a lot of others including
	
			Adrian
			Chris Hilton
			Jamie C Pole
			Jesse Taylor
			John Woolsey
			Jonny the Z
			Matt Crawford
			Matt Burges
			Steve Chapin

I've missed a lot of names; please forgive me and mail me again! :-)