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All KSP users should report this game as it is a clear ripoff of KSP


DoctorDavinci

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Did you guys ever hear about the C&D Orbiter sent to HarvesteR in 2011? Me neither.

A flight game in early Alpha that has many times more depth than KSP will ever hope to have. Not only this does not look like a ripoff (it's a space/flight game and that's it, if you go that way Atari might as well start to sue the entire video games industry), but it will be a very serious competitor to KSP's soupodynamics if its development keeps on. Best of luck to them.

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Just now, Corona688 said:

It's a wildly popular free game engine that really wasn't designed with realistic spaceflight in mind.  The first Kraken came from Unity limitations.  The early joint problems?  Unity limitations.  The early landing leg problems?  Unity limitations.  Harvester spent years working around them.

On the original Kraken, the bugfix (coordinate system recentering) was publicly announced, and you can't exactly copyright an idea. There's also the issue that you don't even know if they made the same changes Squad made. For example, they might still be running a global coordinate system, and hiding the issues via double precision until they implement their own fix.

There is no credible evidence I've seen to suggest they stole more than ideas.

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6 minutes ago, Gaarst said:

Did you guys ever hear about the C&D Orbiter sent to HarvesteR in 2011? Me neither.

Not sure how you think it's relevant.  Orbiter is clearly a different game, this is uncanny-alley.  They might just be making an excellent ripoff, or might not.

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To be honest.... I'm pretty interested in that build your own engine system that they have... the jet engines in KSP are whack (though not as bad as they used to be).

If they do something similar with rocket engines, where you can choose different fuels, turbopump systems (gas generator cycle vs staged combustion cycle, for example), different nozzles, etc, it could be pretty cool

For it to be competetive it, of course, must be mod friendly.

I wonder if its using toy size bodies too, I think it is, but that may be a placeholder thing to show their spaceflight abilities.

Something between 1:3 and 1:1 scale plus the other elements that make it seem like they are aiming for more realism, would be quite interesting to me.

But their focus on combat systems, IR signature, etc... not so interesting to me. For my combat fix, I go to Arma (although that game's scale is a bit to small for fighter combat, its good for infantry, tank, and helicopter combat... its barely big enough for fixed wing CAS)

3 minutes ago, The Dunatian said:

Looks like a different game completely to me, albeit a much worse looking one. I mean, it hurts my eyes just to look at it. Definitely not a game that I would spend time on.

Early KSP didn't look so great either... most games in their early alpha don't look great. They clearly need to improve their textures and interface... but that might come with time.

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24 minutes ago, klgraham1013 said:

Suspicious, or just a developer finding interest in a new genre and deciding to take a crack at it.  I see nothing unreasonable about this project.  ...but maybe that's because I lived through the Doom-Clone-Apocalypse.

That's an interesting case actually:  DOOM was technically difficult when they made it.  A few years later came the hardware 3d explosion and everyone had the tools to easily imitate it.

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7 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:

And how many SimCity knock offs there are... Geesh...

The point isn't that it is a knockoff ... The point is that it is similar enough to raise questions as to the validity of this game being made from scrastch without infringing on any copyrights

Their videos are tagged as KSP on the YouTube page which can only be done if the video uploader tags KSP in the upload ... seems suspicious to me

ytfHVP3.png

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1 hour ago, Alpha 360 said:

Well they will need all the luck they can get. No game can compete with KSP. 

Ah, you haven't heard of Orbiter 2010...

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A while back ago, Cities XL was being reviewed in PCGamer. It was described in that write-up as a "new twist" for fans of SimCity... And I've seen other games use similar strategy - using tags with known games names to direct traffic to an otherwise unknown games.

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4 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

Ah, you haven't heard of Orbiter 2010...

Well I have. But I haven't played it personally. I watched Scott Manly do an episode about it and it looked pretty good. But as far as I could tell, there couldn't be many mods for it. And it didn't look very kerbal.......

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Just now, Alpha 360 said:

Well I have. But I haven't played it personally. I watched Scott Manly do an episode about it and it looked pretty good. But as far as I could tell, there couldn't be many mods for it. And it didn't look very kerbal.......

There are more mods for orbiter than for ksp.  

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6 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:

A while back ago, Cities XL was being reviewed in PCGamer. It was described in that write-up as a "new twist" for fans of SimCity... And I've seen other games use similar strategy - using tags with known games names to direct traffic to an otherwise unknown games.

A review and trying to directly market something are 2 completely different things ... Appears to me that they are trying to market their game off of KSP's popularity as the videos will show up in feeds related to KSP and when people see the video and read the comments/descriptions they find out it isn't

Marketing using another company's intellectual property is illegal in some countries ... And let's be honest, the reason for the video's are to market the upcoming release of the game to Steam

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2 minutes ago, DoctorDavinci said:

The point isn't that it is a knockoff ... The point is that it is similar enough to raise questions as to the validity of this game being made from scrastch without infringing on any copyrights

One thing to be entirely clear on here.

