KickStarter Free Stars: Children of Infinity - upcoming Star Control 2 sequel from original creator Fred Ford

[MRY]

In all seriousness, the SC3 engine seems like it could more than accommodate the Ghosts of the Precusor game, and that would maybe make it possible for GotP to come out.

 

[Elestan]

In all seriousness, the SC3 engine seems like it could more than accommodate the Ghosts of the Precusor game, and that would maybe make it possible for GotP to come out.

The SC3 engine? From 1996? I presume you mean the new SC:Origins engine from Stardock.

We don't know the terms of the settlement, but that seems very unlikely unless the case settled because Reiche and Ford ran out of money and had to give up their rights. Back in 2002, they released their fictional game universe free for anyone to use non-commercially (as the UQM project), but they've also been clear that they don't want it moved to commercial engines, because they plan to make their own sequel game someday (which is what they started to do when Stardock sued them in 2017).

I suppose if Stardock were to release their engine for free under a non-commercial license, then anyone could bring the SC2 universe to it. But I don't see Stardock doing that.

 

[TheDiceMustRoll]

So.

Brad seems happy: https://twitter.com/draginol/status/1137162780321222657

The Case has been dismissed with prejudice: https://forum.quartertothree.com/up.../5153f68750fb96e83e4483f0ff8c504d5dbe6810.png

Something is going on: http://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/ttabvue-91243698-OPP-17.pdf


Infinitron Can you scrounge up more data?

 

[ERYFKRAD]

So.

Who in Balor's blue butt encourages usage of So as a standalone sentence?

 

[Dreed]

So.

Who in Balor's blue butt encourages usage of So as a standalone sentence?

 

[LESS T_T]

E3 announcement coming...?: https://www.dogarandkazon.com/blog/2019/6/8/unexpected-message-from-space

An Unexpected Message from Deep Space!

Stardock® and Frungy Games™ (Fred and Paul) are happy and relieved to announce that all parties have settled their disputes amicably and in a way where the fans of Star Control® and The Ur-Quan Masters™ are the biggest winners. Stay tuned to Channel 44 for more details next week from the E3 floor!

Brad is also teasing:



And also confirmed the next Star Control from them is coming:

 

[LESS T_T]

Oh yeah, also Stardock nuked threads about the case on their forums and F&P nuked their older blog posts. Likely part of the settlement.

edit: The sketch galleries are still there fortunately:
https://www.dogarandkazon.com/sketchbook_1/
https://www.dogarandkazon.com/starship-discovery-ii/

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

A document filed at the Trademark Appeals Board today indicates that the parties have reached a settlement. Terms are not yet known, other than that P&F are no longer opposing the "Star Control" mark.

Could it be that both parties stopped being raging autists? I don't think my geriatric heart can take this.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I’m not sure anyone knows exactly what this was about, but I seriously doubt autism had much to do with it.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

I'm sure they're going to give back all the crowdfunding money.

 

[MRY]

“Hey Frogboy, it seems like you keep winning lawsuits!”
“Yeah. You might say it’s my...”

“Trademark.”

 

[LESS T_T]

They're back:

 

[A_boring_GOG_bot]

Still missing from the Gog catalog .

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Wouldn't surprise me if GOG rejected the old Star Control games now, as they're "a niche game" without a market base, or whatever that canned response is that they throw around these days.

 

[MRY]

My favorite part about this post:

Stardock® and Frungy Games™ (Fred and Paul) are happy and relieved to announce that all parties have settled their disputes amicably and in a way where the fans of Star Control® and The Ur-Quan Masters™ are the biggest winners. Stay tuned to Channel 44 for more details next week from the E3 floor!

Is the (tm) and (r) everywhere, except from E3, which is also trademarked.

Spoiler

In before the ESA sues everyone and takes IP. In the meanwhile, drink your aqua cola!

 

[LESS T_T]

Huh:

 

[LESS T_T]

This is a story about bees and mead : https://www.dogarandkazon.com/blog/2019/6/11/the-only-way-to-win-is

TL;DR: They dropped all challenges to each other; Stardock keep make Star Control games and P&F make Ur-Quan Masters games (Ghosts of the Precursors will be renamed because it's generic); they'll cooperate each other's work. P&F will consult Stardock's work and Stardock offered to provide technology; both parties equally share revenues from the classic games; Paul enjoyed Origins

The Only Way to Win is...

