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*[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/si2v5s/duckstati...
With the sole exception of MAME and mGBAs conflicts with RA (which respectively are about having extremely old cores in RA & the fact that their PS3 port uses a dubiously legal homebrew SDK that uses components from Sonys own proprietary SDK), the overwhelming majority of spats tend to occur because the maintainer has a bad habit of throwing hissy fits over his personal opinions of emulation.
Specifically, the guy gets pissed whenever someone doesn't want to put in extra legwork to support libretro (which due to it being too overengineered is not an insignificant amount of work), gets angry whenever someone licenses out their emulator for a paid device (since RA can't legally be licensed out due to being a mess in terms of licenses) and so on and so forth. It tends to result in said emudev getting a cavalcade of angry IRC messages from the maintainer, backtalking in RetroArch IRC channels and public whining on the RA twitter account/blog (which due to their reach tends to result in users of RA with barely an understanding of the situation sending further angry messages to the emudev) and in at least one notable case, anonymously complaining about other emudevs on 4chan (but being so transparent about it that he was easily identifiable).
Just generally really immature stuff.
RetroArch (the main libretro implementation as well as basically the reference implementation) is overengineered to the point of bordering on unusable. The entire project is riddled with bad design decisions for the sake of extreme modularity, but all this results in is that it's a pain in the neck to configure and customize. Remapping a button in an emulator, a relatively easy task for basically any emulator out there, can result in your entire setup breaking down and because your typical RA install has ~30k files and poor separation of configuration and application components, your only real recourse is to reinstall the entire thing.
Ironically, this specific deficiency also why most emulators nowadays have migrated over to using Stenzeks duckstation UI (which itself is based on Dolphins user interface, just better written); it turned out to be well written enough to be reusable across multiple emulators with fairly little modification, while also leaving developers the room to customize certain elements to fit their emulator (something which libretro is really bad at).
Libretro mostly got where it is because Twinaphex has enough orbiters to keep all the various cores up to date, even if it takes what amounts to a hostile fork to do so.
If it doesn't manage to autoconfigure the controller, you want to remap inputs or you're using a keyboard, you're in for some pain. The GUI doesn't show which actual physical button you're remapping core inputs to, only the RetroPad button. You have to keep in mind two levels of chained button mappings which is harder than it seems. If you remap the RetroPad itself you also remap the entire user interface inputs which leads to stupid situations where the GUI stops working and I have to edit the config file to undo whatever mistake I made that left the inputs in an inconsistent state such as two buttons mapped to the same key.
I actually argued with this guy on 4chan over this once many years ago. Why not have cores enumerate their inputs so that the frontend can map directly to them? SNES cores would return the symbols representing the buttons on the SNES pad. Something like this:
core.inputs.digital = [↑ ↓ ← → A B X Y L R START SELECT]
A few months ago I found Ares (https://ares-emu.net/), a fork of bsnes/higan with a pleasant UI and multi-system support, and I couldn't be happier. It is not perfect, but it is so much nicer.
I always have to remap inputs for nearly every game because I want to have my jump, attack, dash buttons and all the other inputs remain consistent for every game due to muscle memory. The mere existence of the RetroPad makes this nightmarishly hard.
It's not like he doesn't know this. I remember him committing features that would let people swap A/B and X/Y buttons precisely to help the arcade players. Who knows what he's done since then. Maybe he fixed it but I wouldn't bet on it.
> And don't get me started on the million different cores and forks of forks of forks.
Yeah, even the emulator authors themselves are unhappy with that. I guess RetroArch needs those forks because their audience includes people with underpowered devices.
Is it a copycat if it publicly discloses the original?
You can't release software under an open source model and complain about "copycats" since that's literally what you gave permission for. As long as the licenses are followed, people have the right to do whatever they want with the code.
* Redactle Unlimited is a big improvement on original-Redactle
* Redactle is (at least for those who like such things) a terrific game, and you should totally go to redactle-unlimited.com and take a look
* as berjin says, the creator of original-Redactle hasn't been heard from in ages and shows every sign of having completely abandoned the game, so Redactle Unlimited isn't an unethical name-grab
(It looks as if redactle-unlimited.com is #2 on Google and the main clone site is #1; on DuckDuckGo it's the other way around, so well done DDG.)
(Top hypotheses: 1. too much thread drift; 2. suspicion that I'm some sort of a shill for Redactle Unlimited; 3. actually it wasn't meant to be a downvote at all and it's just because the up/down arrows are easy to misclick on mobile devices. For what it's worth, it doesn't feel to me like an unreasonable amount of thread drift, I have no connection to RU other than enjoying playing it, and I entirely agree that the arrows are fiddly on mobile.)
But to someone not paying close enough attention, it's easy to think original-Redactl is the author's game. Then that line can be misread as supporting the copycat over the author, which would be unkind in context. I misread it that way, until I scrolled back to check which one was the author's game.
So, for the avoidance of doubt:
The original original was redactle.com. The creator of that seems to have abandoned it not long after its creation, and to have taken no further interest in it.