It can play virtually identically without infringing a single copyright. So long as they can show they wrote all their own code, and generated all their own assets, without copying anything from KSP, they're in the clear. Copyright only deals with outright copying or creation of derivative works, and says absolutely nothing about creation of similar works.

Nothing in these videos demonstrates any direct copying of code or assets. While in theory they might have copied KSP code, that would be rather easy to show the moment Take Two sued them. Nothing I've seen is something they could not have just done themselves.

 

The similarities I have seen also would not fall under:

Patents. While "is kind of similar" would infringe on a patent, "space sim" is not a patentable idea.

Trademark: Unless the developers put a Squad/KSP/Take Two logo into their game, it would not fall under this either.

Trade dress: Does not appear to be applicable, not unless they designed packaging to be similar to KSP packaging, which would raise the question of "who even distributes physical discs anymore?"

Trade secret: If any of Squad's trade secrets were violated, this would also violate copyright, since they would have to be copying KSP code or assets.

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15 minutes ago, DoctorDavinci said:

A review and trying to directly market something are 2 completely different things ... Appears to me that they are trying to market their game off of KSP's popularity as the videos will show up in feeds related to KSP and when people see the video and read the comments/descriptions they find out it isn't

Marketing using another company's intellectual property is illegal in some countries ... And let's be honest, the reason for the video's are to market the upcoming release of the game to Steam

I'm not saying what they did is right. I am merely pointing out how it can be explained away.

I am fiercely loyal to game companies, in fact, too loyal probably. When I find a game I like, I normally will buy the updated title until the game reaches the maximum lameness and suck factor OR the company quits producing the title. This is what I did with Maxis - I bought every version of SimCity they produced until they quit producing the game. And I will probably do the same thing with Civilization and a few other games...

Chances are, I won't buy this game. The similarities are too glaring for me. It is probably programmed by someone who had butt-hurt over some part of KSP they felt needed to be changed and was ignored. In fact, the way I see it, it was only a matter of time. I am pretty sure Take Two and Squad (calling on @Darth Badie here) probably know about this knock-off. And if they were doing something illegal in creating it, Take Two has a staff of lawyers on retainer that would love to play games with these folks... :D

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6 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:

I'm not saying what they did is right. I am merely pointing out how it can be explained away.

I am fiercely loyal to game companies, in fact, too loyal probably. When I find a game I like, I normally will buy the updated title until the game reaches the maximum lameness and suck factor OR the company quits producing the title. This is what I did with Maxis - I bought every version of SimCity they produced until they quit producing the game. And I will probably do the same thing with Civilization and a few other games...

Chances are, I won't buy this game. The similarities are too glaring for me. It is probably programmed by someone who had butt-hurt over some part of KSP they felt needed to be changed and was ignored. In fact, the way I see it, it was only a matter of time. I am pretty sure Take Two and Squad (calling on @Darth Badie here) probably know about this knock-off. And if they were doing something illegal in creating it, Take Two has a staff of lawyers on retainer that would love to play games with these folks... :D

Yes, thank you for sharing it! :wink: 

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8 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:

I am merely pointing out how it can be explained away.

Of course, however anything and everything can be explained away although in some cases it takes a lot of mental gymnastics to do it :wink:

The similarities between part names and the cokpit models to other KSP mods is striking and could just be coincidence, however the YouTube videos are all tagged as KSP which has to be intentionally done by the uploader ... could just be a case of a false advertising type deal on the uploaders part but this begs to question if there is something more nefarious going on here

Hence my creation of this thread

 

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Please don't start some sort of crusade... One should always consider the phenomenon of convergent evolution - completely independent arrivals at the same basic solution for the same problem. It is, however, very disingenuous of the author to have labelled the videos as KSP. That's something to get a mild bap on the head for. And it definitely is arguable that it's taking a bit too much inspiration in certain places - the UI, etc.

But calling it "reskinned" is patently absurd. You don't just "reskin" a Unity game. Even with KSP's mod system it would involve vast amounts of custom code loaded in via the plugin system to effectively delete the base game, massive amounts of custom parts, etc, by which point you might as well be making your own game already. Faking everything, in part using KSP, to give the appearance of a more complete game than is there, is equally absurd, especially because actual downloads are being offered by the author upon request for an invite, and a charade like that would be broken the moment the first tester ran the game.

And in my own opinion, if a game comes along and does what KSP tries to do, but better, then it deserves recognition. Time will tell how this turns out. I would hope for the author's sake that there isn't any funny business going on.

Oh, and lastly, to everyone calling it ugly - this is what KSP looked like a few years ago:

kBfhs.jpg

 

Edit: Lastly pt. 2: DoctorDavinci, maybe you shouldn't flaunt your screenshots that plainly show your torrent site bookmarks

Edited by NovaSilisko
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