subhuman_bob

Classes with pets will also need pet_levelstats Luckily someone has already done this for you. http://udbforums.org/index.php?topic=11170.0

Causing mangosproject to be shut down is much more difficult in a legal sense than shutting down a few servers. In addition, mangos has never supported modifying the client or making a profit from running servers. Both are strictly against the MaNGOS EULA. If someone has an actual copy of the C&D that was sent out by Blizzard I'd be interested in seeing it. I'd be surprised if any C&D actually came from Blizzard, as that company no longer exists. Anything recieved should be from legal counsel for Vivendi or Activision-Blizzard.

IMHO, those who want to see this should stop trying to tell others what to work on.

As arrai said, you still don't need to store the questgiver's guid. create a new table in DB characters, call it daily_quest (for example) 2 fields in the table, `id`=character's guid and `date`= date last daily was taken do check at character trying to take daily quest, if the date field for their id entry=today's date, do not allow them to take quest if it != today's date, let them take quest and update date=today's date i.e. character guid=1 table daily_quest contents: (id, date) (1, 19-11-2008) They will NOT be allowed to take another daily quest today since they already took one.

http://wiki.udbforums.org/index.php/Spell_script_target

Disclaimer: I have not personally tried these, but maybe they will help: http://udbforums.org/index.php?topic=11170.0

That would be best IMO, but even Win2k3 would be better than XP. At least that one MS *tried* to make into a server. Also, for people considering Vista: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/windows-installation.html "however, 64-bit Windows Vista is not yet supported." Keep that in mind.

You'll do better with a version of Win that is actually intended to be a server....

Don't use Vista, that's my suggestion right there.

Your DB provider should be supplying you with that information.

That's one of the "forbidden words" when talking about MaNGOS.

He's talking about a commercial product here, not OSS. GPL is not intended for use with commercial products and would be a very poor choice as it would afford him little or no protection. In general, commercial products should not be published under the GPL. Take that lesson from LinkSys, who made the mistake of shipping their original WRT54G routers with a Linux kernel. That folly, and their subsequent releasing of the source code due to legal pressure, has cost them untold millions.

The easiest way (in the US, which is where he resides) is to do what's known as a "poor man's copyright." Enclose the work- even a rough draft will suffice- in a registered letter mailed to yourself. Do not open the letter. If the dispute comes up in court, allow the court to open the still-sealed letter. In this case, the storyline burned onto a CD will qualify. Registered Letters (in the US, your country may vary) have a Post Office-affixed seal making tampering evident, plus are dated- thus establishing when you first came up with the idea. If posting the story on a forum, "save" the webpage and burn that to the CD you mail. A rough draft suffices because the author retains rights to the work and any derivative works. Meaning, if you write a story using characters and places from (for example) 'The Lord of the Rings' you do not automatically "own" that work- J.R.R. Tolkein's heirs might, since it's derived from his work and less than 50 years after his death. (there are exceptions to this, namely for reference works and parodies) Similarly, if a person bases a completed work on your rough draft- you would technically own their work. This is harder to prove, however. There are some unclear guidelines on what constitutes a derivate work- and computer related ones are mainly untested in court. Example: MaNGOS incorporates several libraries that are GPL and require any derivative works to also be published under the GPL. The "grey area" comes from what qualifies as a derivative work- just simply using those libraries does not necessarily make MaNGOS a derivative work in the legal sense. To be copyrightable, a derivative work must be different enough from the original to be regarded as a "new work" or must contain a substantial amount of new material. There is a strong argument that MaNGOS is different enough from its included libraries to be a new work, and it also does contain substantial amounts of new material. I'm not saying TheLuda should switch the MaNGOS license- just saying that if he wanted to, he would have a good chance of legally doing so. It's probably not worth the possible legal battle however. Also, bear in mind that the exact definition of a "derivative work" may vary from country to country.

