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A comment on Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten.

Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by thristian on Friday November 30, 2012 @06:16AM (#4852753)
I'm sure this site will be taken offline for copyright infringement almost immediately, but it really is a decent recreation of the original. It's also historically significant: Dune II is to the real-time strategy genre what Wolfenstein 3D is to the first-person-shooter: not necessary the very first example ever, but the first to achieve notable popularity, and the progenitor of most of the following examples.
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by avolcano on Friday November 30, 2012 @06:54AM (#4852842)
No copyright issues; it's based off of OpenDUNE: http://www.opendune.org/
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by Yuioup on Friday November 30, 2012 @07:03AM (#4852869)
The source-code is probably based off OpenDUNE but I'm pretty sure the art isn't. They'll be taken down for the art for sure ...
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by ergo14 on Friday November 30, 2012 @01:56PM (#4854787)
Dune 2 was released as freeware if memory serves me right. I know they still can send them C&D letter, but I don't think westwood/ea will bother.
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by csarva on Friday November 30, 2012 @09:14PM (#4856553)
Yep, looks like they just recreated the game engine. You still need a copy of the original Dune 2 data files to play the game.
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by k33n on Friday November 30, 2012 @09:45AM (#4853402)
Haters gonna hate.
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by jcl on Friday November 30, 2012 @03:24PM (#4855264)
As far as I can tell from their wiki, OpenDUNE was created by disassembling the original game and recoding the assembly in C. I wouldn't say the copyright issue is clear-cut, here.
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by iconfinder on Friday November 30, 2012 @06:27AM (#4852777)
And thank god for the original C&C. I still think the soundtrack was brilliant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZAaq5JIhW0
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by pschorf on Friday November 30, 2012 @08:36AM (#4853129)
I was always partial to Red Alert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb-gI_pFog0
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by shabble on Friday November 30, 2012 @11:12AM (#4853805)
Rapidly heading off on a tangent, but there was an AMA by the creator of the RA soundtrack on Reddit[1] quite recently. I had no idea Hell March was that well-known (and I finally found out what the correct lyric[s] was!)

[1] http://www.reddit.com/comments/11n1xk/c6o41e1/

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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by tropin on Friday November 30, 2012 @06:15PM (#4856002)
Except they're not the real lyrics. For some reason, even the composer believe is German, when is an Spanish commander guiding his troops in a march.
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by silon3 on Friday November 30, 2012 @06:34AM (#4852793)
For me, it's also the predecessor to tower defense games.
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by ygra on Friday November 30, 2012 @08:17AM (#4853053)
This took a moment to sink in but that's quite exactly how I played it (and Dune 2000) back in the day. Way before I even knew Tower Defense games :-)
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by lusr on Friday November 30, 2012 @08:44AM (#4853160)
Ah, I miss those long windy trails of concrete and rocket turrets built right at their base :)

Also the first game I learned to 'hack', and it's what set me on the path to learning programming: I discovered a hex file editor on a floppy and had a hunch about how things might fit together.

So I saved a game, waited a second until some money was spent in the game and then saved again into a different slot. Thereafter I went through the two save game files, visually figured out which parts were different between the files, changed the magical numbers I saw, reloaded the game and slowly figured out how to make myself rich :)

(This worked much better than my earlier attempt with the disk editor I found where I thought I was really clever compressing files by changing their size to 0.)

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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by jlambert1 on Saturday December 01, 2012 @03:57AM (#4857178)
Yea I remember that! Was it a utility or something off a bbs? I remember a hex editor!
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by lloeki on Friday November 30, 2012 @08:45AM (#4853163)
Indeed, and I often came up with solutions that looked like Vauban star forts[0]. I also remember having a hard time in a C&C3 mission (where you raid the Nod temple), whose defense is tiered similarly.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_fort

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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by tapertaper on Friday November 30, 2012 @08:49AM (#4853179)
Maybe a silly question: do copyrights for games (art or whatever) ever expire?
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by stonemetal on Friday November 30, 2012 @10:08AM (#4853489)
I believe this would be the correct copyright term for a game made by a game company.(every body who made it works for the game company so it should all fall under work for hire). Instead of the usual death + 70.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_...

95 years from publication or 120 years from creation whichever is shorter (anonymous works, pseudonymous works, or works made for hire, published since 1978)

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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by tptacek on Friday November 30, 2012 @09:09AM (#4853271)
Yes, but not for a long time.
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by astrodust on Friday November 30, 2012 @02:00PM (#4854814)
By "long time" you mean "as long as large copyright holders lobby to keep extending the window" which could mean "never" in practice.
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by tptacek on Friday November 30, 2012 @02:17PM (#4854923)
Why don't we just settle on "so long as to make expiry irrelevant for video games".
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by astrodust on Friday November 30, 2012 @06:50PM (#4856132)
I don't know what you're complaining about. Pong will be public domain in 2092.
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Re:Dune II ported to the Web with Emscripten by astrodust on Friday November 30, 2012 @02:02PM (#4854821)
Same as for anything. In the United States there's a chart for looking up rights and determining if a property has reverted to the public domain: http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm

1923 is the base-line year for any works with a proper copyright notice. 1977 for any works at all, as the requirement for a notice or registration was eliminated.

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