Announcing a new Thimbleweed Park mini-adventure

AFAIK not in WINE but in Proton.

Awesome, thank you. That’s a big surprise. Going to get it right now.

I think @ZakPhoenixMcKracken might mean something like a legal home copy, which is quite distinct from pirating. See here, article 5.2.

The making of a back-up copy by a person having a right
to use the computer program may not be prevented by contract
in so far as it is necessary for that use.

I rather doubt that actual piracy was ever allowed; software should be plenty covered by copyright laws from over a 100 years ago.

Let me explain. Until the year 1992, in Italy there was no understanding of what “pirating games” meant. In fact, there were many boys collecting tenths of games each months, copying them and selling. Each month I had about 50 new games to play, with C64 first, Amiga then.
It was a common practice, like exchanging figures. We little boys or teens used to exchange games.
“I have this game on 5 floppies, what do you have?”
“I have this one on 2 floppies and this one on 3.”
“Deal.”

Only in 1992 it became clear that this practice was an infringement of an intellectual property, because until then, a computer game was no considered that way.

Today there is the “legitimate copy”, which is what Franzie explained.

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Oh then I can’t play on Win 8.1 either :persevere:
And my laptop just crashed… FML

ouch… I think the program silently crashes trying to tell me I don’t have directX 12… :sleepy: :sleepy: apparently I have a “nvidia quadro 600”.

@ZakPhoenixMcKracken Ianal, but I think that in our Romance-Germanic legal tradition it might have been a lot harder to claim copyright on Generic Platformer 50 since there’s (at least traditionally) supposed to be an element of originality, a touch of the auteur, while in the Anglo-Saxon tradition something pretty much just needs to be an independent creation and that’s it. What you say sounds quite strange from that perspective: something like Zork or Maniac Mansion clearly has plenty of originality.

Also just because someone might have been able to reimplement every aspect of Generic Platformer 50 doesn’t seem that it could plausibly mean they’d be allowed to literally copy and distribute someone else’s product. Quite odd if so! :open_mouth:

I’m having some trouble getting a battery. I can’t seem to take it from the radio in the diner. Does anybody have any tips? :slight_smile:

Edit: never mind, figured it out. xD

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Thimbleweed Park also doesn´t run on Windows 7 unless it´s fully FULLY patched (they only added that part after it was out and people said they couldn´t start it). I somehow can´t add that patch on my old computer and it also rejects Windows 10 for some reason (which it only noticed after the installation was at like 99% so after a good while of installing it just reverted and said, bye sucker!).

So yeah, I´d need a new computer altogether to play this (and the normal game, but luckily that came out on PS4 eventually).

Since games like Day Of The Tentacle Remastered, The Curious Expedition, Life Is Strange and every classic Lucas Arts game run perfectly though, I think I´ll pass for the time being. Especially since I´m told this is really really brief.

Of course I´ll get a new PC eventually rather sooner than later, but certainly not specifically for this. :sweat_smile:

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A quick search seems to claim it has DirectX 12 support. If you’re on Windows 10 it might just need new drivers?

That seems to be the case. I did not try exhaustively, but even a custom-built wine with vkd3d shows the same symptoms. Looks like once it passes the Win10 check, there’s something it’s not happy with, whether dx12 is present or not.

I don’t really want to spend more time with it, but perhaps I’ll report this to the wine bug tracker. Since the game is free, perhaps somebody will take a closer look without me having to provide extensive logs and stuff.

Though I’d also hope that @RonGilbert will consider implementing a Vulkan backend, so a native release might be possible. Seeing that it’s available for macOS, which likely means a separate Metal implementation is already in place, adding Vulkan should be a small thing, right :wink:!?

(I guess I could also just play it on the Mac, but I’m not that desperate. Yet.)

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I installed the drivers from nvidia… to no avail. I read somewhere there are different drivers, so maybe I’ll try again with others. Thanks

Did they actually have to change the law, or was it more that prior to that there was simply nobody that cared about applying the law to the realm of software and/or games?

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Just donated $20 and was disappointed to discover that Linux is not supported.
Will there be another Linux port? And if not, will future projects exclude Linux?

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@maniacpension Noncommittally answered on the blog. :wink:

Linux might show up. It’s a new engine and a completely new backend and there is only so much that I can do and I wanted to get the game out.



The law would have changed at least a little bit, by implementing the relevant EU Computer Programs Directive from '91 (cf. supra) which both clarified and unified matters. I just find it hard to imagine that a court would regard something like Zork as just a mathematical algorithm, the way more functional computer programs had historically been treated in the '60s. That meant you couldn’t patent them, nor would copyright necessarily apply.

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There was a generic law, so it was necessary to specify that the act of copying a videogame was equal to steal money.
Unless that point, it was unclear, and since in Italy “everything is allowed unless what is specifically prohibited”, everybody took advantage of that situation.

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Is DX12 fully supported?

@Windows 7 users: Maybe this could also be helpful? But I guess it’s limited to the games?

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Seriously? I’ve always thought it was the opposite. My accountant is always repeating “better not to do THAT”. “Why? Isn’t that allowed by law?” “Well, technically, yes. But it draws attention. Do it, and you’ll get a harsh assessment”.

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Eheh, my teacher of law, at high school, taught us that: in a democratic republic everything is allowed except for what is specifically prohibited. On the contrary, in the dictatorships everything is prohibited, except for what is allowed.

In programmer’s slang, I’d say that here everything is allowed by default , while in the dictatorships everything is prohibited by default.

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What about Pseudo-Democracies?