Hi,
It sounds to me as if the quoted paragraph only forbids people to use the 
name "Sim City" on their derivative work. It's only the TRADEMARK you 
cannot use; the code itself is under GPL and is therefore modifiable, 
redistributable etc.

Regards,
Tobias


On Mon, 14 Jan 2008, Thomas Ward wrote:

> Hi,
> Actually, I think you under estimate what a task it is to take a
> commercial game and rewrite portions of it in such a way to add
> accessibility. Not impossible, but a major under taking all the same.
> I guess what I am trying to say is when setting out to write an
> accesible game I would use a completely different design patern, method,
> and approach than were I only interested in writing a sighted game.
> For example, often times while the speech is talking I place a call to
> the primary game loop to hault until speech stops. That insures the
> player can hear what is going on before it happens. That is not at all
> something you want to do in a sighted game.
> In vidio games the vidio is usually updated 10 to 20 times a second
> which makes everything appear as though it is in motion. Any call to the
> timer disrupting that flow would make everything look jurky and even
> freeze the screen. Sighted players would go "this majorly sucks!"
> So in order to keep the screen moving smoothly an access developer would
> have to have speech spoken in real time which may actually cause you to
> have a late responce to what is going on around you. You here two
> enemies approaching and you hit the key to speak where they are. It
> begins reading and suddenly your character begins getting killed. Not
> good because I didn't stop those bad guys until you obtained that
> information.
> Second, you need to consider the age of the game. It is supporting
> largely older and out dated APIs that are far less accessible than what
> is available today. One area that would need extensive rewrite and
> upgrading would be sound. You need to have 3D virtual audio which didn't
> exist back when SimCity was released. Which makes working with the
> original source sort of pointless.
>
> Shadow Dragon wrote:
>> Agreed. I've been wanting to play a sims game. The source code is all here,
>> all a developer would really have to do is go through it and put in
>> accessibility features. It would be awesome. Perhaps not as easy as I made
>> it sound but I think it's dooable.
>>
>
>
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