So what the Dickens is going on?! Well before we get to the details, let's step backwards in time a couple of months -- to a psycho-history-ish meeting where we and our lawyers were analyzing the various win and lose scenarios for the litigation most of you know so well. What amazed us was that the distinction between the most likely winning and losing scenarios was probably going to be relatively small. Worse yet, the negatives in all cases (loss of time, money, sanity, not to mention further fan community strife) were predicted to grow dramatically over the next few months. As a fan of WARGAMES (starring a young Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy), I remembered WOPR's wisdom. After calculating every Global Thermonuclear War scenario the super-computer concluded that, "The only way to win is not to play the game." This seemed like a worthy approach. Now we'd tried court-managed settlement with no progress and private mediation was also proving to be as elusive as the Questing Beast. So we decided to throw a bit of a Hail Mary pass and just call Brad Wardell directly -- something he'd actually suggested more than a year earlier -- but first, we needed to find some kind of common ground which turned out to be... bees. Yes, bees.

Seriously. Bees?

I (Paul) have a life-long dream of learning every Medieval villager skill. Raising bees has always been on my list, so that I could make mead (wine) from honey. I decided to cut out the middle-man (middle bug?) and just buy honey, but my desire to raise bees remained. So when we called Brad Wardell my first sentence was something like, "Before I start talking about settling our legal conflict, I'd like to talk about bees." The conversation about bees, honey, mead, and bee stings went on for quite a while before we moved on to the talking about the case. Our perspective was this: we don't like fighting, but we love creating, so can we step waaay outside the box and settle our dispute through positive, creative actions rather than continuing to beat each other up? Brad listened and agreed, and this became the basis for settlement. Our lawyers are all smart, professionals with their client's best interest in mind, but it's worth considering that it was only when we communicated directly with each other that we made progress.

Details

• The terms are not confidential. We won't be publishing the text of the agreement, but we are free to describe all of its contents.
  
  
• This is honestly and truly an amicable settlement. Not only are we settling the lawsuit, but we’ve decided to support each other’s development so that the fan community gets two great games.
  
  
• There is no 'loser'. All sides win, because we are no longer burning money, creative energy and the goodwill of our fans.
  
  
• No money changed hands. We’re not only halting the lawsuit, but we’re committed to supporting each other’s projects and working together to rebuild the cracks in the fan community.
  
  
• There is a weird paragraph in the agreement that involves bees. Seriously — no kidding. Brad Wardell is giving Fred and Paul honey from his hives and Paul is giving Brad some bottles of his homemade mead. Brad will also be giving Paul advice in how not to be stung. The lawyers thought this was pretty dang crazy. This goes to show you can find common ground in the strangest (and most delicious) of places.
  
  
• Stardock will create new games in the Star Control franchise. Paul & Fred will create new games in the Ur-Quan Masters franchise.
  
  
• To help differentiate the two franchises Paul volunteered to create a few new alien races for Origins.
  
  
• Brad offered to help Fred and Paul with technology.
  
  
• Stardock dropped all its alien name and character trademarks and all parties have dropped their oppositions to each other’s trademarks.
  
  
• Both sides recognize each other’s copyrights and will not challenge them in the future.
  
  
• We were able to come to a very specific understanding on the alien characters and races — how they look and act. Stardock is dropping all trademark registration of the alien names and won't use the described aliens without permission from Paul & Fred.
  
  
• Star Control, Star Control II, and Star Control III will be coming back for sale by Stardock so that fans of all ages can enjoy the classic games in their original form. Paul and Fred will split royalties equally with Stardock.
  
  
• Stardock, and Brad in particular, is supportive of Paul and Fred owning the Ur-Quan Masters trademark. All of us are committed to support the current UQM team and project, including their having a free, perpetual right to use the Ur-Quan Masters trademark for their amazing fan-powered recreation of the original game.
  
  
• Stardock accepts that Paul & Fred are the creators of Star Control and Star Control II. Both parties agree that many other skilled people also contributed their talent and creativity to help make the games so great.
  
  
• Paul and Fred will be changing the name "Ghosts of the Precursors" to something a little less generic -- (come on, you know we can do better!). The precise ‘when’ is unclear, but it is still several years off.
  
  
• The settlement resolved all issues with all the parties, including Valve and GOG.
  
  
• Paul enjoyed Origins enough to spend over 50 intense hours playing the game. He thought the jokes in the alien dialog were genuinely very funny and he was blown away by how beautifully interplanetary travel was rendered. Paul was especially delighted that he could remap the control keys to his beloved SpaceWar! configuration.
  
  
• We are honestly very, very happy with the way everything has settled. No Dnyarri mental compulsion was needed.

Ars Techinca's interview/article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019...creators-settle-lawsuits-with-mead-and-honey/

 

[ERYFKRAD]

• There is a weird paragraph in the agreement that involves bees. Seriously — no kidding. Brad Wardell is giving Fred and Paul honey from his hives and Paul is giving Brad some bottles of his homemade mead. Brad will also be giving Paul advice in how not to be stung. The lawyers thought this was pretty dang crazy. This goes to show you can find common ground in the strangest (and most delicious) of places.

Frogboy is the apiary suit not 100% bee proof?