I could go into a big discourse on this, but it would be horribly off-topic, so I'll keep it short. The main issues we hear about are in regards to music, and while the main companies pursuing this aren't headquartered in the US, they choose to serve legal notices from the US because there they're allowed to claim punitive damages instead of just real damages. If they tried this action in most other countries, at most they could sue for approx $2 (US) per song- and it's not worth their time. This isn't a case of the US trying to impose its laws on the rest of the world (but there are other examples of this) it's a case of multinational companies taking action where they stand to gain the most. But back on-topic: registering a work for copyright, in most countries, increases the author's protection under the law. I'm just stating that even without registration you retain some basic rights. These rights will vary from country to country. In the case of a relatively small company like we're discussing here, it's not financially viable to register the product in every country- but failure to register definitely does not mean the work is public domain! Another option would be a Creative Commons license, of which there are several variants. One of them allows copying and distribution for non-commercial purposes, but the author still retains legal ownership of the work. This might also be an option- you could let people legally distribute the client via BitTorrent or websites, but you would still be the owner of the work in every legal sense. Tying-in the first off-topic paragraph, more and more bands are releasing one or more songs under a Creative Commons license to encourage distribution while not having to rely on a big record label to "get their sound to the masses." However, if the song was used for commercial purposes (like on a movie soundtrack) the band would still be entitled to royalties from that commercial use. A similar approach also works for software.

Under the Berne Convention, signatory countries agree to respect the copyrights of citizens of other signatory countries. To date, 164 countries have signed. The ones that haven't, to be honest, probably have very few citizens who have access to computers.The Berne Convention itself does not cover computer software or database contents, however it was expanded by the WIPO Copyright Treaty to cover them. 160 countries have signed this- note that it's not as many as have signed the Berne Convention. Two notable exceptions are Norway and Russia. Meaning, you could make the program OSS (like MaNGOS) and store actual content in a database (like MaNGOS) and maintain protection of that content in the vast majority of the world. (how many potential customers do you think live in Uganda or Ethiopia anyway?) As soon as you put down any original work onto a fixed format, you're protected under copyright and are legally consider to be the "owner" of that work. Write it, type it, speak into a microphone and record it- it's yours. Just speak it to another person, and it's not in a fixed format and you have no rights to it. Frankly, if you're looking into this as a business your legal council should have already informed you of this. Popular misconception. from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_convention" Under the Convention, copyrights for creative works are automatically in force upon their creation without being asserted or declared. An author need not "register" or "apply for" a copyright in countries adhering to the Convention. As soon as a work is "fixed", that is, written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically entitled to all copyrights in the work and to any derivative works, unless and until the author explicitly disclaims them or until the copyright expires. Foreign authors are given the same rights and privileges to copyrighted material as domestic authors in any country that signed the Convention." You do not need to apply or register for protection of original works, and as soon as you create that work it is protected as your intellectual property in 164 countries around the world. This is also not anything new- the original Berne Convention was in 1886. A notable exception to this is the US, who was not a party to the Berne Convention until 1989 because up until that time the US did require registrations for copyrighted works. There are advantages for applying for a copyright, and this will vary from country to country. For example, in the US you are limited to only suing for actual (compensatory) damages if it's an unregistered work. For registered work, you can also sue for punitive damages in addition to actual damages. Note that this only applies domestically, not internationally (meaning if both parties are citizens of the US or are legal entities operating inside the US). Most European Union member countries do not allow punitive damages, BTW. This is another reason to charge for the client. If you give it away for free, your actual damages (amount you can sue for) will always be nothing. Ex: company "y" clones your game and sells 500 copies for $20 each. Actual damages to you are nothing- you lost sales of 500 units, but you give it away for free (500*0=0). On the other hand, if you sell the game for $30, you can sue for $15,000 (500*30=15000).

