From: Marc Heiler <shevegen@...>
Date: 2008-03-29T11:42:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Web-based games?

>  Be careful about intellectual property, especially trademarks,
>  branding, etc. You'd be surprised how many ways you can get someone to
>  hire an attorney and sue you. :)

I think people are overly nervous about this. Now let me first state 
that I do of course encourage everyone to use their own artwork, but I 
have a certain strong stance against attorney-trolls (only the trolls, 
not against attorney's in general), and in my personal experience people 
often overestimate their sue-power. But this might be that I am not 
living in the USA ;-)
I know of several projects that started (or still have) artwork that is 
claimed and used somewhere else (and before they used it).
In most cases the artwork has been replaced completely. In some cases 
even with better artwork.

My basic point actually is that, while artwork is extremely important to 
a game, I believe ultimately the logic behind the game (that it works) 
is more important - at least to "ignite" interest to other people into a 
project. (And dont get me wrong here again, I am well aware of people 
that frantically point out about "thief" - which is funny insofar 
because they are not representing anyone at all except their "concern". 
They could opt to simply not waste any time with such a game, but 
instead opt to argue and argue for long time about it...

Ok, back to another point I would like to make, and I want to make it 
rather clear, even if Rails people get mad at me:

> I would not recommend Rails for a MMORPG. It's not going to scale to
> that well.
I think that is a fair comparison, but we may disagree about the term 
MMORPG. When one says MMORPG these days I immediately think about World 
of Wa***ft.
But a browser game should be much simpler and less resource-wasting than 
that, and I think if Rails does not scale well for a simple browser 
based game, it would not be worth anything at all.


Finally, back to the thread starter:

> Who's interested in developing a few web-based games?
I am interested but only in a flexible framework. (And I unfortunately 
have time constraints as well)
What I would personally love to see would be a framework that is 
perfectly adequate to develop browser based games.

I played around ... 15 different browser based games over time, maybe 3 
of them for actually a long time (one of that I started playing in 
1999... had a quite nice concept but the korean company went bankrupt 
after some years, and a "clone" appeared which was quite nice, added a 
lot of new stuff etc... but also changed the game more and more over 
time, up to the point that it was a completely different game, with 
different problems, and the biggest problem being that "old" players 
were largely ignored when the code was "adapted"...)

So a framework for developing browser based games in an easy fashion 
would something I'd try to help out/would love to see implemented.
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