 

[LESS T_T]

Stardock's press release: https://www.stardock.com/games/arti...-team-up-on-next-star-control-game-beekeeping

Stardock, Paul Reiche to team up on next
Star Control game, beekeeping
Dispute settlement paves way for new games, new DLC and lots of honey


Plymouth, MI. - June 11, 2019 - Game Developers Stardock Entertainment, Paul Reiche and Fred Ford have amicably settled the dispute concerning the tangled intellectual property rights that surrounded the 30-year old game franchise.

In a statement released by Paul Reiche on their website, Mr. Reiche wrote, "Paul and Fred have offered to volunteer their own creativity to Origins by teaming up with Brad to create some new aliens and plot lines for Stardock's future Star Control games."

The settlement agreement, while itself confidential, expressly makes the terms available to the public.

"Paul and I both insisted to the lawyers that the terms should not be confidential," said Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock. "We really wanted to make sure the fans didn't have to speculate on how we came together on this and that it was genuinely something that resulted in both sides getting what they wanted out of the situation."

The dispute revolved around the murky dividing line between what trademarks cover and what copyrights cover. Stardock claimed the trademarks to the classic series and Paul Reiche claimed the copyrights. The issue came to a head when both parties announced new games that appeared related to Star Control.

After a year of litigation, the dispute was ultimately solved by Reiche calling Wardell directly, bypassing the lawyers, and the two finding a lot of common ground on a wide range of topics ranging from game design to beekeeping.

"The magic trick to resolving this was just picking up the phone and calling each other directly," said Reiche. "Brad suggested this back in 2017 and it worked! By talking directly to each other, we were actually able to put something together that we both liked before all the legal mumbo-jumbo got in the way."

Once the two talked about what each really cared about, coming to a resolution was swift.

"We figured out what we wanted in just a couple hours of talking," said Wardell. "The rest of the time was the lawyers smithing out exact, agonizingly precise, verbiage. That took much longer. Usually these things claim to be amicable but it's just both sides trying to spin things. In this case, it really was amicable."

The agreement itself, in true Star Control fashion, includes a substantial amount of levity.

"We added a section in which I'll be working with Paul on beekeeping. He's going to send me some meade, I'm going to send him some honey," said Wardell. "I don't think the lawyers were particularly enthusiastic about us incorporating some of this into the agreement. I did a tutorial video on beekeeping I was going to send over but got stung in the video, so thought better than to actually send it."

With respect to the specific terms, the classic Star Control games will return for sale on Steam and GOG as they were before, along with the alien music DLC that had been removed while the teams resolved the IP questions.

In addition, the trademark and copyright questions were put to rest with the agreement spelling out the copyrighted IP that Reiche and Ford care about along with the trademarks that Stardock cares about, with each party agreeing to respect these boundaries in their use in the future.

Star Control: Origins is available on Steam and GOG for $29.99. The expansion pack, Earth Rising, is due to be completed this Fall. Stardock and Paul Reiche plan to begin work on the new Star Control game together this Fall.

More information and details will become available in the near future as Brad, Paul and Fred will be hanging out at E3 together and meeting with the press to discuss the future of games, the fascinating yet unintuitive way the legal system works, and anything else that comes up.

To read the full release, visit here.

The homepage for Star Control is www.starcontrol.com

 

[Infinitron]

(You guys totally have could done this a year ago though.)

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Still missing from the Gog catalog .

https://af.gog.com/game/star_control_i_ii?as=1649904300
https://af.gog.com/game/star_control_iii?as=1649904300

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Definitely will put money into the fund.

Wardell is like frakking Clive Palmer, a bombastic, narcissistic, unethical, ruthless bully and asshole who uses lawfare as his preferred choice of destroying opposition. It was obvious early in the piece that he would go down this path, which was why I questioned him and his motives, to which he reacted in the predictable way that all egomaniacs respond when questioned. Other people's lives mean nothing to people like Wardell and Palmer, although they are not above making pretenses at "ethicality" when it suits their propaganda purposes. Palmer, too, was not badly thought of, even loved, until the scandals of Queensland Nickle and Coolum Resort blew up. I can only hope that this will be Bardell's Queensland Nickle.

As the Hokkiens would say: Fuck your mom's dirty, smelly cunt, Bardell (with a 10-foot rusty halberd; you don't want any part of yourself anywhere near that).

Nice dialect/language to swear in, Hokkien. I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in swearing.

Did you do it?

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

This is so weird. Never would have expected a happy ending to this all. Just goes to show: kill the lawyers and the world’s most insurmountable challenges can be solved (Sorry MRY ).

 

[MRY]

Nonsense. Notwithstanding this mead and honey talk, the situational was intractable BEFORE lawyers got involved. It was only the crucible of litigation that melted away the hard feelings!

 

[Adidas-Clichèd Cringe]

Well thank fuck that's finally over with.