Vanilla ice cream is simpler than chocolate. (I'm assuming this is the thread for one-line irrelevant posts)

You have to charge something for the game. It won't be in stores otherwise. The stores do not get a cut of the monthly subscription fee- if they don't get that money right off the rack, they won't stock your product. The idea of giving it to stores may sound tempting, but rest assured at least some of them will abuse this. They'll order many more copies than they ever intend on putting on their shelves- and each copy costs you money to produce, even if you give it away later. There's also perception to think about: the public will think a $60 game is better than a $5 game, whether it's true or not.

It's an analogy. The majority of the development world may prefer chocolate (or git) but a few people here prefer vanilla (or SVN). They're basing this preference solely on their own experience and opinion. Despite chocolate having more flavor (or git being more powerful) they want to stick with vanilla. I tried (and apparently failed) to make my point that people are arguing about their preferences. This is pretty much useless. You're not going to change any opinions that way. MaNGOS only sells chocolate ice cream- I mean uses git now- so that's what you have to use. Vanilla is not supported because it lacks the speed and flexibility of chocolate.

Whichever route you choose, just a few things to keep in mind: -MaNGOS changes frequently, so expect to have to update it constantly. -compiling the installer with the UDX-packed option will make it smaller, but it will raise alarms with many AV software packages. In this case, bigger may be better just to avoid the "Zomg! MaNGOS has a virus!" false alarms. I'm speaking from personal experience here. I've never used the POSIX version of NSIS, but the Windows version can definitely do this. There are literally hundreds of plugins available to expand the basic features. You could even go so far as to run the MD5 plugin on the client before using AD.EXE in order to verify it's the correct client version, etc. NSIS has absolutely no problem reading/writing the registry and environment settings, so gathering required info about the system (do they have Visual C++ and MySQL installed, etc) would be fairly simple.

Another suggestion: look at NSIS. It's used by literally hundreds of programs, both commercial and freeware. A partial list is here. As of version 2.0, there is also a Linux version available. Edit: first Linux version was 2.01, not 2.0. My mistake.

Actually it's a really, really bad idea. If that were available, the majority of people would be using it. The fact that you're asking about it makes me suspect you'd probably be using it. Bug reports would crop up everywhere, even though it wouldn't be a supported version. This would cause a slowdown in development instead of an accelleration. The character converter probably isn't working yet, and would probably trash everyone's characters. Your error log would reach several gigs in size within hours. Stability would be horrible. Bugs would be everywhere. Of course, when it is finally released there will still be plenty of bugs and it won't be as stable as the current 2.4.x versions. There's also a chance characters may be corrupted (it's happened before with major rev changes). However, releasing it early will only make those issues much worse.

Of course they're not apologizing for that. In their opinion, SVN is better than Git. By definition, opinions are not wrong. Ever. Opinions are not based on fact, they are based on someone's feelings. Ok, so they like SVN and you don't. Instead of insulting them, try presenting facts about how git is better than SVN. You're communicating with everyone who reads this thread, and several have expressed distaste for your social skills. I have to point out that this part I quoted comes off as being extremely arrogant and pompous, whether you intended as much or not. a ) How are you so certain all you communicate with are absolutely satisfied with your social skills? Has this been verified by independent sources? -Nobody can please everyone all the time. b ) The implication in the second sentence is that you and those that share your opinions, are the ones with correct thoughts. It also implies you don't like people who opinions different than your own. "OMG! they disagree with me! Call the Thought Police!" P.S. Vanilla is my favorite flavor of ice cream. Even if you like chocolate, I still prefer vanilla. This is based solely on my personal experience and opinion. If you don't like it, tough. I refuse to apologize for preferring vanilla ice cream.

Commence flaming yourself in that case. After all, this was started by you not reading kalash's post.

Wikipedia is your friend.

There's no need for us to fork MaNGOS. We're a database, not the engine team. Since MaNGOS will be naming SQL updates by the date they were committed, when we do a release all we have to do is list what date our release works with. It will continue to work until MaNGOS commits a new SQL update. Quite simple, and no forking around required.