A few problems and questions about 1.5

[Ded10c]

Okay, time to search all our pockets

[Nielk1]

characters based on Battlezone

To what degree was that? Sound utterly ridiculous.

You know that even if they had no legal standing they would still demand money. It costs you money to prove them wrong after all.

here's the list

Here is a big question. Is that "Battlezone Franchise" the BZ1 and 2 we know? If it was, honestly, I would think it would be cheaper. I suspect that covers their PSP game's IP. We can't forget, there is a more recent BZ game which we don't give a rat's ass about. We don't even care about the name really, just the IP and distribution. Distribution would allow us to legally distribute BZ1 or 2, which probably still resides with publishers (though they probably can't distribute it anymore because of the name). IP would allow us to continue or remake the story.

We need to make an inquiry as to what the full scope of "Battlezone Franchise" is.

EDIT:
IT DOES NOT INCLUDE THE BZs WE KNOW AND LOVE!
http://www.saveatari.com/bz.php

Included Battlezone Franchise Titles:
Battlezone
Battlezone 2000

[Ded10c]

Just because it's true and they could demand money (which it is) doesn't mean it can't sound ridiculous (which it does).

That's good news. Further suggestion that Atari don't own them. I wonder what's going to happen with the PSP (2006) and XBLA (2008) Battlezone titles.

[MrTwosheds]

I assume it is the price of being permitted to make a game called Battlezone. The cost of borrowing the name to put on your own product. No different from a restaurant franchise really, you just get to put their name on it and have tanks in it. It will not give you any rights over previous battlezone releases, it is simply buying the right to use their intellectual property, probably for a limited time/number of releases.
Forget about it, this is for the big companies who lack the talent to think up their own original names or create a game that will sell simply on its own merit alone.

Seriously who would pay $250,000 just to avoid thinking up a different name and linking it to the original (almost non-existent) story? Someone who's going to put a lot of effort into actually creating a GAME? I don't think so.
Battlezone's 1 and 2 are not still played because they have a nice name and story, its because there is actually a GAME to be played that is not just all over and done once GAME OVER is displayed.
A lot more than can be said for many releases these days.

[GSH]

The sad thing is, I bet the Master of Orion name and games are more popular among videogame players than Battlezone.

-- GSH

[Apollo]

Atari said Bz 1980 they want 100k for because it's soo well known. I don't think i would take it if they paid me to take it.

If they had to pay for updating Bz and Bz2 i bet it cost double what they are asking, the only value i see is if it can make current sells.

[Ded10c]

I assume it is the price of being permitted to make a game called Battlezone. The cost of borrowing the name to put on your own product. No different from a restaurant franchise really, you just get to put their name on it and have tanks in it. It will not give you any rights over previous battlezone releases, it is simply buying the right to use their intellectual property, probably for a limited time/number of releases.
Forget about it, this is for the big companies who lack the talent to think up their own original names or create a game that will sell simply on its own merit alone.

Seriously who would pay $250,000 just to avoid thinking up a different name and linking it to the original (almost non-existent) story? Someone who's going to put a lot of effort into actually creating a GAME? I don't think so.
Battlezone's 1 and 2 are not still played because they have a nice name and story, its because there is actually a GAME to be played that is not just all over and done once GAME OVER is displayed.
A lot more than can be said for many releases these days.

Remember that current evidence is that the next game was likely to have been called Combat Commander II rather than Battlezone III.

[GSH]

According to this list (alternate source: here), the rights to Atari's Battlezone license went to Rebellion Interactive Games, Limited.

(Update: replaced first link that broke phpBB with a more friendly link to a games industry website)

-- GSH

[Ded10c]

So with Atari bankrupt, Pandemic defunct and Rebellion owning just the Classic BZ IP, we are left only with Activision.

[Ultraken]

To answer one of the original questions:

Regarding names, I see that in the edit/build menu list, ANY name can now be displayed for an
object. So, question for UltraKen: are we going to be able to freely name objects as we wish
in future patches? This does not work for in-game objects now, at least for me.

We used full-name sprites for in-game UI elements because that was the only practical way to implement Japanese language support at the time. The tradeoff is that the localized strings have to be baked into textures so it's difficult to add new ones.

Allowing arbitrary names is something I do have on the list of things to do. I'd have to change up how the names get stored internally (more like BZ2, actually).

[Apollo]

Could the localization stuff all be in the same version if the "names0*.map" are nolonger needed?
The ingame text is currently sprites, if changed, would the text scale with the resolution?

[Eddy]

Wasn't Tug working on scalable fonts? Or was that for the lobby...

[Apollo]

He did the DPI Awear thing long ago, i didn't see it work though.
The ingame text is what needs scaled, i tested sprites 1.5x height, it didn't look so good.

[Ultraken]

Non-integer scale is never going to look good.

I just added support for printing text instead of drawing sprites but I can't completely replace sprites until I set up localization. Unfortunately, I don't have different language versions to work from to build localization tables. (I'd add everything to labels.map since it's the easiest to work with.)

[Apollo]

I made some of the tables but they are a real pita.