comparable to old school C&C

Crap, my sarcasm detector must be broken again. I will need to get it checked at my next regularly scheduled maintenance.

they both have a similar tech tree style, in that you dont research new units or anything, you simply progress by building more buildings/units


honestly though, i would love a tiberium mod

I'm sure that someone somewhere will make one. Whether or not it will be any good and whether or not EA will get all pissy and lawyery about it is another matter entirely though.

i might be able to. Ive been programming for around 4 years but ive never modded anything

shouldnt be too hard to do if they add like an order list system. Cant think of the name. lke checkpoints. TibSun had them

regardless, i would imagine it'd just be a form of reclaiming the "tiberium". A bot or vehicle that can only reclaim tiberium, then it just automatically sets a chore list to collect the nearest one and drop it off when "full"

I'm sure it will be technically possible to make a great C&C mod for PA. The real question is will EA sue whoever makes one? C&C is a major player in the RTS market and EA has a lot of money and lawyers.

As long as the modders are not making money of the C&C mod i think it falls under "fair use".

However im not 100% certain as it might fill a small part of the market for the C&C universe (basicly, if the mod means that less people will buy the real thing becuse they are instead playing said mod, then its no longer considered "fair use". While this may be a hard thing to prove its a argument EA could make while sue'ing or atleast sending you a cease and desist).

ea owns names, not features

i can call it anything i want. if it plays like CnC, so be it

Fair use has nothing to do with whether or not you are making money from something. I can't make xerox copies of a book that someone else wrote and then hand them out on the street corner and claim that its fair use just because I am not making any money from my activities.

As long as a C&C mod does not make any use of any C&C art, model, or sound assets or any specific names then the mod creator is probably technically safe on the copyright front.

Technically you could import C&C assets into PA and use the resulting mod yourself as long as you owned a legit copy of C&C (and if the C&C EULA didn't prohibit doing so, which it might) but you would not be able give copies of the mod to anyone else. All you could do would be to write a guide on how to make the mod so that other people who happened to own C&C could also make the mod for themselves. This is how the FSPort project is able to exist without getting sued into oblivion.

That's how its supposed to work and you'd think that it would work that way but unfortunately that's not how things really are.

The problem is that since it is highly unlikely that the mod author would be able to pay to defend against a lawsuit they would have little choice but to comply with EA's demands even if they would actually beat EA in court on the merits of the case.

Conquer & Command: Sun of the Tiber.

You get to fight in an open war raging between the IDG and the DON, both factions relying on a mysterious resource known as "Solid Gold" which appeared out of the ground a few thousand years ago.

That's perfectly legal I think, so go ahead!

The thing created (the mod) being non-commercial or not does often effect the judgement on however its protected under fair use or not.

So saying that it has "nothing to do with it" is kinda naive.

But i see your point as something being non-commercial dosent automaticly make it "fair use", just as it being commercial dosent automaticly make it not "fair use" (theres aloot of other more important factors, so yea maybe i shouldent have focused on the commercial one first).

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As i said, if said creation interferes with the original products market (lowers sales becuse people are instead using the mod) then its guaranteed not "fair use" (unless its meant as criticism, but i doubt a mod would be viewed as criticism xD).

Copyright is not simply the names, its the "idea". I dont know exactly what "idea" means in the content discussed (seems realy hard to straighten out and put in black and white), but i do know its not simply the names that are copyright'ed.

On the subject of copying the idea but not the names, there's a certain RTS currently in alpha which makes pretty blatant references to an older game but is still legally ok due to not being specifically the same thing.

So by extension you could almost certainly get away with a C&C mod, if you changed the artwork and sound.

A lot of it depends on the potential for lost earnings. For example, some time ago there was an impressive mod for C&C:Generals ZH by the name of Halogen. The goal was to create a C&C style game in the Halo universe. The mod was well developed, and approaching their first release when they were sent a cease and desist order by Microsoft. People were understandably upset and angry about this, particularly because MS had had the better part of a year to do this, and not waste the modders time and effort by letting them get so close to release.

Turned out, the reason why they suddenly decided to send the C&D when they did, is that they had just given the greenlight on Halo Wars, and were concerned that another RTS set in the Halo universe would eat into their profits. Even though the mod was free, they came to the (somewhat odd) conclusion that people wouldn't by Halo Wars because they had already downloaded Halogen.

Legalities over IP are complex and not well adapted to the modern era. If someone decided to make something that even looked slightly like C&C, on a non C&C platform, then i would not be surprised if EA decided to start throwing C&D orders around. Particularly as they have what appears to be a disappointing F2P/P2W version of C&C currently in the pipeline.

This happened with one of my favorite games, Mechwarrior: Living Legends. Microsoft decided to start handing out commercial IPs, and one of the companies that was developing an (in my opinion, absolute SHITE game), decided "Oh hey, that one mod over there with 50 or so players might be decreasing our meager profits. **** them!"

Well, if there is a Tiberium mod (WANT), you should call the spreading crystal resource "Euphratium" as an homage, also green, blue and red varieties should be included, along with the sludge and Tiberium trees and creatures.