The thing we are talking about is redactle-unlimited.com. This was made by berjin. It gives suitable credit to redactle.com. It provides a notably better playing experience than original redactle.com does. I do not consider it a copycat in any culpable sense.
And then there are the copycats of Redactle Unlimited, most notably redactleunlimited.com. That one, so far as I can tell, has simply taken berjin's code and filed off the serial numbers. It offers no improvement over redactle-unlimited.com. It does not give credit to any of its predecessors. It is definitely a copycat in every sense.
I’m not sure what I feel about this if the original really is abandoned (is something ‘abandoned’ if it is working fine and just hasn’t been updated in eight months?) - but it definitely feels a little rich that the Redactle Unlimited author is complaining about copycats.
All of which makes it seem ethically-OK to me.
It's also relevant that the point of Redactle Unlimited was to offer a feature original-Redactle didn't, namely the ability to play more than one game per day. By making Redactle Unlimited, berjin made Redactle players' lives a little bit better.
Whereas, e.g., redactleunlimited.com credits neither original-Redactle nor original-RedactleUnlimited whose code I believe it has copied, nor does it offer any usability improvements or extra features over original-RedactleUnlimited. In other words, it's purely parasitic -- it doesn't on net make anyone's life better other than that of the person who "made" it -- and it's playing a zero-sum game, gaining whatever success it does at the expense of something that went before it, whose identity it's trying to create confusion with.
1) When I say abandoned the original redactle.com has had it's problems. There have been several days where the original was down because the hosting bill was not paid. Some fans tracked down the hosting company and paid it. Also the certificate was expired for months. Some days it loads a disambiguation wiki page instead of a real article. The dev hasn't been seen on social media since April.
2) Everything I did in redactle-unlimited is from scratch and with significant improvements like multi-player and lemma. The copycats are actually using others' content by either pulling en eBaum's world and embedding the sites or in one case cloning the source code, replacing the logo and domain and claiming to be the "official redactle unlimited" on reddit.
3) I'm hardly the only person to have re-created a Wordle or web game from scratch.
As a hacker, I hate that these are needed. As a member of society that tries to be considerate and respectful of others, this seems like a ridiculous and wateful overhead.
However, as a realist with some experience in being brain-raped by a bigger company, unfortunately you need to protect yourself from the people that aren't nice or don't care.
I feel like doing it behind closed doors results in many projects getting completed way slower. It still gets released as open source (and eventually ripped off anyway), but now there's no visibility into the process from the outside, which had been a big source of personal motivation in the past.
You can mail me the details of your site and the competitor's site.
I'll make sure to add a red flag against their sites to publicly condone this behaviour. I know this might not do much but it'll be a start.
Yes, now we have some laws and all that but in reality: stealing is still rampant, just a different kind!?
If modern bankers and sycophantic politicians et al tried their modus operandi back in the era of tribes, I’m quite sure they were removed from the gene pool fairly quickly.
Often times this included moneylenders.. who were usually a religious minority. It usually involved their kids too.
More along the lines of:
Jim has a bad habit of being a bit of a dick—harassing & bullying tribespeople, taking an unfair amount from the tribe—Jim gets removed from the gene pool next hunting trip. The quality of the tribe, present and future, improves.
I understand how this kind of thing doesn't track very well as a strategy overall in more complex & modern environments.
While some is gained and some is lost, I'm in the camp that the world is a better place now than it was then.
Adding this HTTP header makes your site not work if embedded.
You'd have to move the domain check in syntax and placement I guess, in an annoying game of cat and mouse... but it'd be something I suppose? Probably not worth it if it's not a large enough return.
That is trivial to remove via proxying, which author mentioned them doing.
Really, anything you add to the page can be just removed that way. Only thing you can try is to somehow differentiate attacker traffic from normal users but with ubiquity of VPN providers good luck
Many ways to do just that, suggested in recent discussion:
It's a really good game, just the right level of difficulty.
About
Redactle Unlimited was inspired by the original game at redactle.com which was inspired by Wordle. A random Wikipedia article is displayed with important words redacted (hence the original name Redactle). Redactle Unlimited has many useful features: multiplayer, smart guessing to match plurals and inflections (lemmatization), annotations and of course no daily game limit.
EDIT: I now see the link in your comment. If it was there originally and I missed it, then I apologize. Otherwise, thank you for adding a link to it!
GP actually put the link of his game into his comment. It is
redactle-unlimited.com
Within a week it was cloned and put up on a nice domain with a different logo and the copycat was impersonating me on social media and ranking quite well on Google. It's no longer open source. The copy cat site now has adverts up and links to a network of copycat web games. Many copy cat sites are now embedding my site proxied (to avoid CORS) and surrounded with adverts. These sites rank really well on Google because the copy cat sites link to each other. The game is at https://redactle-unlimited.com if you want to check it out. I haven't made a life changing amount from donations but it actually might be a significant amount for people in poorer economies.
The bottom line is that you need to have a moat by having a trusted brand or database/codebase that can't be imitated.