What drama? this pales in comparison to Derpygate :V

edited 9th Feb '13 1:28:22 AM by AceOfScarabs

doublepost, lol

edited 9th Feb '13 1:28:29 AM by AceOfScarabs

Thank goodness for tablets. Safely back in the ol home state.

It's not nearly as easy as just swapping in a new spritesheet — especially not for a project with characters as rich as the ones they were drawing from. You have hitboxing issues, have to redo animation linkage from scratch, most of every character's moveset is something that doesn't translate well to a random OC.

The engine was basically done — buggy, but operational — a year ago. All this development time was the characters. Even reusing the code base, you're looking at another year before anything lawyer-friendly is done.

Seriously though, when your series creator is offering to go way out of her way to throw a bone to the targets of litigation done in part on her behalf, you done goofed. <3 Lauren.

Also, fimfiction appears to be inundated with Pokemon-in-Equestria for some reason. Was there a memo or something?

edited 9th Feb '13 2:12:52 AM by Pykrete

Surely the character assets can be exported into M.U.G.E.N's engine.

Okay, point taken.

Still, if they ever decide to take up Lauren on her offer, that still cuts maybe a year off development time, right?

They could probably convert existing assets to Mugen without too much trouble. Well, development trouble anyway — they could well get their asses reamed by lawyers for it now that they're under an explicit C&D. With the animation and hitboxing cycles already laid out, conversion to whatever it uses would likely be tedious but not exactly a long-term thing.

If Lauren helps, she'd basically just be part of the early concept development of those new characters. You're still looking at several weeks per character just to flowchart and storyboard out movesets and general movement frames in the kind of sheer expressive depth they were pulling off, much less creating and hooking up assets and bugtesting, which typically takes up the bulk of development time in the first place.

edited 9th Feb '13 2:28:35 AM by Pykrete

It doesn't have to be them who do the conversion...

Points at EVO alpha demo leak

Well.... this sucks. This sucks harder than everything else immaginable. This guys made a work with such passion and now everything went crap :(.

I think that those from Hasbro have nothing to do with it and it's only lawyers being assholes. Honestly, if I was in the dev. team I would try to fight this at the court, because it's not f****ng right for this jackasses to doing this after being silent all this time!

Oh well, they said they're trying contacting Hasbro for this and the team had been shut down only indefinitely, so.... still hope, I guess. Plus, we still have the non-finished playable verion and the Mane six sprites can be saved for MUGEN emulators, so not all the work is going to be wasted at least. Still.... this sucks hard T__T .

edited 9th Feb '13 2:50:23 AM by kimba90

If the new O Cs are quadroped expies, it shouldn't be too hard. Maybe, the Mane 6 as cats or dogs or something? Or maybe different animals. Rarity as a mole to explain er gem abilities. Applejack as a cow. etc. They can look completely different from their pony selves, but have similar abilities.

@kimba: Trying to fight this in court would be a hilarious waste of time and money for everyone involved except for the company getting sued, because legal fees for a case that consists of 'they're saying we can't use their copyrighted intellectual property, make them stop being mean' are going to be pretty low.

It won't if they tells to the court that they didn't want to use the game for profit, and that they tried to be as legal as possible about everything, and the fact that the lawyers had been silent all this time only to show up now when they could've done this months ago. I would also talk about the freedom of artists and how about invoking copyright in the internet is a waste of time.

Sure, I wouldn't probably going to win the battle, but I would've spread my voice and make more pubblicity about this so that many other people can raise they're voices as well.

edited 9th Feb '13 3:28:36 AM by kimba90

^Sorry - 'They're saying we can't use their copyrighted intellectual property and we wished really hard that copyright law didn't exist, make them stop being mean'.

I have nothing but respect for the Fighting is Magic team, and it sucks that this has happened, but that's the risk you run making such high-profile fanworks. Copyright law may not be fair (and in this case I hold no opinion on that, except to say that Hasbro is within their rights), but it's a reality. You can't budget and plan on how you think things should be.

yeah, but I would've at least make myself be heard by many others and let other people knowing about this. It won't be much maybe, but it would still be something.

A lesson needs to be learn from this, however: never, ever, make pubblicity (or at least too much of it) of your fan games when still under development. It's obvious by now that we can't trust Hasbro this far.

edited 9th Feb '13 3:59:41 AM by kimba90

The real lesson this that we should take the current copyright law and give it a good hammering until it's in a form that actually does what it's supposed to be doing: protecting content creators.

But, you know, that takes a lot of work and people are lazy slugs.

Right... Pretty much everything I wish to say about Fighting is magic has already been said, bar this:

Seriously though, I can't work out recently if Hasbro dislikes us, Hasbro's hand keeps being being forced, or Hasbro's lawyers dislike us...

EDIT: Ack, going to have to miss the livestream. I may be able to catch it later today, else I'll watch tomorrow.

edited 9th Feb '13 5:34:53 AM by Cookoo

Yay! I got back in time! I'm also freaking sick and tired of Sharks Fin Soup!

From the previous page—- hi, Sombra! I missed you, oh glorious one!

One hour, four minutes till showtime!

Well, I guess I gotta unwatch now.

See you around.

Post of the Day #282

On a completely different (but still pony-related) topic, I was thinking about Twinkleshine, and the disparity between the doll called Twinkleshine and the character on the show who fans call Twinkleshine. While I know that many, probably most, fans think of the two as being the same character, I'm not quite so sure. The biggest difference is the fact that the doll's coloring doesn't look much like the character on the show at all, with a bigger difference than most ponies who appear in both the brushable toyline and the show (aside from Celestia, and even she was changed to be white like she's supposed to be). Also, in the case of other background ponies who also have brushable dolls, such as Lyra and Cherry Berry, the boxart resembles the character on the show more, while Twinkleshine the doll's boxart looks very different from the white unicorn background pony on the show. However, it is true that the two ponies have the same cutie mark and pink manes (although the doll's mane is a darker pink), although that isn't always a sure thing because there are sometimes other ponies in the series who have identical cutie marks, such as Minuette and Time Turner.

I'm not saying that it's wrong to call the white unicorn on the show "Twinkleshine, " since we don't have a canon name for her otherwise, and there are enough similarities to make it ambiguous. I can see how many fans would have come to the conclusion that the two are supposed to be the same pony, just that one is pink and the other is white. I just don't personally see them as being the same character necessarily. The main reason I brought this up is that I might start a fanfic that focuses on the toyline ponies (including ones who are also background ponies, such as Lyra and Cherry Berry), and I will probably base Twinkleshine in my story off of the toy version rather than the white background pony, unless something happens in canon to contradict this idea.

I am awake! With like forty minutes to spare! :D

Twenty-odd minutes to sports!

T-minus 40 minutes :D

EDIT: Never mind.

edited 9th Feb '13 6:52:25 AM by theLibrarian