Alberto Salvia Novella

If I was in that situation I would host any feasible service on external platforms, as long as those platforms had the needed features and are cost effective. For example hosting code on GitLab. That will cut maintenance and risks of data lost.

As instructed by the domain hoster, sent a message to the owner of the domain using whois.pairdomains.com.

Sent a message to the team at modb.com.

I have also requested the domain hoster to pass this message to the domain owner.

By the way: And I'm not receiving new email notifications for new messages in this forum, so probably the email server is down too.

@Melan@admin@nbohr1more@greebo@modetwo@modetwoadmin@taaaki@grayman@New Horizon@Springheel@SteveL Is the person in charge aware of the problem? By the way I have emailed team|at|thedarkmod.com without response.

If I was in that situation I would move the source repository into gitlab.com, and just get the missions from there.

And svn.thedarkmod.com is also down.

The mission server seems to be down, the game cannot connect to it.

Personally whatever work I put in something I do with the perspective of it being mostly unattended later on. This way I can manage an amount of things that normally it would be imposible. For example when packaging the Dark Mod for Arch I designed it in a way that, once implemented, it won't need my supervision later on. Except perhaps in case of anomaly. Everything is automatically detected and handled by software, even the package version itself is read from web pages and the list of game files are generated automatically on any future update. For the moment being I don't see the way of doing that on all those platforms, it seems it would require permanent dedication. Publishing in more sites and platforms seems a work-around to me, while the real fix lies on the licensing.

It looks a bit hairy, as that would require architecting the software for a container and then maintaining it. It cannot be as automated as my package in Arch.

I just realized an easy way to promote the game close to what we are talking here, which is publishing it on Flathub. I will have a look at that.

Actually legal entities are there to separate your personal assets from the project assets in case of demand. Otherwise your personal goodies are already exposed. If you are behind a legal entity they cannot take more than what the legal entity owns. What remembers me of this video. By the way Steam Support replied with an useless generic message:

The message to Steam Support has been:

That wouldn't be difficult to pay, since we are plenty of people here. I give $25. They simply say "you shouldn’t publish on Steam content you don’t own or have adequate rights to", but they say nothing about you having to accurately proof it. Nevertheless I'm going to ask them, and post their reply here. Likely that would lead to the same result.

I don't think the lack of a full campaign is the reason, being that there are plenty of great quality campaigns. At least the friends I showed the game to didn't feel that was a problem. I think the problem is more basic than that: when people are browsing new games to play they don't find The Dark Mod in that situation. It doesn't have to do with how many prizes or news you can find about the game, it's when raw searching on Google or in gaming platforms when it's most critical it to be discoverable.

Then some music.

I understand. Nevertheless I would have a look if the Steam situation is solvable. By the way what I did for finding this game simply was googling "open source games". I usually find the games that I play either through Google or Steam. Thanks for your comments ?

Games like Amnesia, Soma, Lost In Vivo, resemble a lot this one, and are highly played. The problem is nobody knows about it! It doesn't matter how good it is if nobody can see it. The game will only see the success it deserves when being on a gaming platform, or completely libre. Then gamers will promote it by themselves.

Now look at these games and tell me which ones are likely way better or more fun than the Dark Mod: These games above belong to the most famous, top rated, most played libre games group. I have tried all of them and they look quite ugly, but specially their game dynamics are horrible. Nearly all of them aren't fun at all. The point here is that any of these, or any other libre game, is more played and known than the Dark Mod. And being all their contents under the CC-BY-SA license, never anyone got commercial benefit out of them. Why? Because that would imply making their own game under the same conditions. They would either get another libre game, or people taking the contents and making libre clones. So that what you fear never happened in practice. We are better talking to the copyright holders themselves and get the real facts about what they think about this. And anybody disappeared I read as this: "I don't give a damn about the license, more than you not making money for free from my own work or doing nasty things with it".

I could contact each of those still alive sites, and ask them if we could use no more than the already gotten textures under the CC-BY-SA license with the warrant that the Dark Mod will never become a commercial product. This way the original intention of their license scheme is preserved, to monetize if you monetize, and the copyright holder will see no compelling reason to oppose or to report those textures. And in the unlikely situation that someone I couldn't contact decided to report in the future, it would be for a fraction of the assets. Then it would be viable to handle the situation.

Could you provide me a link to those repositories, so I can talk with them?

When I started playing the Dark Mod with a friend of mine we were quite surprised that such good game was not so well known. But after promoting it on libre gaming sites, as result of making a packager for it, I now discovered why is that. On one hand the game isn't on digital distribution platforms, which is the main way for proprietary games to get known. But more importantly the game media is licensed under a non comercial license. This results in libre gaming communities refusing to promote it, and the wide majority of Linux operating systems refusing to distribute it. So I would relicense its content under the CC-BY-SA license. It won't damage financially the game, but instead it will see a greater success.

Where's such bug tracker?

On OpenSuse the system fails to create an account, and the Ubuntu package is only for DarkRadiant. I notice this software everywhere I could.